While immigration has been a central theme of American life, some Americans also choose to emigrate, becoming Americans abroad or in exile. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this expatriate population has increased and diversified.

According to government statistics, approximately 1,590,000 US citizens lived abroad in 1959. Two-thirds of this group were members and dependents of the US armed forces. In 1997 the numbers had increased to approximately 3.3 million civilians, including only 200,000 military personnel. These figures, in fact, only represent expatriates who are officially registered at US embassies and consulates globally. It is estimated that an additional 1.5–2 million citizens live outside of the US.

The majority of US expatriates are employees and dependents of US companies or multi-national corporations with strong ties to North America. The expatriate population also includes teachers, students, research scholars, missionaries and writers. Retirees, either returning to their homelands or seeking cheaper living (which has created gated American colonies in Mexico), also become de facto expatriates. In the Vietnam era, Canada and Scandinavia were seen as havens for protestors or those avoiding the draft; the Soviet Union, China and Cuba have all appealed to small groups on ideological grounds. For protestors, and for some very wealthy citizens, renunciation of citizenship has been a part of this movement; others retain their ties whether or not they return to the US with any consistency.

Despite reductions in benefits packages during the past few decades, the expatriate life is in many respects a privileged existence. Housing and education allowances, tax exemptions, travel opportunities and the chance to learn about a different culture hold significant appeal for many. Despite global communication and transportation and a trend towards localization in hiring practices, American expatriates continue to be a significant presence in such places as London, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Tokyo, Paris and Toronto.

Literary and historical representations of expatriates are sparse, although they may figure more in movies set in foreign locales—either as hero/ heroines or “interpreter” of local customs. Early expatriates such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne nonetheless recorded their experiences in Europe, and American students studied at European universities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Missionaries and merchants were the most common nineteenth-century expatriates living in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

The best-known American expatriates are the self-exiled artists and writers in Paris between the First World War and the Second World War. Ernest Hemingway Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller wrote about the tensions inherent in the expatriate existence; Josephine Baker and James Baldwin saw Paris from a different racial perspective. Questions of identity, disillusionment with one’s home environment and the search for an intellectual, spiritual and geographical home are recurrent themes in later quests further afield based on religious search (South Asia), racial identity (Africa as a “homeland” for African Americans) or identification with “nature” and the primitive.

Although these seekers seem to share little common ground with late twentieth century traders, language instructors, exchange students and consular employees, all share an experience of dislocation that has been examined in postcolonial and women’s history, sociology, anthropology and human-resources management. By being outside the US, they test the limits and interpretations of American society—whether its global reach or the possibility of escaping it altogether.