"Exporting the unemployed may sound radical, even cruel, but the quest for jobs has been a driving force behind global migration -- and population growth in the New World -- for centuries. More than 55 million Europeans, many desperate and poor, migrated to the Americas between 1846 and 1940, for example -- often with a "good riddance" from their home governments. And in the past few years, those movements have started up again. When crippling unemployment throttled Spain, some 30,000 Spaniards upped and moved to Argentina between June 2009 and November 2010. The Portuguese, meanwhile, beset by debt and slow growth at home, are heading to Brazil and oil-rich Angola. Between 2008 and 2011 alone, more than 1 percent of the Portuguese population moved to just that one African country. (In terms of relative population, that would be the same as 3 million Americans packing up and shipping off to their country's ex-colony, the Philippines, in search of a better life.)
But Americans haven't been searching for a better life somewhere else on nearly the same scale. According to the State Department, only about 6.3 million U.S. citizens live abroad, or around 2 percent of the domestic population. In relative terms, that's pathetic. About 5.5 million British people live permanently abroad, almost five times the U.S. level in per capita terms. Maybe they're trying to escape the lousy weather, but it isn't like Brits have natural advantages over Americans as travelers. British people are almost as bad at speaking other languages as Americans are, and in terms of haughty isolationism and disdain for foreigners, surely Brits are worse. (I'm allowed say this -- I'm British.)"