Cross posted from USxCanada InfoShop
Newspaper stories tend to say something like “up to a million.” Or half a million to a million. Nobody really knows.
There seem to be only two publicly available and relatively recent sources that offer anything more than pure guesstimate — one from the United States, one from Canada, tables appended. Both offer numbers that are half a dozen to a dozen years old.
According to the U.S. figures, as of mid-1999 there were almost 688,000. How many of those had died or left Canada? On the other hand, how many U.S. citizens in Canada have ever registered themselves in the first place? Likely a minority. And how many of that minority came into being only as registration of a birth abroad? The total number indicates an order of magnitude and little more than that, especially with no other breakdown.
The Canadian figures from 2006 encounter a different set of problems. (1) The basis is self-reporting by persons who may have no good idea of their own status as a U.S. citizen. (2) The data is based on a sample, not a count. (3) The difference in the totals for the two Canadian tables intuitively looks too small, if every Canadian-born child of a U.S.-born parent is to be accounted for. The order of magnitude may be the most reliable contribution of these two assessments.
Even with all this fuzz, it seems safe to proclaim hundreds of thousands. That is a common feature of the two completely independent sources. Given the definitions that the United States applies to citizenship, and the existence of many persons who do not even think of themselves as anything other than Canadian, it also seems safe to conjecture that the real figure would tend to be higher than available indicators rather than lower.
* * *
Source: Private American Citizens Residing Abroad
• Americans registered abroad by embassy or consulate
• Subset from list compiled July 1999 by the U.S. Bureau of Consular Affairs
• [U.S. government employees (military and nonmilitary) and
their dependents are not included]
CANADA
24,300 Ottawa
105,000 Calgary
40,000 Halifax
65,000 Montreal
3,400 Quebec City
250,000 Toronto
200,000 Vancouver
687,700 Total
Source: 2006 Census of Canada
20% sample data collected using the long form census questionnaire
A. USA Place of birth (35) [with Citizenship (5)] 298,370 Total Citizenship 160,950 Canadian citizens 117,425 Canadian citizens only 43,520 Citizens of Canada and at least one other country 137,425 Not Canadian citizens Citizenship (5), Place of Birth (35), Sex (3) and Immigrant Status and Period of Immigration (12) for the Population B. USA Place of birth (33) [with Period of immigration (9)] 31,930 Before 1961 42,670 1961 to 1970 58,410 1971 to 1980 35,830 1981 to 1990 42,925 1991 to 2000 18,770 1991 to 1995 24,155 1996 to 2000 38,770 2001 to 2006 250,535 Total Place of Birth (33), Period of Immigration (9), Sex (3) and Age Groups (10) for the Immigrant Population of Canada
Interesting question, but I agree with your analysis: I bet that the number who consider themselves to be US citizens, hold a valid passport, etc, is much lower than the number of people that the US considers to be its citizens (if only it knew who they were…!). I bet that the number in terms of the US application of who is a citizen is indeed over a million, with the number of those who actually consider themselves or their children to be citizens to be much, much lower.
I do wonder how the estimate of 6-7 million US citizens abroad has been reached. I am guessing that this number includes all of those who are citizens even if they do not know it? I think the real danger is that the US could liberalise their citizenship laws to be more like European countries so that citizenship could pass on indefinitely. This could create hoards of potential tax cows in 20-30 years’ time. It is already possible to claim US citizenship through grandparents somehow as well even if the parent hasn’t lived in the US for the requisite amount of time. Apparently lots of Israelis regularly do this as a kind of insurance policy:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119249790610260189.html
Note that this was from 2007 (ie before FBARs were known and FATCA existed), so it looked like a great idea at the time. I bet that lots of them are shooting themselves in the foot for doing it now though…
Someone I know has an American mother who passed away peacefully in her sleep in 1990. He was born in Canada and has never lived in the United States. When his mother married, ca. 1929, the rule was that she lost her US citizenship. They lived in various places in the Canadian West and then settled in Bellingham, WA, where she had her third child–who today is an American–and she died, living out her days in the United States on a Green Card. Towards the end of her life, she had constant arguments with US border guards about whether she was a US citizen or not–they often claimed she was American based on her place of birth, but her obvious status as Green Card holder belied that point.
Her first son, who is now 80, has never lived in the United States. He ran a successful business here has retired and his children are running the business, as Canadians.
If the US has its way, the man is American, and his business is American-owed. He certainly never thought of himself as American, never sought a US passport, never voted in a US election, and sometimes visited the United States, but never wanted to live there. His children have never availed themselves of any American privileges either. Reading the pages of this website, he’s beginning to wonder whether the United States would try to treat him as an American if they could. He would probably owe a lot of taxes and eventually, when he passes away, the United States will require a their fair share of his estate and the family business that employs Canadians.
What I am describing is not that uncommon. It is the result of the longest unprotected border in the world, and likely one of the longest periods of peace between two countries. The last time that major hostilities broke out between Canada and the United States was 1812. People go back and forth and there is a lot of intermarriage.
The Obama administration is causing a great deal of confusion over this issue of citizenship and birthplace. That’s why it makes so much more sense to move to the concept of Dominant Nationality.
To be fair, there are those people who WANT to be American, like the old Canadian man who wanted to get US Citizenship before he died. I say “Let them have it!”
But one of my major gripes about the US is that it is really hard and expensive to get rid of citizenship. This is what I find to be overly oppressive.
I agree, geeez, it is not only very unjust but it sends a very interesting message, “we are so afraid that our citizens might check out, we must put barriers in their way.” This is an indication of both insecurity and fear and always ALWAYS be cautious of a man or woman who is afraid.
– I refuse to believe that at any point 250,000 Americans registered with the Toronto consulate. Why would you register as a US citizen in any stable First World country? It’s only important somewhere like Somalia or Gabon, where you might have to evacuate your citizens for real and want to make sure that they’re all accounted for.
– I suspect that the U.S. embassy figure of a million Americans in Canada (and 105,000 in Calgary and so forth) comes straight from pulledoutofmyass.com. On the other hand, it would *probably* be possible as a demographic exercise to estimate a total more or less defensibly based on place of birth information and extending that to an average number of children born in a lifetime.
– Actually, estimating the number of people in Canada considered US citizens under US law, and their likely regional breakdown would be a good project for a graduate student in one or another of the social sciences.
– Following Don Pomodoro’s point, the gap between the census number of 298,370 and a much larger number, perhaps a million, in the US estimate, is the gap between self-identified US citizens and people defined as citizens under US law who either don’t acknowledge it or aren’t aware of it.
– The *core problem* was the expansion of citizenship in the 1970s, which necessarily defined millions of people as US citizens who had no connection to the country at all. That plus a rigid insistence on filing tax returns and (recently) huge penalties are part of what created the problem we are now in. Really they needed to choose *either* the citizenship liberalization *or* the rigid tax rules.
Of course, very few of the 117,425 listing themselves as Canadian citizens only with a US birthplace will be Canadian citizens only from a US point of view.
@http://usxcanada: Could you post a link to the StatsCan data, please?
There is no direct link. Go to http://www.statcan.gc.ca/start-debut-eng.html and poke around. I have provided the clunky titles for the topic-based tabulations. Do a search that will bring them up (eg, click the “all” button and use “2006 citizenship” in the search window).