We have booked to see the movie Quartet in a few days. It is a most enjoyable movie, which we saw perhaps a decade or so ago. The movie was directed by Dustin Hoffman, and the cast is stellar with, among others, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly, Pauline Collins and Andrew Sachs1.
Most fans of British comedy (like me) will know that Andrew Sachs played the Spanish waiter in the classic comedy Fawlty Towers. While checking some of the details about the movie, I happened to read his fairly long biography. He was born in Berlin in 1930, the son of Katharina (née Schrott-Fiecht), a librarian, and Hans Emil Sachs, an insurance broker. His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic. He left Germany for Britain with his parents in 1938, when he was eight years old, to escape persecution by the nazis2.
Despite the US not keeping records of emigration, the Wall Street Journal recently catalogued that US citizens are leaving the country in record numbers and listed where they are going. These moves are apparently motivated by a wide variety of factors, including the cost of living, remote work, social benefits, lifestyle, crime, politics and more. Most of these moves do not involve obtaining citizenship in another country, although there is also an increase in those applying for such citizenship of other countries. Even if one does obtain citizenship elsewhere, that does not change U.S. tax rules or alter one’s US citizenship. This can lead to double taxation. If you want to stop paying US taxes, you have to renounce your US citizenship, and this has also been on the increase too. The Wall Street Journal reports that requests jumped 48% in 2024, and have apparently increased further in 20253.
Calculations from the Brookings Institution showed that net migration in 2025 was negative for the first time since 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, and is expected to get worse in 2026. 180,000 US citizens were part of this exodus3.
On top of this, the cuts to scientific research in the US, have made other countries consider poaching US scientists. In April 2025, the CEO of the Danish Chamber of Commerce, Brian Mikkelsen, made an offer to researchers in the United States, saying: “To all the brilliant researchers in the U.S. feeling uncertain right now: Denmark is open – and we need you!” He continued: “Across the Atlantic, we’re watching with concern as politics begins to overshadow science”4.
Other countries, such as Canada, Spain, Norway, France and Australia, among others, are doing the same. In a statement announcing Australia’s Global Talent Attraction Program, Australian Academy of Science President Chennupati Jagadish asserted that “Australia has an urgent and unparalleled opportunity to attract the smartest minds leaving the United States to seed capability here and nurture the next generation of scientists and innovators”4.
This again has parallels with 1930s Germany. Within three months of Hitler coming to power in January 1933, virtually all Jews in state institutions, which included most universities, had been sacked. The book Hitler’s Gift is the story of a small selection of the foreign scientists who fled to Britain and the United States to escape nazi tyranny. Many of the physicists, such as Albert Einstein, Max Born and Erwin Schrödinger already had international reputations. Among the biologists were Wilhelm Feldberg, Hans Krebs, Ernst Chain and Max Perutz5.
One can only guess at the reasons for the US shooting itself in the foot. Is it Trump and his ghouls upset at people who know and understand the complexities of the natural world? Or is it the Project 2025 religious nutters attempting to kill science, because it is encroaching on their religion, demonstrating again and again that their beliefs about the physical world are either bullshit or dangerous? Maybe in future there will be a book entitled Trump’s Gift, written when we find out what drove this crippling of the US’s future.
Sources
- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1441951/
- https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0755133/bio/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2026/03/23/americans-are-leaving-us-at-record-pace-but-not-irs-taxes/
- https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-report/american-science-faces-cuts-other-countries-see
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1119874/
