Poll shows more young women want to leave U.S. — their top destination is Canada

U.S. and Canada flags are seen on a transport truck trailer at the Pacific Highway Canada-U.S. border crossing in Surrey B.C., on Tuesday, March 4, 2025.

WASHINGTON — A record number of younger American women now say they want to leave the United States — and their most common destination of choice is Canada.

Those findings come from a new Gallup poll that says 40 per cent of American women aged 15 to 44 report they would permanently leave the United States given the opportunity.

That’s substantially more than the 19 per cent of younger men who told the pollster they want to leave the United States for good. Gallup said the 21-point gap between the genders is the largest it has ever recorded.

Of the younger American women polled who are imagining life in another country, 11 per cent cited Canada as their preferred destination. Canada beat out New Zealand, Italy and Japan as preferred destinations for young American women looking to flee the U.S.

The survey, published Thursday, said overall about one in five Americans said they would leave the country if they could.

“This is actually a higher percentage than we’ve seen in a lot of years,” Julie Ray, managing editor for world news at Gallup, told The Canadian Press.

Ray noted that expressing a desire to move does not mean Americans are actually packing their bags to leave, adding research shows that the percentage of people who actually make plans to relocate is significantly smaller.

The survey, which polled 1,000 people in the U.S. aged 15 and older by phone between June 14 and July 16, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Just 10 per cent of younger American women told the pollster they wanted to leave the U.S. in 2014.

Gallup said the share of younger women reporting they were thinking of moving first started to shift in 2016 — when Donald Trump first campaigned for the presidency against Hillary Clinton, and as Barack Obama’s presidency was coming to an end.

“We saw it just increase and increase,” Ray said.

For a long time, Gallup said, the desire to move was less political in nature and “migration aspirations were similar regardless of views toward the country’s leadership.”

When Trump became president in 2017, Gallup polling reported the first big gap in the desire to migrate between Americans who approved and disapproved of the country’s leadership.

While that gap narrowed slightly under President Joe Biden, Gallup said this year’s polling saw it explode to a 25-point gap between those who approve and those who disapprove of current U.S. leadership.

“We’ve seen this intense, intense polarization,” Ray said.

Gallup noted 59 per cent of younger women polled identify as or lean Democratic, compared with 39 per cent of younger men, 53 per cent of older women and 37 per cent of older men.

Ray said party affiliation is not the only reason more women want to leave — they’re dissatisfied on other fronts as well. Gallup said younger women also “have experienced the steepest drop in institutional confidence of any age or gender group.”

Gallup pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that overturned abortion rights in 2022 as a key moment in younger women losing confidence in the judicial system. The share of younger women expressing confidence in the justice system fell from 55 per cent in 2015 to 32 per cent this year.

Gallup began asking poll respondents around the world about the desire to migrate in 2007. Among the other 38 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the percentage of younger women looking to migrate has remained steady for years, averaging between 20 and 30 per cent.

Gallup said that for many years, American women were less likely than those in other countries to say they wanted to leave home. Younger American men continue to be less likely to contemplate life abroad than their peers in other nations.

Ray noted that Gallup polls have shown 20 per cent of Canadians expressed a desire to leave the country in 2023 and 2024 — and the United States was their most common destination of choice.

Trump’s return to the White House and repeated calls for Canada’s annexation shook up Canadian politics and shored up national pride over the last year.

Ray said the number of younger Canadians thinking about leaving dropped to 16 per cent this year, but 26 per cent of those who had a desire to move still named the U.S. as the country they’d want to land in.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 14, 2025.

Kelly Geraldine Malone, The Canadian Press