Last weekend, Jesse Derr and his wife, Jess Yeastadt, made the five-hour drive from their home in Phoenix to the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego. Their goal was to learn how to move to Mexico as part of a growing trend of Americans considering life abroad.
A record number of Americans are leaving the United States, with the country seeing a net negative migration of between 10,000 and 295,000 people in 2025, according to research from The Brookings Institution. The widest estimated range was among people who left voluntarily, with Brookings estimating that between 210,000 to 405,000 people did so last year. It is the first time in at least 50 years that more people moved out of the country than moved in.
Restrictive immigration policies and deportation efforts play a role in these shifts, according to Brookings. Some U.S. citizens are emigrating for school, work, raising a family, retirement and everything in between. Expatsi, a company that offers relocation tours for Americans, has become a sought-after resource for some seeking to make the transition.
The company, launched in 2022, held its second annual Move Abroad Con in San Diego on May 9 and 10. Some 600 Americans from around the country attended, double the number of people at the inaugural event held in May 2025, Expatsi co-founder Jen Barnett said. A majority, 89 percent, said they want to leave the U.S. for political reasons, according to a sampling of 218 of the weekend's attendees, per Barnett.
Others say they hope to move for adventure and growth, at 73 percent, as well as to save money, at 57 percent. Roughly two-thirds of respondents hope to move within two years. They have an average monthly budget of $3,856 to work with, and hopeful movers are split among 44 percent individuals, 39 percent couples and 17 percent families with kids.
Like many of his fellow conference attendees, Derr says political reasons are a major factor in his family's potential U.S. exit. He points to recent policies affecting reproductive rights, like the Supreme Court's decision to remove the federal constitutional right to abortion, as well as its rulings weakening the Voting Rights Act, which he considers signals that the country is "going backwards."
Meanwhile, he says, Mexico's 2024 election of Claudia Sheinbaum, the country's first female president, and federally mandated gender equality laws align with the values he and Yeastadt are seeking. Derr says attending the weekend event and hearing from people who've emigrated before made his seemingly "insurmountable" plans feel more within reach.
Talking with a relocation expert to Mexico was helpful to cover things the couple will and won't be able to bring abroad, their income requirements to secure a visa, and other "everyday livelihood" considerations, Derr said. "We really walked away from the weekend with zero unknowns."
Derr says the couple's timeline for moving will depend on the outcomes of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. If the Democratic party gains control of the House and Senate and takes "immediate, measurable action to reverse the destructive decisions made by this administration, it will affect our timeline" and motivations to move, Derr said.
Conference guests paid between roughly $500 to $1,000 for tickets to the weekend's events, which included two days of programming from over 50 experts. Guests filtered into dozens of breakout sessions to learn the ins and outs of different visas, taxes as a foreigner, immigrant health insurance, and specifics on how to move to hot spots like Portugal, Mexico, Canada and New Zealand.
Von Bradley, 45, is a government worker in San Diego. He has been looking up ways to move and work abroad for the last year. Southern Spain tops Bradley's short list of places to move abroad given its warm, sunny climate. His main priorities for living abroad are to find a place with a lower cost of living, where his dollars can go further in his eventual retirement, and a place that promotes a healthy lifestyle, like access to nutritious foods in a walkable city, he said.
The cost of moving and living abroad varies greatly depending on the country of destination and desired lifestyle. The initial move generally includes visa and other paperwork processing fees of a few hundred dollars, plus up to tens of thousands for transportation and shipping costs. For example, a Chicago couple spent 10 months saving more than $20,000 to move to Valencia, Spain, in the spring of 2025.
Bradley says his Plan A is to move abroad through a work transfer, but if those opportunities do not arise, he will tap into the resources he has gathered via the Expatsi network. "It was interesting to me to see just how many people are considering this," Bradley said. The wealth of information "was like drinking through a fire hose, but I took a lot of notes, I collected a lot of leaflets, and so I have information to fall back on."