Getting the f**k out of the USA
My expatriation tour of Holland for the New Yorker
At some point last winter, I noticed I couldn’t go anywhere without somebody asking me how they could leave the United States. It wasn’t that surprising. I’ve been writing about citizenship for years, Trump had just been sworn back into office, and I live in New York City. Anyone who’s met me also knows I just love to talk about passports.
I was a little unnerved, though, when I started overhearing random peoples’ conversations on the subject: their attempts to get a passport through a grandparent, or begging their boss for an overseas transfer. There were more exotic schemes, too, like “laundering” small sums though a retired relative to make savings look like passive income, or opening an LLC to employ oneself abroad, all to qualify for a European visa.
I heard these tips and tricks everywhere: dinner parties, the subway, my son’s pre-K field trips, and (naturally) at the Park Slope Food Co-op. At a café in Soho, I eavesdropped on a recent college graduate detailing a ploy to move to Spain forever to escape student loans.
Telling people about their passport options used to be my weird party trick. Now, the normies were doing it without me!
It was around this time that I reconnected with sources I met reporting my first book (somehow a whole decade ago). These sources, who help mostly wealthy people migrate, confirmed that what I was hearing was not just confirmation bias, but a real phenomenon. Since Trump’s first term, Americans had begun outnumbering their other clients by orders of magnitude.
National data helps back this up: Ireland naturalized 26,000 Americans in the first half of 2025, and in April the statistics office reported that the number of Americans moving there practically doubled in the previous 12 months. The UK has seem similar increases, and Americans are all over Lisbon and Porto and Berlin and Madrid. Anecdotally, they are also buying up apartments in Nice and Cannes, ruining the food in Mexico City, and, according to my British friends, filling up private schools in London with their children.
After I wrote an Atlantic article on plan B passports for Americans, I got a bunch of emails, but one in particular piqued my interest. It was about expatriation tours, which struck me as new ground for this sort of business. U.S citizens weren’t just making a backup plan; some were leaving for good, and an industry of sorts was popping up to help them figure out visas, logistics, and integration.
Obviously, I had to go on one of these tours. So in September, I packed my bags and traveled around Holland with GTFO tours, a relocation coaching company started by two vivacious American women, Bethany Quinn and Jana Sanchez.
On the trip, I got to know a group of people who really opened my eyes to how miserable Donald Trump is making ordinary U.S citizens. I also ate horrible Dutch food and caught a cold because it is never, ever the right temperature in Holland.
I wrote about my time with GTFO in this week’s issue of the New Yorker. It’s my first piece for a magazine I’ve been reading since I was a little kid. I’d love it if you read it and let me know what you think!
Read the print piece. Liked it a lot. Interesting parallels between the emigres of 2025 and the emigres post war to France. I’m an immigrant too and there is really no other place other than here you’ll see the ratchet energy of people in their underwear eating their takeout banquets on their fire escape turned porch. The ending was on point. No other place I’d be
Congratulations on your first appearance in The New Yorker, Atossa. I just saw that doc about their 100th anniversary ... that final read-through process with the editors must be intense.
I just emailed with Laura Madrid Sartoretto of Global Citizen Solutions for a piece we'll publish in the January issue of Site Selection magazine that features her perspective on how the principles behind the Global Passport Index (Netherlands ranks No. 6 among a bunch of European nations in the top 10) might be applied to corporate site selection.
The contemporary business environment increasingly demands additional layers of assessment, she writes, "including talent mobility, institutional predictability, and the broader ease with which companies and their workers can move across borders. The Global Citizen Solutions Global Passport Index (GPI), although primarily designed to assess the strength of a passport, offers an alternative lens through which investors can evaluate countries for new factories, regional headquarters, logistics hubs and R&D centers.” I naturally wonder how much individual repatriation trends will be reflected in destination countries' talent bases.