HOW TO LEAVE THE U.S.A.

Why fed-up Americans are going Dutch.

- BY ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN

Americans want to emigrate for the reasons immigrants once came to America.

On an overcast Saturday in September, a group of travellers gathered for dinner at Jopenkerk, a brewery inside a converted church in the Dutch city of Haarlem. They’d come from Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, and they planned to spend the next week visiting the Netherlands. The purpose of their trip was neither business nor pleasure. These Americans were there because they wanted out of the U.S.A.

Debi and Bane, a couple from Denton, Texas, sat at a long table on the mezzanine level, admiring the space’s stained-glass windows. Debi is a forty-two-year-old project manager with an easy laugh and dark bangs that frame her heart-shaped face. “It hasn’t hit me yet that we’re here, to be honest,” she said.

Bane, thirty-seven, works as a freelance photographer and manages social media for an orthopedic surgeon. He enjoys heavy metal and complex tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons and lets his wife do most of the talking. Debi assured me that he’d been “just giddy” at their hotel. “This is a guy who barely shows emotion,” she said.

I’d been in touch with Debi and Bane throughout the summer, as they planned their trip—and their eventual exit from the United States. They’d always thought about retiring overseas, Debi said, but they moved up their timeline last spring because of Donald Trump’s flagrant disregard of court orders; precursors, Bane noted, of full-blown authoritarianism. After he took office for the second time, “things got real,” Debi said. “At first, we were hopeful things would get better, or not worse.”

“But they didn’t,” Bane deadpanned.

The evening had been organized by G.T.F.O. Tours, a relocation service that helps aggrieved U.S. citizens start new lives abroad. The dinner was the first stop on a crash course in the Dutch way of life. The tour, Debi and Bane hoped, would help them plan a permanent move in January.