The up-to-date database resides in Part 2 (link at the bottom of this page).
Above is a link to data we are compiling on Relinquishments and Renunciations — a work in progress. This corresponds with the Consulate Report Directory (in sticky post below), tracking individual experiences for each Consulate, along with a timeline chart.
Note: We are using numbers instead of blog names for this public posting so there will be no compromise of private information. Your facts will help give a snapshot of relinquishment and renunciation activity and where that occurs.
Please submit information in the comments here (or someone can contact you privately). Thanks for all your help on this.
COMMENTS ARE CLOSED FOR Relinquishment and Renunciation Data (as reported on Isaac Brock), Part 1.
Part 2 is now open for your comments. Thank you.
Dawid, I just can’t see any reason for putting anyone through this, this over-one-year-to-complete-the-process. This is ridiculous. Earlier this month, last week even, I was optimistic thatVancouver was sincere about getting things on track. I know they’ve been swamped with this and I appreciate that. But all the consulates have been swamped, and except for two we know of, they’re adapting and coping.
As I recall, you relinquished several decades ago. You need to straighten out you life. This is just wrong. It looks like the only solution is to go to a different consulate — or better yet, as Cir and Calgary suggest below, write to Ms. Johnson.
Since we posted the good news aboutVancouver Friday, you’re the fourth Brocker to have reported getting the runaround or pushed into the far future from Vancouver . On Friday, I had added an update to Vancouver’s first page in the directory, calling attention to the positive adaptations they were making and telling people to bear that in mind when reading earlier reports. I’ve since posted an update to that update because it’s important that the directory is credible.
This is very disappointing.
It certainly is ridiculous, pacifica. I’ve emailed Dawid.
This Vancouver situation is more than ridiculous. It reflects either deliberate evil or monumental incompetance at one or more levels within the building. I’m not sure which it is, nor which would be worse … Bottom line is, everyone going to Vancouver is getting screwed over. Go elsewhere, is my advice. Unless you’re prepared to put up with this for months and months.
“Change you can believe in.” Remember that? (The Obama camp was notably silent about using it this time around.) I guess the message hasn’t perked down to the working level in Vancouver consulate, if the message ever really was meant at all.
*dawid:
Your delay is unforgivable, unless there are extenuating circumstances we don’t know about.I had extraordinary good fortune after writing to Ms. Sylvia Johnson at the Ottawa embassy.My second interview was today, a little less than six months after the first. Urge you write Ms. Johnson and relate your experience. You’ll find her address herein.
Cir
Hi, Cir.
I’ve emailed dawid and given him Sylvia D. Johnson’s email address. I absolutely encourage him to do as you suggest. Something seems not right in Vancouver.
I agree, Cir and Calgary, that’s the best thing to do. I was thinking go somewhere else, but of course contacting Ms. Johnson makes more sense.
@ all
Thanks so much for your encouragement, and of course the email address for Ms. Johnson. I think I will send her a note. Maybe some feedback will keep the pressure on Vancouver to improve their service or get the support they need.
My daughter, who renounced her US citizenship in London last June, has just received her CLN.
@Pacifica, you can add this information to her London report in the Consulate Report Directory :
Renounced on 12 June
CLN signed by consular official on 25 July
DOS approval on 8 November
Letter from US embassy London on 21 November
Received 23 November
Lord Jim,
Thanks so much for the information that your daughter has now received her CLN. I’ll complete her London line on the Renounce and Relinquish database. Please extend our congratulations to her.
@dawid,
Thanks for considering that route. It will be one more voice about the Vancouver US Consulate experience vs the experience at other Canadian consulates. It also may speed up your own case, which is outrageously long and drawn out. You do fall between the one appointment experience (unless there is some significant reason otherwise) and the two appointment experience that I was told would be the policy for all consulates in Canada. We were asked to wait until December to see if things improved. It appears, from one Brocker’s query, that Vancouver is maintainig their two-appointment policy. December is just around the corner.
All of us who have made the decision to renuonce or relinquish have given this important decision full consideration and research.
For a few, they may change their mind during their “one” appointment interview (and it should not be coerced). In that case, two appointments may be needed as that person leaves to consider their decision more fully — or they may never return, having decided that US citizenship is more important to them and they will put up with the cost and stress of administration (not the tax of) citizenship-based taxation requirements their US citizenship requires.
Most of us go in to the consulates having made a very considered decision — so we can get on with our lives.
@Lord Jim,
Thanks for the sharing the good news!. I shall note the month of CLN receipt with her report in the Consulate Report Directory.
Congratulations to your daughter! And thanks again to you both, I remember she provided a very detailed report on her consulate visit.
Finally! I’ve just returned home today and have found that my CLN arrived while I was away. I renounced on March 26, 2012 and my CLN arrived on November 26th, exactly eight months later. I’m free!
Please add my data to the directory. Thanks!
Congratulations, Bruce! I’m so happy because you’ve been waiting so long! I thought of you when that Halifax batch came in this summer. As you probably noticed, a few Toronto ones from last December seem to have fallen through the cracks, but were recently received. I guess this was the same sort of thing. Glad it’s finally here. Late CLN, early Christmas present!
@brucenewman,
My pleasure to complete your line of the Halifax US Consulate experiences reported here. Congratulations on receiving your CLN in less than the year they said it might take — and your freedom.
Hey, Bruce, that’s mighty! Only eight months!What demons! There”s hope I may get mine before death after all!
Cir
*anybody here have a recommendation of a consulate that has some spots and does not require 2 appointments.
*@Bruce, Congratulations! So glad you are finally FREE from the Beast!!
Hi Robert,
I take it you’re asking about Canada. If not, let us know.
Toronto, Halifax and Montréal are doing renunciation in one visit. I know Toronto currently has 132 appointment slots available in January.
Vancouver is supposed to be doing it in one visit, but we’re getting mixed messages from them about that, and last week they said they are fully booked and don’t know when their next available appointments will be (they appear to be booked up til May 2013). So, for now, I’d go elsewhere. (We hope to be getting some definitive (and hopefully good) news from them next week, and will post it when we get it.) Ottawa has gotten such consistently bad reviews that Brock simply advises going to Montréal or Toronto, on foot if you have to.
In our Consulate Report Directory, we have about 50 pages of people’s reports on their renunciation/relinquishment meetings at consulates in Canada and about 40 pages of reports from outside Canada.
*Congratulations, Bruce! Nice feeling, eh?
*REPORT ON 2ND INTERVIEW, U.S. CONSULATE, VANCOUVER, BC, 2012
NOVEMBER 28
From first to final interview took six months less seven days. My former constitutional right has now been implemented and I am no longer an American citizen. This doesn’t feel odd, or feel much of anything, because that decision was made 44 years ago, during the trauma of Vietnam. It’s slow; I’m slow; America is slow, even with terrorism on its agenda, where it certainly was when the ambience of this consulate was released from any vestige of propriety.
Security changes have been made since my first meeting. They got themselves a new airport-styled x-ray machine with matching personnel, baskets, and volleys of rote this and thats: fractional smiles, grunty words, half looks—the usual display of
three-dimensional clichés. There were both women and men this time, dressed in black women on the baskets and x-rays, men on the body scanner, sentinel-like and standing very tall; at the doors, controlling the elevators (“DO NOT PUSH BUTTON!”), or, variously, just there. Observing!
The mien of one young dude was a dead ringer for Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds. I chuckled and he gave me a little clandestine smile as if to say, I make a pretty good-looking Nazi, don’t I?
Yes, he did, but I thought he’d also be good for a bedtime story. In contrast, the women—usually (always?) of colour— never seemed to fit: Indians and Latinos don’t leap to mind as KGB operatives. Only later did it dawn that perhaps most of those fabricated bodies are Canadians and have to file US income tax returns. That would be a cruel way of learning that “Uncle Sam” is code for giant squid.
The elevator dumps you into a set piece out of a 60’s Cold War movie. Not a shred of red, white or blue anywhere, nor will you find any identifying reference to freedom, liberty and the rights of man. A framed copy of the Declaration of Independence? Forget
it. George Washington? A picture of Lincoln or Jefferson, perhaps? Nor a chance. How about the national capitol or that famous Iwo Jima shot? The Golden Gate? Empire State Building? Nowhere! Surely the Grand Canyon, at least. What could be wrong with that? Or even—hold your breath—the current president, Mr. Uno Who?
Now that would be a bit of Paramount to stick in your Hollywood Reporter, but you’ll not find it here. Nothing old. Nothing new. Not even a map of the nation. Just! Plain! Nothing!
O! Elizabeth, You Crone of majestic boredom, wherefore dost Thou not hang limpidly in this most ponderously borrowed place!
The elevator dumping ground is the outer chamber of a multipurpose corridor. At six feet wide and longer than a president’s intestine times two, it transports bodies in both directions, houses a sit bench, a waiting room, and provides the only access to a staccato line of windows, all numbered and blast-proofed against the rank and filers who have just passed through five levels of security outside, inside, on several floors, in multiple chambers and elevators. So where could a blast come from? Ah, you muse, they fail to check the rectums. Every day there are hundreds of them squishing through in secret and there’s your missing propriety! The rankers may be relatively safe, but it is the hapless terrorees who are really safe and, God knows, we don’t want damage sustained by the saviors of our rights and freedoms.
So the Homeland may be secure, but be wary if you’re a visitor. It is probably better not to think too much, or wonder too much or look too closely. Keep your eyes peeled at your peril. Danger is invisible, but you may live longer by ignoring it—and more freely, which used to be the big Bushy thing, the big American thing, now known to be reincarnated with a glistening double edge of sweet and sour earths imported from China. But I’m getting carried away…
Someone tells you to go to window number so and so, and at window so and so, you’re given a number, asked to sit down, and wait for your number to be called. Sitting may or may not be possible because the corridor is filled with a multitude of heavily wrapped November bodies, emitting various languages, scents and anxieties, as a mellifluous but nonetheless droning female voice calls out four digit numbers from two speakers spaced at opposite ends of corridor number one (the first intestine), meaning just before the corridor right angles into corridor number two (the second), which terminates doubly at window number 11— the first of the “renunciation” windows (or so I think)—and a double-banded steely exit door emblazoned with a ferocious sign implying that by no means do you want to push the handle bar unless you are bleeding uncontrollably or escorting someone who is either unconscious or attempting to conceal a sudden rectal disorder.
Window number 11 is a happy place. I know it well. (It is easy to know.) The faces there, the voices, the words, the atmosphere leaking from the two-inch liberty slit under the blast glass, are friendly, courteous to a fault, very American, smiley and nice.
Looking through that window is fun, too. Perhaps all the windows are (although I don’t mean to imply that this is a fun house). I was able to see through an open, lockable door into an office with an American flag in the corner.
Remember what I said about no red, white and blue? Well, ha ha, that was just to fool you. It’s a mistake to infer that where you’re standing is in America because America is on the inside of the glass, the other side. Get it? Just because you’re secure doesn’t mean you’re in on anything. That security is not yours, so don’t get any ideas. You have to window-peek to see what’s really going on in your teeny weeny view of the greatest nation on earth.
And what I saw was a flag going nowhere. A big one! Limp as could be and covered with dust. Either that, or it was really old and possibly tattered. Figure that one out. The American flag! On hallowed ground! This consulate has either morphed up from the original Erewhon or the nation really is hitting the dust.
But again I digress. Window number 7 is just as nice as 11. Number 6 is where they take your money and the faces are as good there as they are at number 11 or number 7. The odds seem to have it for renunciates. Isn’t that suitable? Probably too much to believe it’s clever, yet the civil service does contains surprises. The odds made America, but most of those are dead, leaving, or too fat to care. (I’m damning political correctness here: by 2030 half the nation is predicted to be obese.)
Probably every window is nice; however, if you hear well and need to do some serious thinking while exchanging statistics with your renunciation caseworker, the mellifluous number singer is going to rattle your cortex. Guaranteed. That voice and those inexorable numbers are going to drive you arctic. You could take earplugs along; the x rays won’t mind. I don’t hear well but could have used them myself. On the other hand maybe you’re easy with stress or have a blast-proof cortex. Moderate bursts of yell will probably go unnoticed; just watch your vocabulary.
So you do your thing and you hand in your documents and you stand up, wait for a seat to vacate, sit down, pass a quip with your sit-bench neighbor, look at your watch, look at the neon-red number board which seems to emit the mellifluous voice, listen to a baby cry, listen to a child bark, listen to a mother trying to calm, watch another family pass by on their way to number 11, hoping they can all read the sign on the emergency door (Can you imagine what happens if the alarm goes off? I wondered if the only solution to such a disaster would be for the whole building to blow up.), and then finally, bingo!, your number is called! Mellifluous is no contest for the sudden chimes in your heart, nor the pulse in your head, or the beat in your gut, for this is O day, O hour, and now finally O minute! You are on the cliff of being deAmericanized—or valed, or summited—mere seconds from the mighty Oath of Deallegiance, of raising high your constitutional right to change your mind and taking that right with you because it has nothing to do with constitutions or flags or answering inane questions and being forced to fret for months or years in order to carry out something so simple, direct, human, categorical, above liability, reprimand, taxation, penalty or threat.
O OATH COME AND GET ME!
When I was a boy, we were taught in seventh grade American history that taking citizenship in another country automatically abrogated your American status. One or the other, not both. And what’s wrong with such simple, such obvious, clarity? To what end did Congress make the change? Was it for taxation? If so, how trifling and cheap. How adulterating, covetous, un-American. How brimming with yuck.
Other nations allow two, perhaps three, citizenships with little or no official fuss. England is one such, and what’s wrong with that? My Canadian wife remains quietly English because she is not penalized for having been born there and living here, whether she renounces or not.
Taxation cannot be wholly separated from citizenship, but it can be partially separated. Currently the international revenue pond is a mess and the U.S. Treasury is humping the Department of State in a swamp of muddy sewage. That they’re producing monsters must be part of the fun, when other nations, including Canada, appear quite prepared to help extend the prostitution into a world-wide ring of tax collectors, informers, bank pimps, and political sluts.
Until the Vietnam War I was as much an American patriot as anyone: not a criminal, not a threat, never an enemy of the state. I am none of those things today either and never will be, yet I detest what the United States is doing in the world and, as a result, to itself.
For some it is sensible to stay and fight it out politically; for others it is not. I happen to be in the latter camp. One is as good as the other because we all have to do what we have to do. I don’t suffer many beliefs, but for me that is the only right thing. It contains within it a hefty dose of my American atavisms, which are not likely to melt away.
Today, 2012, there are still great Americans inside a moldering culture. Invention, decency, nobility are not absent from the nation and the country still vibrates with originality. Cultures decay and renew simultaneously, but proportions vary and in America’s case…well, history will decide. Each of us throws our own dice and the juggernaut moves on…
@Cir, Thanks for filling us in on your second visit and sharing your thoughts on the whole thing. Glad you’re finally finished — it sure took a long time to get that second appointment, but you persevered 🙂 Hope you get your CLN soon!
Thank you for that very descriptive account, Cir. My husband’s D Day (D for Deallegiance as you say) is a couple of years away (sigh). I’m glad you are well on your way now to a CLN. The security is unnerving to read about but at least behind the bullet-proof glass you found some smiles. Congratulations!
And to our most recent CLNer, Bruce — Congratulations, too!
@Cir,
Wow, a descriptive narrative of your required second appointment at the Vancouver US Consulate. You have come full circle back to what you thought you were for a very long time — Canadian! Thanks for the summary of your final chapter with the US — may your CLN take less time. I’m so glad that you were able to
relinquishrenounce. Thanks for all you’ve contributed to Isaac Brock, Cir.Best. Renunciation. Account. Ever.
@Cir
Congratulation. Most interesting account. Thanks for my chuckle of the day. Having also had my first meeting at Vancouver, your description was so perfect. Most depressing place I have ever been in my life.
I do have a question – you have been in Canada more than 40 years, why did you have to renounce – why were you not allowed to file for the CLN as a ‘relinquisher.