Chris Anadale stumbled across this intriguing historical possibility:

Karl Marx, the archetype European revolutionary, had a lifelong interest in the United States. As early as 1845, when he was twenty-seven years old and living in exile in Brussels, he was thinking seriously of emigrating to America. On October 17 of that year he wrote to Franz Damian Gortz, the Oberburgermeisterof his native Trier, in Rheinish Prussia, asking to be provided with an Auswanderungsschein (Emigration Certificate) “to the United North American States.” He had in mind Texas, which had just been admitted into the Union.

–On America and the Civil War, Volume 2 in The Karl Marx Library, edited by Saul Padover. The first paragraph of the Introduction to that volume.

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