Firstly, the 7 million number is totally wrong, not only has that been proven by posters above, but I can recall that the number in 1989 was about 14% of the population, which would have been somewhere around the 35-40 million mark. At that time there were more than 3 million Americans living abroad, so the 7 million number is just crazy, hell, in 1989 airlift alone just between the US and the UK, was over 2 million passengers a year, over half of which were US citizens.