Imagined Exit as Voice: Americans’ Emigration Aspirations Under Obama and Trump

Abstract

This article interrogates whether, and if so how, political factors underlie the migration aspirations of US-born citizens—a group of people often assumed to have the privilege and options to relocate elsewhere, typically “voluntarily” and for a mix of economic or social/cultural/lifestyle reasons, rather than being pushed out politically by war, revolution, or violence. Drawing on a unique, nationally-representative panel of 1,764 US-born citizens surveyed in 2014 and 2019, and despite many media suggesting the contrary, we show that the overall prevalence and distribution of Americans’ migration aspirations period actually stayed stable during this volatile time period. Nevertheless, we do uncover evidence that political considerations do shape what aspirations US-born citizens do express, with both weaker national attachment and liberal political ideology consistently raising their odds, and political engagement operating in different directions, depending on panelists’ ideological affiliations and the specific governing regime. We discuss the relevance of these findings for literature on migration aspirations from the Global North, multicausal theories of migration, and the relationship between Hirschman’s classic concepts of loyalty, voice, and exit.