Courtney Bowden didn’t leave the United States on a whim. By the time she and her husband moved to Mexico in 2021, the idea had been quietly forming for years.
Bowden was living just outside Atlanta then, running a consulting business, surrounded by friends and family. From the outside, her life looked stable: professional traction, community, a home she’d worked hard to build. But beneath that surface, she was reckoning with a more private accounting shaped by racial microaggressions in her neighborhood, neighbors calling the police on her and her husband for reasons that felt both trivial and threatening, and a political climate that was growing increasingly hostile. “I started asking myself if there was any other place in the world where I could exist freely,” she says. “Free from being categorized by my skin color, free from being policed and managed and surveilled. Once I started asking those questions, the wheels started turning.”
That reckoning sharpened in 2020. “After [the murder of] George Floyd, I started really reevaluating my life and truly calculating the cost of staying,” says Bowden. “Watching the Black Lives Matter movement erupt alongside a pandemic made it very clear that I needed to make a change. But the questions were there long before that. I had already been wondering if there was any place in the world where I could exist freely.”
Bowden and her husband agreed in a “handshake deal” to try living elsewhere for six months. After doing some research and reading about other expats’ experiences in online forums, they chose Mexico. Five years later, they’re still there.
Based in Playa del Carmen, Bowden and her husband have never looked back. “Once we got here, we reduced our living expenses by 50 percent. And what that does to the nervous system is profound. Your cortisol levels come down because you’re not constantly calculating. In the United States, especially as a Black woman, the margin for error is nonexistent. Here, I have breathing room.” She continues, “For the first time in my adult life, I feel safe in my body. I don’t walk around with hypervigilance. I don’t have my head on a swivel. I feel safer here than I ever did in some of the most coveted zip codes in the United States.”
Bowden now hosts Black Expat Stories, a podcast documenting the lives of Black Americans who have left the U.S., and is currently writing The Exodus Book, which expands on those conversations. Over time, patterns emerged: lower costs, health care that felt accessible rather than adversarial, and a true sense of safety.
Their stories mirror a broader shift. According to a recent Gallup poll, a record share of Americans say they would like to leave the United States permanently, with women under 45 expressing the strongest desire. In 2025, 40 percent of women ages 15 to 44 said they would move abroad permanently if given the opportunity, which is four times the share that said the same in 2014. Gallup also found a 21-point gender gap among younger adults; 40 percent of women, compared to 19 percent of men in the same age range, said they would leave permanently if they could.
That increase reflects something more complex than wanderlust. Declining confidence in American institutions, rising costs of living, access to health care, and concerns about safety all correlate strongly with the desire to emigrate. Among younger women, trust in the judicial system has dropped sharply over the past decade, a decline that accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Confidence in the courts among women under 45 fell from 55 percent in 2015 to 32 percent in 2025, more than for any other age group.
For Bowden and Dom Jones, who moved to Taipei in 2024, a newfound sense of safety registered first in the body. Jones had spent years inside American civic life, working in education and politics and running for both Congress and California State Assembly in Orange County, a historically conservative stronghold. She understood America’s political systems intimately and eventually found that proximity to them made their fractures harder to ignore. “I fought hard in America, and I continue to fight in my own way,” she says. “But for me, remaining overseas is the peaceful choice.”
In Taiwan, the contrast was immediate. “It felt like I received a big hug from the community,” Jones says, describing what her first time exploring her now hometown of Taipei was like. “It was a hug I didn’t know I needed, and it instantly felt really homey; the people were just so warm and kind and caring.” Treating others with respect and dignity, she adds, is a baseline expectation there. “I felt so much anxiety back in the States, and anxiety activates the nervous system and raises cortisol levels,” says Jones. “So the biggest thing is, my nervous system is resting in a way I could have never experienced, in a way my ancestors never experienced. I am not constantly othered.” She adds, “Here I’m seen as a woman first. Not a Black woman. Just a woman.”
That sense of safety extended beyond streets and neighborhoods, into the systems meant to help keep people nourished and healthy. Several women described food that felt fresher and less processed. “My quality of life has radically changed for the better,” Bowden says. “I feel healthier in my body.”
Health care came up again and again as one of the most immediate benefits of leaving, citing access and affordability as major stress relievers. According to the Commonwealth Fund, the United States is the only high-income country without universal health-care coverage, and it has the highest maternal mortality rate among peer nations—a disparity that worsens for women of color. “In Mexico, the quality of care is different because we’re not dealing with so much medical racism,” Bowden says. “And when you’re treated like a human by the folks who are supposed to be helping you attend to your health, that lengthens your life.”
Taylor Bolhack felt the safety shift most acutely as a parent. After her home burned down in the Palisades fire in early 2025, she, her husband, and their young son relocated to Lisbon later that year. “As much as we loved L.A. and still love L.A., it felt hard to make it feel like home when there was still so much pain surrounding the city and everything we experienced there,” she says.
In Portugal, one of the most startling changes was what she no longer worried about: gun violence in her son’s schools. “You don’t deal with gun-safety issues at all [here in Lisbon],” she says. “I’m never nervous guns are going to be at school. One of my girlfriends in Portugal, her son, when they moved from Brooklyn, was like, ‘Am I going to have to do gun drills at my new school?’ That was his first question.” Parenthood itself felt differently scaffolded. Mornings were slower, and family life felt less surveilled, less performative, and less judged.
Still, not every system she’s encountered have felt as accommodating. Bolhack, who is pregnant with her second child, also relays unexpected downsides in the move abroad. She was unprepared for how rigid Portugal’s medical system was, specifically around pregnancy and birth. Americans often consider Europe to provide gentler, more humane care, but her experience was far more strained. She has encountered limited autonomy, highly medicalized decision making, and little room for self-advocacy. Practices that are considered standard or negotiable in the U.S., like the presence of a doula in the birthing room, aren’t readily accommodated. “We’re lucky,” she says, noting that her family has medical expertise to lean on and helped her advocate for more informed care. “But if you didn’t have that support, I can’t imagine the confusion.”
The friction didn’t end there. “The visa process for Portugal is absolutely horrifying,” Bolhack says, describing a logistical grind that compounded grief rather than relieving it: passport delays, shifting rules, consulate confusion, missed family milestones, and the exhausting sensation of living inside a bureaucratic black box. Their housing situation revealed further cracks: After they initially moved into an apartment that had been featured in Architectural Digest, severe mold issues forced them out and they lost $18,000 in the process, with no legal recourse.
Her experience punctures the fantasy version of expatriation where leaving is elegant and exciting at every turn. It’s not just Emily in Paris charm; there can also be exploitation, precarity, and a lack of recourse when things go wrong. “It seems so glitz and glam, but the reality is much different from that,” says Bolhack. “And I think a lot of people don’t realize that until they move.”
For Amelia Hill,* the calculus was explicitly about survival. As state-level restrictions on trans rights and gender-affirming care accelerated, all while the broader cultural temperature hardened, she began to feel that leaving was less a choice than a necessity. “I don’t think of my transness being the reason for a lot of my decisions,” she says. “I don’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘I’m a trans woman today.’ But living in America, I’m forced to face it in a way that doesn’t feel good and doesn’t feel productive and feels quite threatening, actually.”
Hill moved to Canada from New York City in 2024 and asked that her exact location remain vague. The difference she describes is not simply emotional relief; it is a shift in the foundation of public life. “My stress levels are so low, it feels like my biology is changing. I didn’t know this kind of safety was possible,” says Hill. “It feels almost utopic for me in a weird way that I wasn’t expecting. I was like, ‘Oh, it’ll be, like, a similar culture around trans shit,’ but actually it’s night and day to me, even from New York. I don’t feel really safe as a trans person in New York.” What she’s describing isn’t just affirmation but a baseline of mutual respect.
Even those who left earlier recognize the emotional contours of this moment. Writer Naydeline Mejia moved to Paris two years ago on a student visa and stayed, building a life while confronting a more complicated truth: Leaving doesn’t automatically deliver professional ease, and the American performance model doesn’t disappear just because you cross an ocean. “I’ve been here two years, but I still have a very American mindset when it comes to what success looks like,” she says. “It’s been really hard to start my life over here.”
Mejia works a retail job to stay afloat and feels the constant tension of wondering how her career might have looked if she’d stayed in New York. And yet, she describes Paris’s labor culture as one with structural permission to be human. “People value their weekends,” she says. “People disconnect. They take their vacation days.” The move forced a different kind of adulthood—one defined less by acceleration than self-reliance: “I feel so much more autonomous. Moving here took me out of my comfort zone and forced me to fend for myself in ways I haven’t had to before, like learning the French system on my own, doing the visa application by myself, figuring out French bureaucracy, health care, finding a job. It taught me I’m stronger than I think.”
Across these stories, what emerges isn’t a rejection of America so much as a recalibration of values. These women miss things: family dinners, old friends, cultural shorthand, the particular intimacy of home. Many feel guilt for leaving and choosing personal safety or sanity over proximity. “Even five years post exit, I’m still going through the stages of grief, because America is my homeland. I wanted so badly to build a life there,” says Bowden. “But unfortunately, I didn’t find it to be possible in my lifetime. And although I am here, I still have family members and loved ones that are in the United States that are still in the eye of the storm, and so I feel a sense of survivor’s guilt in some ways. I’m watching the collapse in real time. And though I was able to get out, what about those who aren’t?”
*Name has been changed
