ATHENS, Ga., October 22, 2025 (Newswire.com)
– More Americans are starting to ask questions about what life could look like somewhere else.
A new survey from moveBuddha finds that nearly 1 in 10 Americans is actively researching a move abroad, with nearly 60% reporting they’ve considered leaving the country at some point. This is a clear sign that international relocation is no longer just a passing daydream, but something people are seriously exploring.
To understand what’s behind this rising interest, moveBuddha surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. residents in September 2025. The results point to a quiet shift in how Americans think about where and how they want to live.
The responses point toward a practical motivation; many are looking for a place where life feels stable, affordable, and easier to manage day to day.
Key Takeaways
Nearly 60% of Americans have considered moving abroad.
1 in 10 respondents is actively researching an international move.
Cost of living (34%) is the top factor Americans consider when choosing a country to move to, followed by financial security (11%) and political stability (9%).
Europe (38%) is the top region for moves abroad, while Canada (24%) tops the list of individual countries, except among Gen Z, who favor Japan.
America’s high living costs (64%), healthcare access (63%), and crime/safety (59%) are the primary reasons respondents might consider moving abroad. Lifestyle or cultural factors matter much less.
More people are taking the idea of moving abroad seriously – and not for adventure, career moves, or retirement.
They’re running the numbers. Reading expat blogs. Comparing countries. Asking if life might be simpler elsewhere. While few are actively relocating, many are exploring international options.
“We’ve helped thousands of people move across the country for all kinds of reasons – to chase a job, start a family, or just get closer to the beach. But, what we’re seeing now is very different,” says Ryan Carrigan of moveBuddha. “With rising costs, job uncertainty, and concerns about healthcare and safety, more people are looking for somewhere that just feels livable.”
The survey aligns with moveBuddha’s report on Which States Google Moving Abroad Most, examining state-level Google searches about where Americans are most curious about moving abroad, and reveals the motivations and specific countries Americans would choose if they could move abroad right now.
Top Country Destinations:
Country
%Respondents
Canada
24.4%
England
12.2%
Japan
11.2%
Ireland
9.0%
Switzerland
8.2%
France
6.5%
Costa Rica
6.4%
Mexico
6.1%
New Zealand
6.1%
Thailand
4.1%
Germany
3.4%
Portugal
2.4%
Why This Matters Now
From unaffordable rents to healthcare hurdles, Americans are increasingly evaluating their options through a global lens. In some cases, a new passport is starting to feel like a better path to peace of mind than a new zip code.
With cost pressures, climate events, and political anxieties continuing to impact Americans’ sense of safety and opportunity, international relocation may start to look less like an escape and more like a rational next step.
As a foreigner, navigating health insurance systems can often be difficult. German startup Feather thinks it has a solution and raised €6 million to help some of the 40-plus million expats working and living in Europe.
It is not that there are no options for foreign nationals to get insurance; there are plenty. But it is precisely because the offer is fragmented and hard to match with individual needs that Feather thinks it can carve a space for itself despite heavy competition from incumbents.
With expats often having access to the public health system of their host country, a big part of the question is where they fall into, especially during the transition periods that are increasingly common with the rise of remote work.
It is this level of detail that the startup wants to get right, Feather CEO Rob Schumacher told TechCrunch. For instance, it provides a recommendation tool to help individuals understand what kind of coverage they might need, starting with health insurance, but also including additional options such as life, pet, automotive and personal liability insurance.
“The funny thing is, everyone who’s an expat immediately gets it,” Schumacher said. That helped Feather get angel checks from former founders who gained knowledge of the issue through their startups, such as GoCardless, Monzo and N26, where Feather CTO Vincent Audoire was an early employee.
Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus also invested in Feather through the VC fund he co-founded, called Plural. Feather’s lead investor, Keen Venture Partners, even came inbound: It was associate Abdul Afridi, an expat himself, who approached the startup, and not the other way around, Schumacher said.
However, fundraising has been anything but painless for insurtech startups in the post-2021 hype, and Schumacher is wary of making the process sound easier than it was.
With French neoinsurer Lukocoming undone in the background, and other very public insurtech woes, getting past due diligence was no easy feat. With conversations dragging on, Feather’s founders considered simply going back to pursuing profitability. “And I think that was the key thing that made us really interesting again,” Schumacher said.
International expansion
Feather went along because its new backers brought expertise on a wide range of topics, including branding, but mostly because the capital will help boost its internal expansion. The startup currently serves expats in Germany, France and Spain, with three more countries set to launch by the end of 2024.
It wouldn’t have done this without additional funding, Schumacher said. “We would have just done more incremental stuff.” That would probably have been a wasted opportunity: The startup says it achieved more in its six months post-launch in Spain than in its first 18 months in Germany.
Despite the international audience it serves, an expansion roadmap wasn’t obvious for Feather, whose founders thought they might go for a broader audience in Germany first. However, they soon realized that the expat niche was particularly interesting for a digital-first offering like theirs.
Compared to the same age cohort of locals, expats are much more likely to prefer not dealing with a broker. But they do still need help; as a French national, Audoire knows this first-hand, and so does Schumacher, who relocated to Germany after spending most of his life abroad.
While they are scratching their own itch, the duo is aware that the market they are going after is very large, and growing. Whether you call them expats or immigrants, the fact is that Europe’s economies seem set on hiring more foreign workers to compensate for their aging population.
Finding balance
To its end users, Feather promises a better experience consisting of transparent policies, unbiased recommendations, and simple digital claims processes, all in English. With its new funding, it is also taking a “big bet” on employee benefit insurance that companies hiring lots of expats may want to provide.
While it is as bullish on tech as any insurtech player, Feather is also keen not to badmouth legacy players, which it partners with, and has a couple senior insurance executives on its cap table.
This, and its measured approach to fundraising and spending, could pay off, or at least help the companies avoid the scrutiny new insurtech partnerships are facing. “For the last six years we’ve been doing healthy, sustainable business, and this allows you to unlock new things, even with incumbents,”Schumacher said.
On the surface, the American expat Hilary presents herself as a control freak. From her surroundings to her makeup and neutral wardrobe, it’s all pristine. That facade slowly unravels as her layers are peeled back in the Prime Video six-part limited series. Behind closed doors, her marriage is falling apart, and her husband is cheating on her.
Costume designer Malgosia Turzanska used “aggressive neutrals” when it came to building Hilary’s wardrobe. Her goal was to use costumes as camouflage and protective armor for the character. “She is an incredibly strong, powerful woman. But she’s also an incredibly hurt woman, and that goes back to her childhood,” she says.
An asymmetrical David Koma jumpsuit, for example, is an outfit Turzanska wove into Hilary’s wardrobe for a dinner party scene that was specifically designed to reflect her inner pain. “It looks like a sling, and it looks like she’s bandaged,” says Turzanska. “She’s pushing through because she doesn’t want to be at that dinner, and she doesn’t want to see those people. She has other things on her mind.”
Hilary’s (Sarayu Blue) dress is a metaphoric band-aid.
Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
Later that night, Hilary changes into an orangey-red dress to meet her husband David (Jack Huston) at an Irish pub. At this point, David is living in a hotel, and she’s received a text not meant for her, but for his girlfriend.
Hilary’s (Sarayu Blue) dress is a cry for help.
Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
That outfit and moment is a cry for help. It’s also a moment where Hilary starts to lose control. “It’s a metaphor for this open wound,” says Turzanska. “It was this idea of showing that she’s hurting and willing to work on their marriage, hoping that he is going to agree and keep working on their relationship, but it doesn’t go so well.”
Franquesa-Solano says Hilary’s framing is “composed and balanced.” She notes that Hilary, Margaret (Nicole Kidman) and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo) “are trying to control their surroundings because they feel like they are not in control. It’s an attempt to not let go because, if not, they’ll fall apart.”
Franquesa-Solano continues, “Hilary is constantly doing that by trying to always be perfect and keep things in place. So her color palette is perfect. Her makeup and her wardrobe match the tone of the walls.”
Wang says Hilary is the most relatable female on the show, since so much of who Hilary is stems from how community and society judges a person. “She’s trapped by that,” says Wang. “These are values that have been handed down by her family and women in general, and that’s why we’re so hard on ourselves. She’s just trying to keep it together.”
Hilary’s attention to detail in how she approaches life starts to reveal itself slowly after she learns of David’s infidelity and her mother pays an unexpected visit. Audiences see this well-composed woman almost revert to a child, as she frantically prepares for this arrival.
When she and her mom get stuck in an elevator with a neighbor, Hilary shares a story about how she used makeup on her mom to cover up bruises.
Makeup helps Hilary cover up past scars.
Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
“You’re watching a woman who had to grow up really young, and it’s so painful and real,” says Blue. “You watch this character who’s perfectly put together, curated and tailored, and you watch her whole world fall apart. It’s not just the marriage, the friendship; it’s not just the reckoning with her mother — it’s all of it.”
Toward the end, the women at the center of the show are eventually provided with some closure on their journeys as they attempt to live their lives and move on.
Hilary returns home to visit her dying father, a visit that brings ghosts from her past. Also at her father’s bedside are his children from another marriage. When Hilary is finally alone with him, she takes the opportunity to tell him what she thinks about him and his abusive past. It’s one of the few moments where Blue says that Hilary gets to be human.
“She says, ‘Fuck you, I’m done. I’ve got nothing left.’ What does she have left to lose? And it ends up being the best thing for her,” Blue says of the significant turning point. “She really has learned that it’s all about putting on a front, putting on a face, and you really watch a woman go, ‘I don’t want to keep it together anymore. I’m tired.’”
By the time she returns to Hong Kong, despite their separation, David comes to meet her at the airport, and Hilary breaks down. A tender moment happens in the car as the two discuss Mercy’s pregnancy and Hilary talks about never wanting to have children. Blue says it’s a very real moment between the couple, who have a 20-year history: “I love when she’s like, ‘I’m so tired of being angry.’ She doesn’t want to be angry at David because even that is going to drain her.”
The last shot is a single take of Hilary flowing through a crowd of people after buying a rug. “There’s a little bit of letting go when she buys that carpet. It’s a metaphor that she has to keep moving. She’s finding her freedom,” says Franquesa-Solano.
By the end, Hilary finds freedom.
Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
Turzanska reflected on dressing Hilary in a shade of orange not too far from mocha and beige for that scene. “She’s out of her regular clothing and is delightfully happy. It is the brightest color she wears, and she embraces it and lets herself feel the color,” says the costume designer.
“That’s the moment you see Hilary embodied,” adds Blue. “It’s Hilary saying, ‘I’m free. I get to live the life I want to live. I don’t have to hold on to all of this anymore.’ And it’s such a simple moment, and it’s so joy-filled. And then she’s in color.”
Her armor has gone, and the facade is dropped once and for all.
In the end, we know about as much as when we started. Expats, whose first episode started with some open-ended reunions — first a more charged one between Margaret (Nicole Kidman) and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), and later a calmer, sadder meet-up between Hilary (Sarayu Blue) and Margaret — has left off with those same characters coming together, and the same indefinite feeling permeating their meetings.
[Ed. note: This post will now start discussing spoilers for the end of Expats.]
What we still don’t know is what happened to Gus, or what Mercy is going to do next with her own baby, or even, technically, how these women all feel about each other at the end of the day. But that’s exactly how showrunner Lulu Wang wanted the adaptation of Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2016 novel The Expatriates to feel. As she tells Polygon, she sees the ending as its own sort of beginning, and the mystery that drives so much of the pain in Expats was never the point she wanted to leave us with.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Polygon: So, starting off, how did you think about and approach the tone of the ending for each of the characters?
Lulu Wang: I think I wanted it to feel both, like, macro and micro. Both large in scope of the world, and global, but also so deeply personal. It’s a mother looking for her child. But it’s also all of us looking for a way to move on, to grieve, to find closure, to be happy, to find forgiveness, to be gentler on ourselves.
So I think visually, it was always really important to me that I have that really long take of Margaret walking through the city with her backpack on. And in many ways, she becomes part of the city; she’s now no longer able to separate herself from the streets and from the people and from the elements, because her son is out there somewhere. And for Mercy it was about getting to realize that she just wants to be loved. We hate her so much, she does all of these things, and she makes all of these choices. But that moment of her where we really realize she’s just a kid, and her mother brings her soup — I think that’s one of the most heartbreaking [bits] of, like, Oh, wow, she’s really young. She’s just a kid and she’s dealing with these really adult situations. And for Hilary, just breaking free, you know, we always envision her ending having a lot of color, and I wanted her to almost, like, yeah, she’s lost everything, but in a way she’s coming back to life. And she’s this butterfly and she, you know, goes from very monochromatic to embracing a lot of color.
Photo: Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
I’m curious how you thought about establishing the tone of the series directorally. What was it you felt like early on you gravitated toward in terms of getting the mood just right for what you were looking for with this adaptation?
I didn’t want it to be a plot-driven series where we were watching to solve the crime. I wanted it to really be an exploration of grief — I wanted it to feel like the book, because that’s what the book felt like. It was this tapestry of characters, of all of these different backgrounds, and against this very complex setting. And there are all of these different ways that people are trying to cope in different ways.
And so I think that really looking to the book, and I would pull out sentences, and then I would talk to my DP, and we would watch films together — we watched this great French series called Les Revenants, “the return,” which is a zombie series about the return of the dead. But it’s not what you would think. It’s really about grief and about time passing. We would watch foreign films, like this Icelandic film called AWhite, White Day. We watched Nashville, which is one of my favorites. We also looked at a lot of photographs.
So just putting together those images, I think we wanted to have there be a sense of a haunting, and have an emptiness.
That haunting really comes through, and I’d love to know what formed in your mind’s eye as you were thinking about how to show an absence or illustrate, if not a total emptiness, that lack?
I think we talked a lot in the writers room about ambiguous loss, and about not having closure, and all of the different ways in which we carry trauma that is not visible. It’s not always as simple as, OK, this person died. And now I’m grieving. Sometimes you never get closure, you never get to say goodbye. Sometimes you’re grieving the loss of time. Sometimes you’re grieving the loss of memory […] where the person is still there, but they’re not there in the way that you know them. So how do you relate to them? And how do you grieve?
I think that’s why — and I did this with The Farewell also — [I focused on] really looking at space, and having the ability to do wide shots, where people are really isolated in the frame.
Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Prime Video
Photo: Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
Photo: Glen Wilson/Prime Video
Margaret, for example, she seeks out in her grief a place where she can be alone. And the emptiness of that room gives her comfort somehow, because she’s able to be someone else. She’s not constantly reminded of the tragedy. And so that was a really pivotal image for us was having Nicole in a practical location in Hong Kong. She had to go up the seven flights of stairs. It was her first day of shooting. I was like, Oh my god, she’s gonna hate me. This is Nicole Kidman. I’m having her trek up the stairs, there’s no elevator. We’re in this tiny room, and there’s windows everywhere so that we can really see Hong Kong and all the windows and all the lives inside of all of those windows, you know? And she’s here in this tiny box of a room, and there’s this weird purple bathtub. Like something kind of almost Murakami-esque, right, about the strange places we find ourselves in and the strange feelings we get from them.
Definitely. And to your point about almost dodging the mystery of it, I’m curious how you build the final sort of confrontation between all these women. There’s this sense in the finale of it as a staccato conversation, these bits and pieces chopped up.
In a way, it’s like a visual voice-over, I suppose. I wanted it to feel like they were addressing the audience; I wanted to play with this [idea that] everything they were saying, the other woman could also be saying almost those same things. It’s a specific conversation, but it’s also a universal conversation; it’s endings and beginnings. It’s apologies, and not being able to find the words to apologize. They all have been the other woman in different situations. And the series deals a lot with perpetrators and victims. And we always empathize with victims, it’s easy to identify with them. But it’s much more difficult to actually have compassion for the people who commit the acts and make the mistakes. And it was really important to us that all of these women were perpetrators and victims at the same time — but in different stories. In someone else’s story they are the perpetrator; in their own story, they are the victim. And to be able to hold all of those truths at once — it just felt like having that symmetry of their faces linked them.
Foreign investors and businesspeople with exposure to China are becoming increasingly unnerved. And for good reason.
In March, Chinese authorities detained an employee of Japanese drug manufacturer Astellas Pharma JP:4503 ALPMY for alleged espionage violations. The Chinese seem confident in their case. Beijing’s ambassador to Japan said there was ample evidence of wrongdoing, and, despite the uproar, the Astellas employee remains detained.
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