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The internet told them Europe was a social paradise. Turns out the trains are awful, the health care isn’t free, and people can be really mean.
ILLUSTRATIONS: JOHANNA PLOCH
In the autumn of 2024, Annie was ready for something new. She was living in the southern United States when her husband received an unexpected job offer that would move them to a town just outside London. They were in their twenties with no kids. “We wanted to take a risk,” she says.
While researching their new destination on Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram, Annie found Americans eager to explain how enchanting life in the British suburbs could be—all the benefits of a small town, just a short train ride away from one of the biggest cities in the world. The more she read, the sunnier her expectations about the UK’s health care system, social culture, and European transportation systems became.
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They moved before the end of the year. But the reality of life in the UK was dramatically different to what she’d imagined. “There are huge misconceptions about access to quality health care, standard of living … the quality of life is significantly lower than in the US,” she says, citing the challenges she experienced with the National Health Service’s maternity care—having moved while pregnant with her first child—as well as the lack of disposable income in Britain, thanks to lower salaries. “Things in the UK that are considered luxury items are very common” in America, like a dishwasher and dryer, she adds.
Annie says she experienced a high amount of anti-American sentiment straight away. “I found it particularly surprising how people feel so comfortable mocking my accent and culture, even in a workplace environment,” she says. “The UK is very much a place of ‘it is what it is,’ but as Americans we are taught to always improve and strive for better things.” Annie and her husband now have an exit plan for summer next year, the earliest their employers would allow them to relocate back home.
They’re not alone. Thousands of Americans have, like Annie, relocated to Europe in the last few years. Some left seeking adventure; others, the promise of a “slower” lifestyle outside the American grind. But, for many, these reasons were just bonuses to another kind of escape: political refuge in the wake of Trump’s second term.
Annie is not her real name—in fact, she chose not to share any of the specifics of her work background, her husband’s industry, or the precise places they had lived when we spoke about her desperation to get back to America. Like several other Americans WIRED spoke to about their decision to leave and subsequent regret, Annie wanted to remain anonymous because she is concerned about the professional risks of publicly criticizing life abroad. Others cited recent online backlash when other Americans said they missed home, or, in one case, a realization that the political climate of Trump’s America was not something they could escape by heading to Europe.
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.
Sarah Wood González, a journalist and consultant, recently returned to New York after three years in Spain and Edinburgh. She says she had few expectations of her life in Scotland and wasn’t glossy-eyed about Europe but was “surprised and delighted” by how “educated and intellectually curious” everyone was. However, when it came to work, she found the slowness to be a drawback.
“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?
These posts are usually met with a huge amount of backlash. Commenters are quick to imply that the poster must be right-wing and privileged, in for a nasty shock if they did return home. Ironically, many times, they parrot the right-wing notion that they probably aren’t trying hard enough to assimilate into their new country. When one person recently said they badly missed their community of friends in a “blue city in a blue state” and were considering moving back, the majority of top comments agreed the user was “insane.”
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. In another from earlier this year, where a user said they were struggling to adjust to life in Spain with a toddler, commenters warned that she may cause psychological damage to her child if she relocated back to the US.
Jen Barnett, the cofounder of Expatsi Go, tells WIRED: “Our clients are not naive and don’t expect a political utopia anywhere. They’re just well-intentioned Americans who are trying to live meaningful lives while the fabric of society is kind of being ripped apart around them.”
She adds that with the right tools and realistic expectations, it’s “more likely they’ll stay and thrive.”
The irony is that Europe is not a left-wing paradise. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni—who has been a Trump ally—is anti-abortion, anti same-sex marriage, and anti-migrant. Hard-right groups are on the rise in Britain, while Greece, Germany, and Portugal all have right-wing governments pursuing conservative, anti-immigration agendas.
“What is happening in the US is also happening everywhere now, to the point I’m even a little hesitant in what I say to you, or anywhere online,” says Nick, an art director from New York who relocated to Poland in part because of right-wing populism in the US. He moved with his Polish wife to Krakow, where they have a young child, but despite these personal ties has found it difficult to adjust to the culture and bureaucracy. Now Nick feels trapped in Europe where he says the politics aren’t much better—conceding that Poland both politically and culturally has strong right-wing popularity.
As of a few months ago, Josh is back living in the US, where he says he feels happier, and finally “accepted and at home.” In retrospect, he wonders if he got caught up in the frenzy of discourse when he chose to leave in the first place.
“Once I was in Germany and had some distance from the situation in the US,” he says, “I felt perhaps I had overreacted.”
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Sarah Manavis is an American writer based in the UK, covering culture, technology and society. She was previously senior writer at the New Statesman and a columnist for The Observer. Her first book, Tell Me About Myself: How Pop Culture Swallowed Psychotherapy, will be published in May 2027. ... Read More
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