John wrote earlier today about the Wired story featuring Americans who now regret moving to Europe to escape the fascistic, oppressive, and altogether too Orange United States of America. 

From abroad, America looks a lot more Red, White, and Blue than Orange. 

Why did these Americans abroad change their minds? It turns out trusting the Narrative™ instead of the hard facts were a mistake. Europe kinda sucks. 

Nice place to visit as a tourist, but I wouldn't want to live there. Kinda like Disneyland, only with more Muslims. 

WIRED didn't go into the whole replacement migration issue, and it would likely have been out of place in the story. That is more of a "meta" topic; the focus here was on the day-to-day struggles of living in a declining society where people are grumpy and unwelcoming, and where dishwashers, large refrigerators, and laundry appliances are luxuries, not normal parts of daily life. 

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For left-leaning Americans concerned about Trump’s reelection, relocation to Europe was presented as a lifeboat: Some claim you can live gentler, freer, and, most of all, morally lighter. Celebrities, including Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, and Rosie O’Donnell, all fled the US for political reasons. Courtney Love announced she was applying for UK citizenship in early 2025, describing the political climate at home as “frightening.” Digital nomad visas introduced after the pandemic in countries like Spain, Greece, and Portugal have made the jump logistically easier.

The number of US migrants doubled in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the previous year. In Spain, the number of American residents reached a “record high” in 2026, according to the country’s National Statistics Institute. The Financial Times reported in April that there was a 63 percent increase in American applications to Ireland’s Foreign Births Register, the citizenship path for those with an Irish parent or grandparent, between 2024 and 2025. The UK Home office reported a surge in residency applications from the US between January and March 2025, the highest since records began in 2004.

Private data also reflects the political climate is a major factor. The expatriation company, Expats, released a report earlier this year in which 71 percent of 58,000 respondents “cited the political climate in the United States as a reason for wanting to relocate.” But while Trump 2.0 has more than fulfilled the worst nightmares of many Americans who left, online posts reflect a growing number of them are quietly—and at times apologetically—plotting a move back home, if they haven’t already returned.

One thing you need to know is that our vision of Europe, at least as presented in the media, is similar to our vision of Great Britain through the lens of Downton Abbey. Sure, life can be quite nice if you are wealthy and privileged, but that's true anywhere, isn't it? Mexico City is like that. Uganda is like that; ask Zohran Mamdani what it's like to visit Uganda and get married in a compound protected by armed Special Forces troops. 

Of course, London or Berlin are not Third-World s**tholes yet, and likely never will be. But if you are middle class or a bit better, they aren't like anywhere in America, either, which is why all those World Cup visitors were so blown away. What we consider normal is extraordinary to them.

“Something I had taken for granted is the American outgoingness and default to action, where the question is ‘how can we collaborate?’” she explains. “Generally speaking, I also found that the American work style, for better or for worse, moves much faster and can get to a yes or no in less time.”

This was a similar reality for Josh, another American immigrant who asked to remain completely anonymous, citing concerns about backlash. He moved to Berlin in 2023, in part anticipating what might happen at the 2024 election, and also because he felt his life had hit standstill post-Covid. He had even lived in Germany before, spoke German, and had friends in Berlin. But his expectations, particularly when it came to his career, didn’t align with reality.

“Finding work was so hard, and the endless bureaucracy had grown worse since I’d left,” he tells WIRED. “I missed the friendlier people, freedom of speech, and ease of daily life” in the US. He adds, “If you aren’t born and raised there, and don’t look German, you’ll never be fully accepted.”

“I thought that ‘British politeness’ existed as it does in movies,” Annie says, “but unfortunately, the reality is that present-day British culture is very individualistic, as well as without the sense of charity and helpfulness that many parts of American culture value.” She says she had negative experiences with the NHS maternal care, compared to the smooth experience of her private health insurance in the US, and didn’t expect it to cost her anything: “I pay huge amounts of taxes and an immigration surcharge to access the NHS services—so no, the health care is not free here.” She also expected train travel to be low cost, based on what she’d read about Europe (despite the extortionate train prices and terrible service quality being one of the biggest political conversations in the UK).

A noticeable number of American influencers and anonymous social media users are calling it quits, often sheepishly confessing that life wasn’t what they expected—and that they missed their old lives back in the US. On subreddits dedicated to these kinds of discussions, like r/expats, r/GoingToSpain, r/AmericanExpatsUK, r/AmerExit, you can now find a number of stories about difficulties building a new community, trouble finding work, icier cultural norms compared to the open friendliness of America, and sometimes a higher-than-expected European cost of living. Many posts now feature people asking for a new kind of advice: Is it okay for me to miss, or even to want to move, back home?

Of course, the Left's backlash against these people is something to behold. Many will only speak anonymously because, above all, The Narrative™ must be upheld. Europe is to be the ideal; America the bad guy. 

Kate Glavan, an influencer whose posts are often focused on leftist politics, moved to London in late 2024 from New York. She almost immediately found getting work incredibly difficult, with many of the brands she’d previously worked with not having a good enough reason to do sponsored content with a creator now speaking to a British audience. Earlier this year, she announced she’d be returning to New York.

On Reddit, the response ranged from “feels a bit icky to me how she’s been living in the UK all this time instead of having to deal with all the BS in the US like the rest of us” to “Saying I hate it here about the UK while talking about wanting to move to America is definitely a choice in this political climate.”

When Annie posted earlier this summer on Reddit her excitement about going back to the US in 2027, the comments were largely critical, and ones offering functional relocation advice were heavily downvoted. A moderator intervened, saying many people in the forum “believe the USA is evil” and conversely “the UK is paradise,” continuing that there was often little room for nuance or empathy for differing experiences.

Of course, none of this should be a surprise. Those of us who keep up with what's happening in Europe already knew there is a vast gap between the Europe we see in the media and the reality on the ground. 

Not that the United States is a utopia, of course. Nowhere is. 

But we still have a dynamic society where people can breathe freely and strive as they wish. Americans who claim to be poor here can complain about a Pumpkin Spice Latte in a beautiful coffee shop on their MacBook Pro, listening to music through their AirPods Pro, streaming from their iPhone 18 Pro Max. 

Every once in a while, they can jump up and scream, "Call me MA'AM"! 

It's easy, tempting, and not entirely wrong for us to focus on the migrant crisis in Europe, but even without that problem, the continent is in decline. Its societies are sclerotic, its politicians obsessed with absurdities like NetZero, and the political elites hate their own citizens. 

Josh describes that aspect well in the above quote:

This was a similar reality for Josh, another American immigrant who asked to remain completely anonymous, citing concerns about backlash. He moved to Berlin in 2023, in part anticipating what might happen at the 2024 election, and also because he felt his life had hit standstill post-Covid. He had even lived in Germany before, spoke German, and had friends in Berlin. But his expectations, particularly when it came to his career, didn’t align with reality.

“Finding work was so hard, and the endless bureaucracy had grown worse since I’d left,” he tells WIRED. “I missed the friendlier people, freedom of speech, and ease of daily life” in the US.

Europeans look down on Americans, and that attitude is shared by our own cultural and political elite. But what makes life comfortable for elites here and across the pond is that they share a transnational culture and privilege that is alien to most Europeans. 

Here in the United States, even our billionaires generally look like everybody else, because life is pretty good for the average person. Jeans, T-shirts, Converse sneakers. Some of it is a show, of course, but it also reflects the fact that in the US, being a normal person isn't icky. 

In Europe, the class distinctions are worn like uniforms. Middle-class Americans who go there feel it immediately. 

Again, think back to the World Cup stories, where Europeans were blown away by how welcoming Americans were. It's not just that we weren't as portrayed that blew them away; it's that their own countrymen are not friendly, even to them, and certainly not to Americans. 

Europe is a museum more than a place these days, and that is Europe at its best. That museum is being slowly, or not so slowly, destroyed as it gets occupied. No doubt most places in Europe are not at all like the scenes we are seeing on X right now. The whole continent is not burning. 

It's declining.