Abstract
Exit planning among U.S. citizens is on the rise. A confluence of worrisome domestic conditions— including societal violence, the curtailment of individual rights, and creeping authoritarianism— has prompted U.S. citizens to contemplate and plan for a possible departure from the country. Among the more popular exit pathways, particularly for minorities in the United States who have experienced or fear identity-based mistreatment, are programs that allow descendants of citizens or other members of the diaspora to acquire status in their ancestral homelands. Decades or even centuries after their ancestors’ arrival, present-day U.S. citizens are considering a return journey, thereby disrupting long-standing narratives about immigrant integration and plural democracy in the United States.
In this Essay, I offer a firsthand account of exit planning and describe how I, a gay man of color and son of immigrants, successfully obtained status in India, the nation of my parents’ birth. Drawing upon the scholarly traditions of critical legal studies and social scientific autoethnography, I interweave academic research and storytelling to generate insights about the motivations that underlie exit migration and the actual process of applying for status overseas. The Essay also records reflections about what diasporic return signifies for the project of U.S. democracy, the possibility of internal or circular migration, the powerful role of private industry in enabling transnational moves, and the complex relationships that exit planners maintain with both the United States and their ancestral homelands.
