By Blane Bachelor, CNN
(CNN) — When New Yorker Antoni Scarano visited Romania in 2019, the trip marked his first return to his country of birth since the 1990s.
As a newborn, Scarano, now 34, was among tens of thousands of Romanian children adopted by US families following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But around 2017, with the help of a Facebook group, Scarano reconnected with his Romanian family, including his birth mother, siblings and grandmother.
Two years later, Scarano and his wife, Samantha Attaguile, arrived in a small village in the Transylvania region on a sunny spring day to meet those relatives — who rolled out “the Eastern European red carpet” for the couple, as he describes it.
“It was like a party,” Scarano says. “It turned into a big love fest, really. We really hit it off, and it felt like we picked up where we left off, you know, all those years ago.”
Over the next several years, the couple traveled to Romania three more times, feeling increasingly drawn to the country’s close-knit communities and relaxed pace of life — a striking contrast to the “60-to-90-hour weeks” demanded by their full-time jobs in the US, Scarano says.
In May 2024, following months of packing and paperwork to secure identification cards and residence permits and reclaim Scarano’s Romanian citizenship, the couple moved from New York to a small village in Sibiu county, in the Transylvania region. “It’s idyllic, with mountains, ancient forests, churches — a place that’s truly magical and has a spirit and energy to it,” Scarano says.
The couple, both of whom are musicians, share their new chapter abroad with tens of thousands of social media followers as “This Rromerican Life”, which is also the name of their band — the extra “r” reflects Scarano’s Roma ancestry.
“Now that we’ve been here for a year and a half, we realize that living in a country is very different than visiting a country,” Scarano says. “So perhaps we did romanticize quite a few things about it. But as we’ve gotten deeper into it, it really has continued to exceed our expectations.”
Beyond Europe’s Big Four
The desire among Americans to move abroad is reaching record numbers: One in five say that, ideally, they would like to emigrate if given an opportunity, according to a 2025 Gallup poll — with the number of young women wanting to leave quadrupling from a similar 2014 poll. Scarano and Attaguile are among the growing wave of those who have actually made the move, with safety, affordability and a better quality of life as key factors for many.
Countries within the 27-member European Union are, not surprisingly, a top choice, especially France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, sometimes known in immigration circles as the Big Four. But experts also report a growing interest in lesser-trodden European destinations — especially Eastern European, Central European and Baltic countries including Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Poland, Albania and Estonia.
Jean-Francois Harvey, global managing partner of Harvey Law Group, a prominent immigration law firm, tells CNN that inquiries to his company from the US about non-Big Four countries have risen as of late: “from one or two per month” about 18 months ago to “10 to 12 leads per week.”
“People do their homework,” Harvey notes. “In the last few months, we’re seeing people that write to us (have done) their research already. They have their family tree, they find documents in archives. And they say, ‘What do you think? Do you think it’s feasible for me to claim my Romanian ancestry, or my Hungarian a