Californians reportedly preparing to flee country pending election results: 'I'm very scared'

A new report highlighted a growing number of Americans, and particularly Californians, who are planning to move overseas because they are "fed up" with the divisiveness of U.S. politics.

The Los Angeles Times spoke to global migration experts who've documented a spike in the number of Americans seeking to move out of the country since 2020, with many of them being California residents. 

The number of requests this election year has already exceeded last year, global firm Henley & Partners said. The consultant company helps clients obtain residency and citizenship in other countries and said that about 80% of their U.S. clients want to leave the country because of political issues.

"They want an option to escape," Basil Mohr Elzeki, who leads the North American operations for Henley & Partners told the L.A. Times. "Now with the election, people have opinions on both ends, and they’re worried."

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Jen Barnett, founder of Expatsi, another company that helps U.S. citizens looking to move abroad, said her website's traffic spiked 900% after the first presidential debate between President Biden and former President Trump. She said that traffic climbed again in the final weeks of 2024 race.

Barnett and her husband moved to Mexico earlier this year after spending years looking for somewhere outside the U.S. to live following Trump winning the 2016 Republican nomination.

"Just that he could be nominated to me meant that something was irreparably broken, and it wasn’t something we could get back," she told the Times.

Mykel Dicus, 54, from Hayward, California, said in the report that he's pursuing moving to Spain in the next three years because he feels safer there, and he's afraid of another Trump presidency.

"If a regime like MAGA should win this election, I’m very scared," Dicus said. "I just feel like it’s time to enjoy a life that’s free from any American worry."

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It's not just liberals looking to flee the country, according to experts in the report.

"Anecdotally, I’ve heard more and more folks talking not just about a Trump administration, but about the divisiveness in the country," Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, a migration scholar at the University of Kent in Brussels, told the Times.

Another migration expert, Marco Permunian, founder of Italian Citizenship Assistance, said his company saw a surge of Americans looking to live abroad after the 2016 election but that number continued to grow during the Biden administration. 

"We came to the conclusion there is a sense of fear in general, and that affects people from both sides of the political spectrum," Permunian told the paper.