If you guessed Baby Boomer retirees, you would be wrong. The largest and fastest growing segment of the new American expat generation is 25-to-34-year-olds, the so-called Millennials, who were born in America in the 1980s and 1990s.
For answers on who belongs to the new American expat generation, we went to the source of the first research ever conducted on Americans considering or planning a move abroad. Bob Adams, who lives in Panama and heads panamawave.com, pioneered American expat research, launching his first study in 2005 with research partner Zogby International.
“I was CEO of a Washington D.C.-based company called New Global Initiatives in 2004 and we thought at the time that we might explore this subject for future commercial purposes,” Adams said. “It seemed that there might be an opportunity to get into the international relocation business, so I went to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington D.C. and asked them if there had been any research done that would tell us about Americans relocating abroad. None had been done so I decided we would fund a primary research project.”
The seminal study New Global Initiatives did in 2005, which sampled the opinions of as many as 25,000 Americans, became the first in a series of nine research projects funded first by New Global Initiatives and then by Adams himself. The last study of about 2,000 Americans was done in 2011.
“Our first study in 2005 came back with information that I had not really anticipated,” Adams explained. “The number of Americans who were considering or planning a move abroad was much higher than anyone thought, with widespread interest among all adult age groups. We found, though, that instead of retirees being the majority, they were in fact the minority of those considering relocation. That surprised us.”
An even more surprising discovery was the age group most interested in moving abroad was the Millennials, also known as Generation Y.
“The statistic that really jumped out in our 2011 survey was the dramatic increase in the rise of the younger age groups,” Adams said. “The fact that younger people were interested and actually moving did not surprise me, but the sheer numbers did. In our 2007 study, about 3.5 percent of all 25-to-34-year-old adults said they planned to relocate abroad, but that number jumped to 5.1 percent by 2011. That represents over 2.1 million Millennials thinking about or planning a move to another country. We also found in previous studies that the 18-24-year-old group - younger Millennials - was very interested and thinking about relocation to another country, but many are restrained by the amount of money it requires to move abroad.”
Research conducted by MyInternationalAdventure also in 2011 among over 200 Americans considering or planning a move abroad confirmed Adam’s results. Of all adults over 25, over one-third were in the 25-to-34-year-old age group. The second largest age group was 35-44-year-old adults, nearly 30 percent. Adults 18-to-24 were not included in the MyInternationalAdventure study, but clearly would have represented a large proportion of those considering or planning a move abroad based on the work done by Adams. The over-65 age group represented less than 3 percent, dispelling the notion that retirees are the main age group moving abroad.
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