Americans Abroad

An American college student traveling around Europe on a bicycle with two friends arrived at a recent July 4th celebration in Moscow and remarked, "e;We've been traveling around Europe and Russia for almost a month now. I never thought I'd be saying this, but I never wanted to see and hear Americans so much in my life. That would be so corny back home. But here it just seems right"e; (Hartford Courant, July 5, 1989, p. A2). Apparently you can take an American out of America, but you cannot take America out of an American-and perhaps this notion applies to other migrants as well. This is a book that explores the experience of Americans abroad, specifi- cally those who are living in other countries of the developed world with a lower standard of living than that of the United States. This study compares the travels and travails of emigrants to Australia and Israel and seeks to apply a social psychological perspective to address three questions: (1) What accounts for the motivation of migrants to move? (2) What are the sources of the adjustment problems the migrants experience? (3) What explains whether the migrants re- main or return to the United States? Ideally, it would be best to devise one instrument to gather data on repre- sentative samples of Americans living in a variety of countries abroad, but such an effort is beyond the resources of most researchers-including us.