The Other Half of the Immigration Equation

For all the heated debate over this summer's failed immigration reform bill, little attention has been paid to the other side of the equation: the flow of Americans out of the United States. Emigration doesn't stoke passions as illegal immigration does, but its scale and impact are significant.

As the US Census Bureau has discovered, attempting to count Americans residing outside the US is prohibitively expensive, assuming they could even be found scattered across the far corners of the globe. That led my global marketing firm, New Global Initiatives, to survey Americans to find out how many are planning to relocate outside the country. If we can't measure the past …