Fortune: America is becoming the ‘uncool’ country that people want to move away from

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An odd thing is happening as America, long a beacon worldwide as the defining destination for people in search of a new hope and a new life, is starting to feel like the “old country” that people quietly plan to leave behind. More than that, to be American is downright uncool.

When George Clooney secured French citizenship last year and confirmed that his family’s main home is now a farm in Provence, it sent a strong message about the standing of the American Dream. Clooney has been unusually blunt about what the move represents: a bet that his children would have a “much better life” in a country where fame matters less, privacy laws are stronger, and childhood can be more ordinary than it would be in Los Angeles.

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He is hardly alone in looking elsewhere. In 2025, the U.S. experienced definitive negative net migration for the first time since the Great Depression, with an estimated loss of about 150,000 people, according to Brookings calculations reported on by the Wall Street Journal. The analysis found a “millions-strong” American diaspora increasingly choosing to study, telecommute, and retire overseas, drawn by cheaper health care, safer streets, and walkable cities where their U.S. salaries go further. In Portugal, the number of American residents has jumped more than 500% since the pandemic, according to the country’s Agency for Integration, Migration, and Asylum. In Spain and the Netherlands, the Journal reported, the number of Americans has nearly doubled over the past decade, and last year more Americans moved to Germany and Ireland than Germans or Irish moved to the U.S.?

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As venture capitalist Seth Levine and journalist Elizabeth MacBride argue, an economic model has hollowed out both the middle class and the story that used to make staying feel worthwhile. In Capital Evolution, they contend that “shareholder-only capitalism doesn’t work,” having carved “unsustainable fissures in our economy and our society” by treating workers and communities as “resources to be extracted from.” CEO pay has surged more than 900% since the late 1970s while average worker pay barely moved, they note, and the odds of someone born poor rising to the top quarter of wealth distribution have fallen from about one in four to roughly one in 20. “By basic measures,” Levine told Fortune in a recent interview, “we’re failing to provide economic mobility,” pointing to an average first-time homebuyer age of around 40, up from the twenties a few decades ago.

MacBride, meanwhile, told Fortune that she sees the consequences in mood and behavior rather than just statistics. People, she says, no longer feel that “following the rules of the system is going to get them anywhere,” a breakdown reflected in declining life expectancy and what she calls “a suicide crisis among white men.”

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Along with the decline of this idea of the middle class as a distinct thing that can grow and thrive in America, there is also a risk of America declining as a symbol of global cool. A generation ago, blue jeans, Michael Jordan, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s played a major role in the West winning the Cold War. (There was also a fateful trip to a Western supermarket when Boris Yeltsin realized how wide the gap in quality of living had gotten.) With Gen Zers growing up globally connected by social media, they increasingly find that, basically, cool stuff is overseas.

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