Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers | Hacker News Reader

Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers

wsj.com

99 pointsreaperducer93 comments

I've lately been asking my coworkers if they would have come to the US if it looked like this back when they were first applying.

Not one of them has answered yes.

I moved when Obama was president. I sincerely believed that we were in a post racial world. Imagine my surprise in seeing people proudly flying confederate flags in Austin!

I am still hopeful. While that flag was considered “ok” then, it no longer is anymore, and I rarely see it in the urban areas.

> I sincerely believed that we were in a post racial world.

I grew up in a post-racial world as a "brown" immigrant in a deep red Virginia county in the 1990s. My daughter, meanwhile, developed a strong "brown" identity from her teachers in our deep blue state. I don't blame Obama for it. But there was a definite shift in thinking during his administration where the distinct politics of black democrats--which is highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons--became generalized to the hispanics and Asians that democrats sought to court. It was a couple of years into the Obama administration that someone called me a “person of color” for the first time, as if you can properly group people together based on skin color.

> highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons

This is something I get but it always buffles me. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't they, in their own interests, and the interest of groups they aspire to represent, attempt to unite people above skin-color differences and emphasize our human aspect?

In order to bring people together, it's necessary to acknowledge the harms that have been caused. That is part of repair and trust building. Germany had war crimes trials. South Africa had truth & reconciliation. The US can't paper over the ways in which marginalized populations have been harmed, especially since large parts of the country either don't believe harm has been caused or activity endeavor to perpetuate that harm.

Perhaps, like me, you grew up in the era of the great "Melting Pot". At that time (I was young, it was the 1970's) it seemed fine. Come to the US, melt together with us (okay, it was a little weird, but like some kind of stone soup, I got the gist).

By the time I got my Education degree in college though the melting pot was out. Cultures coming to the US don't want to abandon their language, their foods, music… these are a part of their culture and heritage they want to still celebrate.

It slowly became clear to me that this was correct—further, it enriches the U.S. to accommodate it. (Mardi Gras down in New Orleans comes to mind as an example—a little poorer the U.S. would be to have tossed that in the name of homogeneity.)

The problem is that culture isn’t just food and music. That’s the tip of a much deeper iceberg: https://commisceo-global.com/articles/intercultural-training.... When I immigrated to the US, I dressed like an American I listen to American music. I ate American food, but my mom still socialized me like a Bangladeshi. All the little adjustments and guidance that parents give their small children throughout the day—that’s different between cultures. I didn’t realize how different it was until I started started raising kids with my Anglo-Protestant wife. (And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.)

Culture is substantive it’s a type of social technology. It’s strongly influences the kinds of societies and communities that people create. I’m having a discussion with my dad right now about American individualism. From his Asian perspective, Americans don’t care about each other because they have very weak family ties compare compared to Bangladeshis. I thought that too. But what I realized is that Americans teach their kids to love abstract systems snd rules over people. For example, Americans spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about sharing or not littering. Whereas Bangladesh, she spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about how to address, elders, or how to reciprocate, affection, or other social norms that are designed to foster kinship relationships within a more tribal social structure.

> And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.

Oh I'd love a heated argument over that! And I'm sure plenty of Americans, including a lot of protestants, would disagree with your conclusion, too.

On a more meaningful note, wouldn't it be wonderful to have an amalgamate with the best of these worlds - including sharing, socializing, addressing elders properly etc. and not littering.

I’m from the subcontinent, so I’d love to live in a place where families stay together like India but has public order and good governance like Massachusetts. Where is that place? Good governance (stable, efficient, low corruption, free—not just in the formal government but across society’s institutions) and public order is a luxury reserved for a handful of the world’s population. Basically Scandinavia, a few states in the U.S., and the Anglo countries (UK, AUS, CAD, NZ). Where else? Japan and Singapore come close, at the cost of pretty top-down management of the population.

And for places that don’t have order and good government, progress towards those things is non-existent. People in my home country of Bangladesh have spent their 55 years of independence doing everything they can to remain poor and dysfunctional. They just held sham elections (again) after overthrowing the government (again). And the guy in charge of the sham elections was a Nobel Laureate lauded by the international community.

So I’m much more afraid of the few islands of prosperity regressing to the global mean than I am aspirational about trying to have it all. I’ll endure donuts cut in half and running out of food at potlucks in return for order.

> It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.

100% disagree, I love being able to enjoy and learn about different cuisines, it's an opportunity to connect with people I wouldn't have otherwise. In my metro area there's Ethiopian, Oaxacan, Ukrainian, Yemeni, etc. If it weren't for the variety, eating out would have no appeal to me.

I was raised, quite deliberately on my parent’s part, not to have any racial identity. I don’t think anything good can come out of reminding white people that I’m “brown”—especially in the educational and workplace contexts where it’s become common to really emphasize those differences. I think that actually makes people more racist in their treatment of individuals: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen....

I guess liberals have more faith in white people’s capacity to not be racist than I do. I don’t think people can simultaneously emphasize differences but not treat people differently as a result. The only workable approach to having a multi-ethnic society is to synthesize disparate people into a new group, like America did with the category of “white people” or China has done with the category of “Han Chinese.” And ultimately I suspect even that is a fragile status quo.

Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes Day as a state holiday on January 19 each year. This occasionally coincides with the third Monday of January on which MLK Jr. Day is celebrated as a national holiday. Democrats in the Texas legislature have repeatedly tried to remove or rename the holiday, but these attempts have so far failed to get out of committee.

Some people take umbrage at being lumped into a large heterogenous group called People of Color. I can assure you that the people who celebrate Confederate "Heroes" have no issue with lumping all of those people into a group of Colored People. That is where the grouping originated.

I thought we might have finally reached enlightenment after WWII, but the world only stopped hating Jews for a few years before reverting to the norm. This long arc of justice is on the order of centuries, not years.

Flying confederate flags while Obama was president was considered “ok?”

According to polling, yes: https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-pol.... For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in the south, it was a generic symbol of rebellion or regional rivalry. Remember, Dukes of Hazzard, which aired in the 1980s, was a liberal show about southern boys fighting corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen.

Now you can say “hey, maybe you shouldn’t have picked that particular flag as a symbol to mean ‘fuck the Patriots.’” That was the result of propaganda by Lost Causers in the early 1990s. But that doesn’t change the fact that the symbol was repurposed over a long time period and generations grew up associating it with ideas that were quite different from what it originally represented.

I will accept being wrong. The more you know…

> For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in the south, it was a generic symbol of rebellion or regional rivalry. Remember, Dukes of Hazzard, which aired in the 1980s ....

For people who grew up in the south in the 1960s (me, mostly), the Confederate battle flag was indisputably and unambiguously a symbol of white supremacy and keeping "the coloreds" in their supposedly-proper place. I really don't think it changed that much in the 1980s and 1990s.

I’m talking about a completely different generation that grew up decades later. Dukes of Hazzard was not a white supremacist TV show. It was a top rated prime-time show on CBS.

You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them. I once use the phrase “atomic bomb of patent law” half a dozen times in a brief to describe inequitable conduct doctrine. It’s a quote from a line of federal circuit cases. Co-counsel from Tokyo sent us a polite email asking if we can reduce the number of times we say “atomic bomb” out of consideration for the Japanese company that would be co-signing the brief.

The Federal Circuit obviously didn’t mean to suggest that inequitable conduct findings vaporize entire patent families the way the atomic bomb vaporized hundreds of thousands of Japanese families—even though that’s the only thing atomic bombs have ever been used for.

> You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them.

So: What a symbol means to the writer (or speaker) is supposedly more important than what the symbol means to readers — who (according to the writer) must accommodate themselves to the writer's mindset instead of vice versa. This sender-oriented approach is in contrast to the writer's seeking to serve his readers — and the writer's intended message — by using the readers' language, if you will.

(I'm curious whether you've found the sender-oriented approach to work when writing a legal brief for a court or agency — in our joint line of work, the received wisdom is that it's decidedly suboptimal.)

The "Young Patriots" in the 60s were a white far-left anticapitalist antiracist group, part of the Black Panthers' Rainbow Coalition. They flew the confederate flag. The Panthers were okay with it, go figure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Patriots_Organization

Maybe the Panthers were smart enough to accept the help without bothering about the flag.

It still is in Trenton, Georgia (whose city flag is the former Georgia Confederate flag). Weird driving through that part of the world...

I wonder what this will do to the US developer salary premium. You could, for reasons I never entirely understood, make so much more money doing the same job in the US than anywhere else. And I don't mean comparing to India or China, but comparable CoL countries in e.g. Europe.

Sure, US is more productive, has bigger tech companies, attracts talent, and not least, their hectocorns are truly making the world a better place with their CRUD apps and REST APIs.

But at these levels of imbalance, already a long time ago I would have expected US companies to move a lot of their software engineering efforts to Europe or India or elsewhere, and it just wasn't happening, despite SE being one of the most remote-able jobs ever.

But now, the trickle of expat workers into the US appears to be drying up, apparently Americans are leaving too. There will be more and more pressure for these companies to hire abroad even for non-monetary reasons (as is already happening) and I fear for my fellow American HNians that they will like paying a fraction of the cost for the same job.

> make so much more money doing the same job in the US than anywhere else.

Unless you are comparing with top-paying faang employers, the difference is not as stark I think.

Once you deduct the higher cost of every day things, medical expenses, education fees, and other social safety net stuff that you typically get for free in EU, and compound that with a weak dollar, you'll see that the typical EU salary is probably not all that bad. Otherwise, as you say, companies would have outsourced to EU rather than India for example.

There's also a non-zero number of Canadian engineers in the US. No visa required, just a job acceptance letter for TN status at the border. Minimal language or cultural barrier and educated at competitive colleges. Those workers are going to take their US salaries and experience back to Canada if the US continues to alienate its neighbors. Canada is also building a lot more connections with nations that the US is shunning, like China.

Might be time for a new Blackberry.

> You could, for reasons I never entirely understood, make so much more money doing the same job in the US than anywhere else. [...] e.g. Europe.

It really, really depends. First, not every SE works at top companies, and even there the salary can vary much. Second, in Europe you can often choose your contract type - if you choose a permanent role, you surely earn less, but at the same time enjoy the level of social security your counterparts at FAANG can dream of. If you choose to be a contractor, the median will still be lower than in the US, but not that lower.

I imagine because the other jobs all around SE isn't as outsourcable. Designs and PM in particular. At some point the timezone pain is not worth the cost savings.

What exactly about design and project management isnt outsourceable if your devs are already outsourced?

On a meta note, this comment section is absolutely littered with flagged and dead comments from fresh accounts. There are certain topics that really bring out the emotions.

> There are certain topics that really bring out the emotions.

Or, based on this thread from yesterday, the fresh accounts are bots and/or disinformation: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes[0].

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47152085

Alternative link https://www.ap7am.com/en/121311/donald-dash-report-shows-ame...

this shows WSJ article https://archive.ph/K2LXY

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/25/nx-s1-5725354/nurses-emigrate...

Canada is actively recruiting healthcare workers and it's apparently become quite easy to get people to move up. If I were a healthcare worker I wouldn't have to think about it for very long before having the U-Haul loaded up and ready to go.

https://healthcareinfusion.org is actively promoted on social media channels to assist with this, a project of the Canadian commentator, writer, and former national host and producer at CBC Radio Tod Maffin. BC allocated $5M to a marketing budget to do the same.

Is there anything like this for tech workers? Or is that not a sector Canada is trying to recruit in as much?

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

https://immigration.ca/fast-track-high-demand-occupations/

“Canada skilled workers program” are the relevant keywords for searches.

If you can’t find one that fits the work that you do, another option are visas that are non lucrative non working that are based on your investments, their income, including income from rental properties. Own a place in the US? Find a property manager, rent it out, visa secured (assuming monthly/annual income requirements are met).

The shortage of health care workers has a larger impact on the day to day of Canadians than a shortage of tech workers. However we would even define how many tech workers one "needs".

i dont think theres anything active, since canada has a bit of a glut of software engineers, but the big companies frequently put people who couldnt get an h1b in canada, so there must be some options

Works where archive.ph is blocked:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/americans-are-leaving-t...

No Javascript, text-only, HTTPS opitional:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1X5a4f...

How? It's not like people can just decide to move to another country and they will say "sure, come on in!" right?

Are they getting visas from work or a spouse or something? Surely that does not account for a vast majority of cases?

If you are in Spain on a tourist visa, and apply for the equivalent of a digital nomad visa while in country, you get three years as a temporary resident. At three years, you re-apply for another two years, and after those five years you can apply for permanent residency. 80% of your income must come from outside of Spain. They’ll even take a letter from a US W2 employer as income verification. One example of an exit strategy you can move on almost immediately, depending on your circumstances.

Resources:

https://relocateme.substack.com/

https://old.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/comments/urwlbr/a_guide_fo...

https://old.reddit.com/user/Shufflebuzz/comments/1iv4dud/shu...

https://www.helpmeleave.us/

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se... (Canadian citizenship by descent)

https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/b58914ce-b98d-4330... from https://pancakeonastick.substack.com/ (Digital Nomad Visa Map)

I have several US friends who got European citizenship through ancestry. They found a great grandmother or something from "the old country" and by proving their relation to them could get a passport.

That got me to googling around since my grandfather was born in Germany and came to the US when he was 5 (circa 1920). But from what I'm finding it sounds like when he became a US citizen that tie to German citizenship was broken. Also, prior to 1975 the citizenship only passed down through the father - it was my maternal grandfather so it wouldn't pass down, apparently. Well, it was fun to think about the possibilities for a few minutes, anyway.

Your case sounds complicated so I'm not sure, but two things to note:

1. US is one of only a few countries where children emigrating with parents don't officially declare intent to immigrate, they do it automatically with their parents. This means that your grandfather (whether he was aware or not) was still German, since German law says you only give it up if you "take action to immigrate" or something like that. Likewise every child since then (your mother and you) were born as US citizens "involuntarily" (as in you didn't choose) so you also retained your citizenship.

2. In 2021 Section 5 of the StAG law was updated to say that people born to German mothers between 1949-1975 are now eligible, it was updated since male only was seen as discriminatory. So theoretically say grandfather -> mother (born to male) -> you (post 1949). Not an expert so double check this.

Im not an expert but my understanding of your case would be that you are not even needing to apply for status, you are literally German now, and just need to request a passport (check this with the resources on Reddit I mention below).

I'd recommend checking Reddit "German Citizenship by Descent" resources. There's a couple profile names you will see there really frequently who are German citizens who can help you in finding paperwork from German government resources if needed (old birth certificates, etc.) for a small fee.

You can also see public threads where people explain their case and you can see if you find one similar to yours. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Genealogy/comments/scvkwb/german_ci...

Oh, wow. Thanks for that link. So it sounds like it could be possible.

Almost without exception, any US citizen can perform self-employed work in Netherlands via the DAFT program.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT>

This can lead to eventual citizenship, but you have to follow the rules (e.g. monetary requirements, which are actually quite low).

> monetary requirements, which are actually quite low

Technically, yes - you are required to hold only €4,500 as an "investment" in the business you create. In reality you will need a lot more. My wife and I spent about €40k to move over which is inline with what others on the DAFT program have said they spent.

Completely worth it though!

From my research, the biggest roadblock these days seems to be lack of housing.

What was your final motivator to depart [mine: crony capitalism e.g. healthcare setup]? Were ya'll's companies already established, or created in the moving process? Citizens, yet [spekin de Dutch yet eh]?

Lastly: is living in Maastricht similar to living in a US state panhandle (e.g. benefits of: border shopping; tax reasons). What drew ya'll south (V.e.g: Amsterdam)?

Any suggestions/websites for a single electrician that's been thinking about DAFT for over a decade? My own would be YouTuber Not Just Bikes (expatriated to Utrecht for traffic engineering).

> What was your final motivator to depart

Our main motivator was that we watched our grandparents grow older and just stop moving. I absolutely love America, but you do spend the majority of your time sitting. I'm not inactive, I do ultras, I hike, etc. But that doesn't make up for the fact that we're just always sitting - at home, at work, in the car. We wanted to live somewhere that would force us out of that.

> Were ya'll's companies already established

I had an LLC I used for contracting in the US, but the DAFT visa required setting up a new Dutch corporation.

> Citizens, yet

We're currently applying for our first visa renewal. Next time we'll be elligible for PR. Citizenship would require us to give up our US citizenship and I don't want to do that.

> is living in Maastricht similar to living in a US state panhandle

It kinda is. We don't have a car, but we do have neighbors that only grocery shop in Germany because it's cheaper.

> What drew ya'll south (V.e.g: Amsterdam)?

I just couldn't imagine living anywhere so flat and so far from forests / mountains. We still don't have proper forests in Maastricht, but I can be in the forests of Belgium or Germany in 20 minutes.

> Any suggestions/websites for a single electrician that's been thinking about DAFT for over a decade?

No websites, but just as someone who has tried to hire an electrician in both countries it seems like the shortage is greater here. It really seems like you could just come over and have a lot of work.

The nice thing about DAFT is that after 5 years, I believe you can get EU permanent residency, not just Dutch permanent residency. Basically gives you the right to live and work anywhere in the EU like a citizen. There are continuous residency requirements to meet eligibility, but a lawyer I talked to about DAFT told me that they're not super strict about it.

I appreciate your perspective, from having lived DAFT experience.

>We're currently applying for our first visa renewal. Next time we'll be elligible for PR.

Good luck (shoe-in, correct?)! As PRs, would you still then need to remain self-employed (forever)?

>electrician shortage

I've run my own residential electric shop, on/off for two decades, but eventually want to get into industrial controls.

Definitely need to look into licensing/reciprocity.

>It really seems like you could just come over and have a lot of work.

Sidework would be an eventual hustle, but honestly I'd have to learn about local wiring practices and wouldn't want to be independant in a new AHJ/system. If I dafted it'd be in an adjacent careerpath. I'm honestly looking into engineering programs, abroad (possibly pre-DAFT).

>couldn't imagine living anywhere so flat and so far from forests / mountains

It's raining here in Appalachia. Soft little pitterpatters upon my tin roof.

Thanks for chatting. I've bookmarked your website for further inspiration =D

> As PRs, would you still then need to remain self-employed (forever)?

Nope, once we get PR we have the same rights as citizens except: we can't vote in national elections, and we can't leave the country for too long without losing the residency permit.

> I've bookmarked your website for further inspiration

Haha, last blog post was, what, 2 years ago!

>~ my last post was 2 years ago!~

I'm ten years behind, you're thoughts are very helpful =D

Maybe I'll neighbor you in two years (you get free electric help).

I have quite a bit of family in Germany, and have had several friends move from the US to Europe. Europe absolutely knows that they have an opportunity to capture a ton of talent right now. If you have skills that are in demand, basically any country in the Schengen zone will find a way to get you a visa. For example, if you’re a trans researcher, you will find open arms at academic institutions in Europe.

You could also lie and claim your address as a US address, and then just live in another country. This is obviously illegal, but I’ve met a few people who made it work for a while. But I’m also speaking abstractly on the internet, so maybe I’m just making all this up.

> It's not like people can just decide to move to another country and they will say "sure, come on in!"

Many countries actively try to attract skilled migrants with simple, points-based immigration systems and fast processing times.

Simply having a bachelor's degree, 5+ years of work experience, and fluency in the local language will get you on the fast-track to a permanent working visa in many countries.

At least as far as tech migrants are concerned, the points floor for Canada and Australia has become quite high in recent years.

It's very hard to get a UK work visa normally (and getting a lot harder each year, like in the US), but if you are a HN type with a good tech, start-up, investor, or researcher career, they roll out the red carpet for you.

https://www.gov.uk/global-talent

If you qualify, you get a 'Tier 1' visa where you can work at any company without sponsorship, change jobs at any time just like a citizen, or start your own company with no fear of your visa being tied to a job. You can become a citizen yourself in 5 years.

Source: Am now UK citizen

Various other European countries have similar programs with different requirements. Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain are common places that a lot of US people go depending on what options they have to qualify and where they want to be. Spain has a digital nomad visa right now that is easy to get.

If you're a doctor or nurse Canada is definitely saying "sure, come on in!" - they're actively recruiting in the US for healthcare workers. But that's because like most other countries they've got a shortage of health care workers. They're not likely to tell us software engineers that we can com on in.

According to an LLM I asked, about 80 countries have a way in for $$$.

I was superprized it was as high as 80, assuming I can beleive the answer. I knew though that the USA is one of them. Also Singapore, since it was big news when the co-founder of Facebook did it.

One option is dual citizenship, which varies by country. I know about half a dozen people who are in various stages of applying.

Maybe not North America and Europe, but with proof of income most countries most definitely will tell you sure, come on in!

There are a few dozen countries that one can buy citizenship. Some require investing in something or starting their own business. Search for "countries that offer citizenship for money". Some places will pay for people to move their under certain conditions and lack of criminal history.

“Golden visa” and “citizenship by investment” are good search terms to use.

How? It's not like people can just decide to move to another country and they will say "sure, come on in!" right?

If you read the article, you'd see that for some countries that is almost precisely what happens.

The website blocks my ISP unfortunately, so I am not able to read it. Same thing when trying with a VPN as well. And the archive.ph link posted elsewhere in this thread is an endless captcha loop for me.

Destination Thailand Visa is comically easy to get if you have ~$20K in savings

https://archive.ph/s1hWN

Just out of curiosity. The companies let you work remotely from Europe and preserve remote work?

Are they giving up citizenship as well?

It could be beneficial to if working abroad because the United States is one of the only countries on the planet that taxes earned wages abroad while offering absolutely zero tangible benefits to those who do, perhaps besides the passport itself.

Given much of the free world depends on the US for defense, maybe it's not "zero tangible benefits"?

Yea, it's annoying, though. Under $130k a year you don't pay. So this is a 1%-er problem. And, you still deduct your foreign taxes and just pay the difference. I'm not saying that makes it ok, but you aren't double taxed, you're just taxes as tho you were back in the USA.

The rest of the world pays for US defense through investing in US treasuries, which they are moving away from for obvious reasons. The US isn’t providing defense for free, they are compensated for it by the world buying their debt at favorable yields considering the debt load (~120% of GDP as of this comment).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN

Your argument needs ‘public debt /held by foreigners/ as percent of gdp’, I think? Or rather ‘public debt /held by foreigners to whom US provides defense/ as percent of gdp’ Then you are down to Japan.

Europe was investing €300B/year in the US. That capital is likely better invested domestically in Europe, and the direction Europe is headed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1qjtvtl/macron_says...

I don’t really understand the advantage of doing it this way vs having them pay directly.

Re debt loads - does the debt load actually materially affect default risk in this case? It’s not like US bonds are officially rated as high risk, at least. Debt to GDP is one thing but without a comparison to other bonds and their associated debt to GDP and a relationship inferred from that data it doesn’t really say anything in a vacuum. Why would it be done this way instead of just paying directly? As opposed to the more straightforward explanation of US bonds just having a favorable payout to risk ratio vs other options. It just smells like some kind of conspiratorial thinking and I’m not sure if it actually adds up.

Honestly asking by the way, I haven’t seen anyone spell out the theory and it just seems quite hand wavey to me.

The hassle of being forced to pay Intuit a dime in order to pay taxes is enough to make a problem for anyone.

Edit: grammar

Does that mean giving up social security you spent you life paying into?

I don't know why you got downvoted for just asking a question. I'd be curious too. In some countries it's much easy to become a citizen (give up your previous citizenship) than it is to get permanent residency permission (in which you're still technically a citizen of your previous country)

Honestly lately I’ve been feeling like this must be the perfect time to move to the US.

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