1996 seemed to be a pretty good year to be an American abroad. The U.S. was at the height of its global prestige. The State Department had several years earlier ended its policy of automatically revoking U.S. citizenship from Americans who naturalised elsewhere. And there was little motivation to give up the blue passport anyway: ordinary diaspora wage-earners with non-U.S. retirement accounts and mutual funds ignored all the international financial reporting forms created under the Nixon administration’s Bank Secrecy Act or the Reagan administration’s Tax Reform Act — and the IRS had no complaint because it knew that none of this paperwork could possibly generate more revenue than it would cost to process in the first place.

Yet this benign neglect of Americans abroad was by no means an expression of support. Homelanders were hostile to the idea of an American diaspora: in a national survey, nearly three-quarters of people in the U.S. thought that “living in America for most of your life” was an important part of being “truly American”. This widespread societal consensus on the territorial nature of Americanness was even supported, and supported quite strongly, by a surprising group: native-born Americans who had lived abroad for five years or longer, among whom 85% agreed with this proposition. And over the next decade, this view would only strengthen.

Overview of the General Social Survey

The General Social Survey is a biannual survey by the University of Chicago. Each iteration of the survey gets about two thousand respondents and sits them down for 90 minutes to ask them a series of questions on social issues; some questions are administered in all years, while others only appear in one or two iterations of the survey and then disappear. You can explore the GSS data online using this web interface from UC Berkeley, which generates convenient HTML tables you can easily paste into blog posts. GSS questions are referred to in the interface by somewhat-descriptive alphanumeric codes of eight letters or less; I’ve written those in capital letters below.

You get the most value out of the GSS by cross-tabulating answers to questions about social issues with each other — or with a wide variety of demographic variables (AGE, RACE, socio-economic CLASS, WORDSUM vocabulary size, political PARTYID-entification, etc.) — to look for correlations. Of course, you can only look for correlations between questions that were asked in the same year, and sadly some interesting questions stopped being asked — for example, up until 1994, attitudes towards specific countries (BRAZIL, CANADA, CHINA, EGYPT, ENGLAND, JAPAN, ISRAEL, and RUSSIA) were also surveyed, but they dropped these afterwards in favour of other, more Homeland-focused questions. Even certain demographic variables weren’t recorded in all years, e.g. military veteran status (VETYEARS), which was removed from the GSS in 1995 and only reappeared in 2010.

Finding Americans who have lived abroad in the GSS

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: –Column percent -N of cases		BORN
		1 YES	2 NO	ROW TOTAL
ABROAD	1: NEVER LIVED IN OTHER COUNTRIES	82.1 1,007	5.4 6	75.2 1,013
	2: LESS THAN 1 YEAR IN ALL	5.1 61	5.0 6	5.1 67
	3: 1 TO 4 YEARS IN ALL	8.2 105	13.1 14	8.6 119
	4: 5 YEARS OR LONGER	4.6 56	76.6 83	11.1 139
	COL TOTAL	100.0 1,229	100.0 109	100.0 1,338

 

One easily identifiable group of Americans who have lived abroad, at least in the 1996 and 2004 GSS, are people who were born overseas to at least one US citizen parent (filter BORN(2); PARCIT(1-3)). These comprise 0.79% (23) of the 2,904 respondents to the 1996 GSS, and 0.82% (23 again) of the 2,812 respondents to the 2004 GSS. However, this group is rather small, so it’s hard to draw conclusions about them. This post instead focuses on the 222 folks in the 1996 GSS who were born in the U.S. but then went on to live abroad for some time (filter BORN(1); ABROAD(2-4)). This in itself is a surprisingly large number: it means that out of the 1,229 native-born adults who were asked ABROAD (not all survey participants that year were), 18% had spent some time living outside of the United States. 214 of those were living in the US at age 16 (REG16(1-9)), suggesting that they mostly chose to live abroad themselves as adults rather than going with family while they were still young. I’ll call them “returned expats”.

In the table above, returned expats are represented by the three cells above the total in the left-hand column. I further divide these into “returned long-term expats” (who spent five years or more abroad, i.e. ABROAD(4)), and “returned short-term expats” (who spent some time abroad less than five years. i.e. ABROAD(2-3)). “Homelanders” in this particular post exclusively refers to those who were born in the U.S. and have not spent any time living outside of the Homeland (ABROAD(0)). In all cases, I’m not including immigrants (BORN(2)) under those labels, since it’s not possible to sort out whether their time abroad was before or after they became Americans. Demographically, returned expats in the 1996 GSS were similar to Homelanders at the time. By race, 82% (181) were white, 15% (34) black, and only 3% (7) other. They were slightly more likely to be of high socioeconomic status, and slightly older.

Unfortunately, the GSS only asked ABROAD once in 1996, and PARCIT only twice in 1996 and 2004 — as we know well, Americans really don’t like to think about the fact that an American diaspora exists. This means it’s not possible to make longitudinal comparisons about “returned expats” at all, since they are only identifiable in the 1996 GSS. Also remember that respondents are people who live in the United States at the time of the survey; the GSS does not make any effort to find respondents among Americans living abroad. However, with those caveats in mind …

Why do returned expats think “true Americans live in America”?

As mentioned in the beginning of this post, returned long-term expats were far more likely than any other group to believe that living in America for most of your life is an important part of being “truly American” (AMLIVED). This was already a widely-held view among Homelanders: men and women, whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans all agreed at rates of higher than 70%. People with graduate degrees, political independents, and people of other race were least likely to think so, but among them it was still a majority view.

By age group, support was weakest among people who came of age during the Vietnam War (and thus may have remembered high school friends going into exile in Canada in protest), but again “weak” is a relative term: two-thirds of them agreed. Even 69% of naturalised immigrants who were living abroad at age 16 but came to the U.S. later (BORN(2); CITIZEN(1); REG16(0)) thought that true Americans lived most of their lives in America, apparently reading themselves out of the definition of “Americanness”.

Frequency distribution
Cells contain: –Column percent -Weighted N		ABROAD
		1 NEVER LIVED IN OTHER COUNTRIES	2 LESS THAN 1 YEAR IN ALL	3 1 TO 4 YEARS IN ALL	4 5 YEARS OR LONGER	ROW TOTAL
AMLIVED	1: VERY IMPORTANT	46.8 455.7	27.2 16.8	37.2 36.4	52.1 26.6	45.2 535.5
	2: FAIRLY IMPORTANT	28.9 281.4	36.0 22.3	25.6 25.0	33.0 16.8	29.2 345.6
	3: NOT VERY IMPORTANT	19.2 187.4	29.8 18.5	28.3 27.7	11.7 6.0	20.2 239.6
	4: NOT IMPORTANT AT ALL	5.1 50.0	7.0 4.3	8.9 8.7	3.2 1.6	5.5 64.6
	COL TOTAL	100.0 974.5	100.0 61.9	100.0 97.8	100.0 51.1	100.0 1,185.3

 

So that’s the data table, but we’re still left with the question of how to interpret it. I’ll look at four partial hypotheses, each of which has at least some explanatory power without necessary contradicting the others.

The reactive patriotism hypothesis: Long-term expatriates often face local people with anti-American sentiments in their countries of residence. Rather than assimilating local attitudes, expats may respond with resentment. Opposition to living abroad might just be one component of their resulting increase in nationalism. Indeed, returned long-term expats were somewhat more likely (35%) to believe “my country, right or wrong” (IFWRONG) than short-term expats (29%) or Homelanders (31%), to agree that being born in the U.S is also an important part of being “truly American” (AMBORNIN: 81% vs. 59%, 73%), to agree that “it is impossible for people who do not share American customs and traditions to become fully American” (AMCULT: 40% vs. 31%, 36%), and to agree that “American television should give preference to American films and programs” (AMTV: 50% vs. 21%, 40%).

However, returned long-term expats were only about as likely as short-term expats or Homelanders to believe that the U.S. is better than any other country (AMBETTER: 84% vs. 79%, 82%), to agree that they’d rather be citizens of the U.S. than any other country (AMCITIZN: 92% vs. 90%, 94%), and to state that sports made them proud to be American (AMSPORTS: 73% vs. 68%, 76%). Returned long-term expats were far more likely (80% vs. 67%, 61%) to be in favour of foreign language teaching (FORLANG), though this attitude could arise either from antagonistic nationalism (e.g. “know thy enemy”) or from cosmopolitan sentiment, so it’s not really proof or disproof of this hypothesis.

The alienation hypothesis: Perhaps after more than half a decade of living abroad, returned long-term expats move back to the U.S. only find that they have lost a great deal of their ability to relate to the people of the country they used to think of as “home”, and realise that they themselves are no longer “truly American”. I doubt this is the case among all returned expats, but it may explain some portion of the effect. One interesting example of this: among returned long-term expats who did state that living in the U.S. was a “fairly/very important” part of being “truly American”, only half said that they would be “fairly/very unwilling” to move outside of North America in the future (MOVENOAM), a much smaller proportion than short-term expats (67%) or Homelanders (83%). This suggests that at least some returned long-term expats took the attitude, “I’m no longer ‘truly American’ and I don’t care, let me out of here again!”

The military hypothesis: Americans who lived abroad for five or more years and then returned are probably more likely than the general population to be in the military — indeed, military service was probably the reason many were abroad in the first place — and service members are likely to be more nationalistic. Perhaps this extends to a belief that civilian Americans have no business living abroad, though this is probably a stretch. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to determine this directly or to quantify its effect, since VETYEARS was not asked in 1996. One possible indicator is that 54% of returned long-term expats had “a great deal of confidence” in the military (CONARMY), against just 37% of short-term expats and 39% of Homelanders, though this could also be explained by the “reactive patriotism” hypothesis.

The self-selection hypothesis: as mentioned above, GSS respondents are all U.S. residents. Perhaps the people who did not feel that living in the U.S. was an important part of being “truly American” simply expressed their belief by remaining abroad and excluding themselves from the respondent population, while those who did feel it was important acted on that belief by moving back home so they could skew the responses to the GSS. This may tie in to the reactive patriotism hypothesis: those whose experiences of living abroad turned them into American ultra-nationalists were probably overrepresented among returnees. Unfortunately I can’t think of any way to use the GSS itself to support or disprove this hypothesis.

What’s so important about five years abroad?

An interesting trend in the data was the contrast between long-term and short-term expats, which repeated itself on a number of questions: the returned long-term expats tended to be even more nationalistic than the Homelanders they left behind, whereas the returned short-term expats were markedly less nationalistic. This might be due to their reasons for returning: short-term expats are more likely to have returned because their assignment came to an end and they had no opportunity to extend it even if they’d have liked to, whereas the returned long-term expats probably made an active decision to move back to the United States. Or maybe five years is some sort of important threshold that causes your attitudes to change.

It’s not just a psychological threshold either, but a very concrete legal one: the period of residence prerequisite to naturalisation in most countries is at least five years, unless you’re married to a citizen. Some places like Australia, Brazil, and Canada let you apply after your fourth year, though of course by the time you actually get all the paperwork ready to send off to the bureaucracy you’ll probably have finished your fifth year already; others as diverse as Chile, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom make it five years exactly, while most of the rest of the world requires even longer periods of residence. Only a very small number of countries, primarily Latin American ones like the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, and Peru, have significantly shorter periods of just two or three years.

And on a more mundane level, five years is the period of time after which many countries stop considering foreign residents as “expats” for tax and social security purposes, and start expecting them to make payments on the same basis as citizens. In both China and Japan, for example, five years is the threshold after which residents start paying tax on worldwide income rather than just local income; this ensures that English teachers and corporate transferees can come in for short-term work without having to spend days puzzling through dense thickets of kanji to try to understand how to report the bank interest they earned “back home” — until “back home” stops really being “home” and they’ve had the chance to acquire a decent command of the language, or at least the phone numbers of a few good international accountants.

In other words, five years is the point where external forces really give you a kick in the pants to assess your relationship with the society you live in: are you going to naturalise and become a full member, are you going to end your adventure and go back to the U.S., or are you going to try to cling to your identity as an “American sojourner” and accept being an outsider both in your passport country and in the place where you actually live?

Anti-diaspora sentiment in historical context

One last thing you should do while you’ve got that GSS window open: run a table for AMLIVED vs. YEAR. You’ll see that the number of people who believe that living in the U.S. most of your life is a “fairly/very important” part of being “truly American” went up from 74% in 1996 to 83% in 2004. As mentioned above, the GSS didn’t ask about time spend abroad (ABROAD) in 2004, so we can’t tell how many of those are Homelanders as opposed to expats, but it points to a cultural trend in the Homeland: they never liked the idea of an American diaspora of people permanently resident abroad but claiming a connection to the U.S., and as the world becomes more globalised they like the idea even less and less — a sentiment fueled, most likely, by dishonest media portrayals of rich Americans allegedly fleeing en masse to overseas tax havens.

This popular sentiment is not new, and up until the latter part of the twentieth century, the U.S. government gave voice to it through the nationality law. First there was the Expatriation Act of 1907, which stripped U.S. citizenship not just from naturalised citizens living abroad for more than five years, but overseas-born children of American parents who did not swear upon reaching adulthood that they intended to become residents of the United States. Then there was the Nationality Act of 1940, which punished voting in a foreign election with loss of U.S. citizenship, and stripped people born dual citizens of U.S. citizenship if they lived for just six months in their other country.

The underlying thrust of these laws is clear: if you live overseas as a dual citizen or for long enough to become one, your Americanness becomes suspect and the government will put you under quite a bit of pressure to either come back home or stop being a U.S. citizen. And clearly, large numbers of Americans continue to want their country to be a single-citizenship country, both for emigrants and for immigrants. Supreme Court cases like Afroyim v. Rusk and Vance v. Terrazas may have changed the law, and the State Department may have changed its enforcement policy, but they did not change the underlying national sentiment. They merely suppressed it until it could manifest itself in the form of alternative punishments for choosing to live abroad permanently or to maintain connections to other countries more substantive than a passport in a sock drawer and an occasional holiday to visit distant relations.

And finally, remember: in the unlikely event that Congress ever forms that commission to assess the impact of their policies on U.S. Persons abroad, they’re not likely to seek out emigrants and ask us directly for our opinions; instead they’ll find representatives from among returned expats, and as this post implies, those representatives may not share our attitudes and concerns.