Pressured Exit
Abstract
This Article upends the traditional framing of the United States as a migrant-receiving country by examining a growing category of emigrant outflows: U.S. citizens who have been compelled to depart permanently because of conditions of vulnerability. Eschewing use of the generic term “expatriate,” this Article contends that these U.S. citizens are most accurately described as pressured migrants who have exited due to identity-based mistreatment, gaps in the social safety net, or concerns about deteriorating social and political conditions in the United States. By focusing on these departures, this Article aims to further theorize and provide a lexicon for a subtype of human mobility that lies at the interstices of refugee flows and lifestyle migration, somewhere between involuntary and voluntary migration.
The Article presents a typology of U.S. citizen pressured migrants and catalogs the migratory vehicles they have used to gain entrance to other countries, including programs for diasporic descendants, retirees, and investors, as well as conventional immigration pathways. This Article also explores the prominent role that private immigration brokers play in facilitating exit from the United States. It concludes by examining the broader significance of these departures for scholarly debates about U.S. citizenship, the relationship between overseas citizens and the state, the influence of privilege and coloniality in migratory moves, and the creeping clout of the “exit industry.”