Emigration from the United States
overview of emigration from the United States of America
Emigration from the United States is the process where citizens and nationals from the United States move to live in countries other than the US, creating an American Diaspora (Overseas Americans). The process is the reverse of the immigration to the United States. The United States does not keep track of emigration and counts of Americans abroad are thus only available based on statistics kept by the destination countries.
History
Due to the flow of people back and forth between the United Kingdom and its colonies, as well as between the colonies, there has been an American diaspora of a sort since before the United States was founded. During and immediately after the American Revolutionary War, a number of American Loyalists relocated to other countries, chiefly Canada and the United Kingdom. Residence in countries outside the British Empire was unusual, and usually limited to the wealthy, such as Benjamin Franklin, who was able to self-finance his trip to Paris as a U.S. diplomat.
18th century
After the American Revolutionary War, some 3,000 Black Loyalists - slaves who escaped their Patriot masters and served on the Loyalist side because of the Crown's guarantee of freedom - were evacuated from New York to Nova Scotia; they were individually listed in the Book of Negroes as the British gave them certificates of freedom and arranged for their transportation. The Crown gave them land grants and supplies to help them resettle in Nova Scotia. Other Black Loyalists were evacuated to London or the Caribbean colonies.
Thousands of slaves escaped from plantations and fled to British lines, especially after British occupation of Charleston, South Carolina.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5371125. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Emigration from the United States” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.