Innocente beat me to the punch and pointed out in a comment that the FBI released their latest report on Active Records in the NICS Index last Friday. NICS now contains the records of 21,823 persons who renounced U.S. citizenship under INA § 349(5) (or, theoretically, the wartime provisions of INA § 349(6)) and are thus barred from purchasing firearms in the United States. This is an increase of 319 records as compared to March 2013, and 1,169 records since December 2012.
General trends
The questions from last time remains: whether or not renunciations show a seasonal trend, and what this data means for the rest of the year. But without trying to figure out seasonal trends, we can still note that the number of renunciations recorded by the FBI from 1 May 2012 to 30 April 2013 — 5,161 — is more than four times the 1,275 renunciations recorded for 1 May 2011 to 30 April 2012. Much of the increase in the past twelve months was due to 3,220 records that the FBI added to NICS in September and October 2012. This sudden increase is not well-understood; it may be a one-off correction of a backlog of unreleased records, or may represent part of the longer-trend term of rising renunciations. However, even if take the extreme position of discounting that entire 3,220 as a fluke, there were still 1,941 other records of renunciants added to NICS in the past twelve months, a 52% increase over the twelve months prior to that.
NICS does not record individuals who relinquished U.S. citizenship under INA § 349(1)–(4). Past trends indicate that with just under 1,200 renunciations since January there should be around nine hundred or so relinquishers, suggesting that around two thousand people voluntarily gave up U.S. citizenship from January to April.
Comparison with other sources of renunciation data
Media reports of public figures who gave up U.S. citizenship also seem to have risen: from January to April 2012 we heard about Belizean politician Yolanda Schakron, former Yugoslavian royal Elizabeth Karageorgevic, and Japan scholar Donald Keene, while so far this year there have been articles on Tina Turner, Corine Mauch (Zurich mayor), Mahmud Karzai (brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai), Naftali Bennett and Dov Lipman (Israeli legislators), Bernard Chan (Hong Kong executive council member, not to be confused with another Bernard Chan who renounced a decade ago), Marshall Nicholson (Hong Kong banker), and Sharon Roulstone (Caymanian parliamentary candidate).
Contrary to the impression you’ll get from the newspapers, most people getting out of U.S. citizenship are ordinary folks trying to pay rent and save for retirement, not rich and wealthy superstars fleeing the estate tax. Even most of the public figures renouncing U.S. citizenship are politicians rather than businesspeople. However, a rise in their numbers is still significant; it points to the underlying fact that more people are deciding that the purported benefits of U.S. citizenship abroad are an insufficient inducement to retaining U.S. citizenship, and that they can best pursue happiness and success by not being U.S. citizens.
Finally, it seems that since last year one additional un-American (or someone using the identity of one) attempted to purchase a gun and got caught during the background check, increasing the total number of denials to renunciants since the inception of the NICS system from 57 to 58. I wonder how many of those are actual people who have renounced, returned to the United States, and decided to buy a gun, as opposed to Homelanders who stole Mike Gogulski’s identity after he posted a picture of his Social Security card on his blog.
Anyway, say what you will about the FBI, but at least they’re reasonably thorough, and they get their work done before the weekend even when they have bigger fish to fry — much unlike the Treasury, which still has not release what will likely be an incredibly-incomplete list of people who renounced, relinquished, or gave up green cards in the first quarter of 2013.
Didn’t they start charging the $450 fee to renounce mid-summer 2012? I wonder if that larger number reported in the fall reflected a large number of renunciants trying to avoid the fee.
The ones in the FBI report are precisely the ones who did have to pay the $450 fee (NICS includes renunciants but not relinquishers). IIRC the fee was around long before that, it just got upgraded from provisional to official status last year.
As always Eric, thanks for the complete analysis. Your work is invaluable…
Very interesting read.
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Thanks very much, Eric. The State Department still does not report the actual numbers of CLNs it issues. Why must we continue to try to infer those numbers indirectly from Treasury Department and FBI figures? See https://explore.data.gov/nominate/2412 , which remains “Under Review”.
Thank goodness for your thorough work and reporting of the real numbers, Eric. Our thanks. As said, your contributions here are so valuable.
The “Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate” for the 1st quarter of 2013 is due to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow (May 8). A preview of it is available at
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/05/08/2013-10852/quarterly-publication-of-individuals-who-have-chosen-to-expatriate
This time it’s 18 pages long — 680 names at a rough estimate. Still it doesn’t list everyone who received CLNs in the quarter. I know two personally who aren’t on it. So the actual criteria used for including names in the list remain unclear.
And as usual the list contains errors. What are the chances that these two entries are names of two different people?
LOCKE-TECKEMEIER LORETTA ULLRICH
LOCKE-TECKMEIER LORETTA U.
I counted 685. One can only guess at what the real number is.
Who needs to worry about a FBI weapons ban when all you need is a 3-D printer?
“Computer files to create a handgun almost entirely from parts made with a 3-D printer went online Monday, alarming gun control advocates after it was successfully test-fired by its inventor.”
“Stomach-churning,” said New York Sen. Charles Schumer. “Now anyone — a terrorist, someone who is mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon — can essentially open a gun factory in their garage. It must be stopped.”
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/05/08/world/handgun-made-with-3-d-printer-passes-test/#.UYl9aZXns20
Found this 1999 source from google books:
Nov 30, 1999 ( 626 Renounced )
Source: http://tiny.cc/nics113099 ( google books )
And a few others
Dec 31 2009 ( 14,337 Renounced)
Source: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/2009-operations-report (page 19 )
Sep 30, 2010 ( 15,184 Renounced )
Source: http://www2.fbi.gov/hq/cjisd/nics/NICS%20Index.pdf
Dec 31, 2011 ( 16,004 Renounced )
Source: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/2011-operations-report/operations-report-2011 ( page 17)
@statelessman: thanks — especially for the 1999 one. now that’s interesting. they had just 626 records in 1999, but by the end of 2000 they ended up with twelve thousand?
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/2000-operations-report#page=29
Twelve thousand is too small to be the backlog of renunciants for all time (since we’ve seen reports that there were thousands of people renouncing in Canada during the Vietnam war). So I don’t understand what that huge jump could be. I don’t think those all could have been people who renounced in that one year period — though it’s interesting to note that 12,000 is pretty close to the IRS estimate for the number of Form 8854 filers that they keep putting on their Paperwork Reduction Act Reports ever since the late 1990s:
http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2012/07/25/irs-estimate-for-number-of-form-8854-filers-eleven-to-twelve-thousand-per-year/