Looks like I’m losing my edge — AnonAnon wins the prize for being the first to notice the Q1 2013 Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who have Chosen to Expatriate, which has been placed on public inspection for printing in tomorrow’s Federal Register. Grammar and spelling aficionados will note that the list’s title no longer contains the awkwardly-placed relative clause “As Required by Section 6039G”; unfortunately, the misspelling of HIPAA as “HIPPA” has now entered its eighteenth year.

This quarter’s list appears a mere eight days later than required by law, and with about 680 names — a far larger number than most of us would have expected, though well short of the 850 people renouncing under INA § 349(5) whom the FBI entered into their NICS gun control database during the same quarter. And that’s not even mentioning the people who relinquished citizenship under INA § 349(1)–(4), who are not subject to gun control and so don’t show up in NICS but do belong in the Federal Register — or the backlog of thousands of others who renounced last year and also showed up in NICS but never had their names added to Treasury’s list.

Analysis

The first thing that’s noticeable about the list: there are quite a few more Arab names than in previous quarters, probably meaning that Kuwait’s push to enforce their laws against dual citizenship has resulted in many people choosing the Gulf over the United States.

My usual voyeuristic habit of running the Cantonese names against Hong Kong public databases finds that an increasing proportion are lawyers rather than financiers or company directors (they show up not in Securities and Futures Commission filings but in the Government Gazette list of legal practitioners), and some don’t show up at all. This suggests that by the middle of last year, the trend of turning in blue passports had gone well beyond the rentier class and began reaching down into the salaried class — people who owe little U.S. tax but are sick of the dozens of pages of red tape, threatened life-altering fines, and other restrictions which only the U.S. and no other country places on its citizens abroad.

Late and missing names

I say “middle of last year” because that seems to be the rough time frame of the renunciations and relinquishments which show up in this quarter’s list. (This is also when the news about Kuwait came out.) Unfortunately we have only a single concrete name on which we can base that guess: Kenneth R. Fox of Fox v. Clinton fame, an olim whose acquisition of Israeli citizenship was ruled after a court battle to be a valid relinquishment — his name appears at page 6. At page 9 there’s also Mahmood Karzai, who actually renounced in January 2013, precisely the period allegedly covered by this list — but then politicians tend to get rushed through, when they are important enough to appear at all.

However, not a single other political candidate who has given up citizenship since February 2012 appears in this quarter’s list: Yolanda Schakron (Belize, February 2012), Nicholas Yang and Erica Yuen (Hong Kong, May 2012), Victor Okaikoi (Ghana, August 2012), Akierra Missick (Turks & Caicos, October 2012), Corine Mauch (Switzerland, late 2012 or early 2013), Naftali Bennett and Dov Lipman (Israel, January 2013), Bernard Chan (Hong Kong, February 2013), Sharon Roulstone (Cayman Islands, March 2013), and Fauzia Kasuri (Pakistan, March 2013) are all missing. Japan scholar Donald Keene, who is also known to have relinquished — in his case, by naturalising in Japan in March 2012 — fails to appear either. In other words, that’s twelve out of fourteen public figures during the period in question.