Our colleagues Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson both live in Europe, and they report a lot of stories together, usually about things like high-stakes hostage swaps or war in the Middle East. Here's Joe.

Our job is to travel around normally finding the big stories that are

happening across the world that Americans are interested in. Sometimes the most appealing

stories you almost miss because they're hiding in plain sight. In their day-to-day lives,

Joe and Drew noticed something.

They were meeting a lot of Americans, and not just tourists.

Here's Drew.

We met people who are buying and selling real estate in Texas out of Barcelona.

We met someone who runs a trailer park in Florida, out of Madrid.

People running investment firms out of Berlin.

So they started wondering,

was this just a coincidence,

or were more Americans uprooting their lives to move abroad?

Joe and Drew started reporting.

They reached out to the governments of more than 40 countries,

from Albania to Vietnam.

And ultimately, they found that the answer was yes.

America's always been a country of immigration, a land that people moved to.

But last year, for the first time since the 1930s, more people left than moved in.

And there's this really interesting undercurrent,

which is that the number of Americans who are leaving the U.S. to go live in foreign lands and

work and retire and go to school there is rising. And it is rising really fast.

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