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.
” 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.”
this is likely true today as it was then, and illustrates that FATCA is a self-administered poison pill, before any reciprocity costs.
what are the processing costs of a 1040 return from arrival in the US; from postal sorting station through initial evaluation by the IRS. maybe 10 hours at $50/hour fully laden costs per average employee.
An additional 1.5 million filings would negate the estimated $800 million annual revenue. Additional FBAR and 8839 forms would further aggravate the negative revenue from this program.
We cannot discount of social protest nuisance filings by foreign citizens. Useless meaningless 1040 with dummy addresses and random SSN to sabotage the IRS.
I can definitely agree. Just under the surface of a State Department policy allowing, but not encouraging dual nationality, the USA, and a large majority of its people are hostile towards the concept of dual nationality, and just as much, they doesn’t like even the concept of Americans living abroad. Why would anyone want to leave, after all.
I’ve heard a few of them say that Canadians have an inferiority complex, but yet it’s the Americans that seem to freak out at the idea of people leaving. Canadians? They can leave Canada if that’s what it takes to chase a career, and they seem to be welcomed back when they return. Now, to someone’s rational mind, what really sounds like an inferiority complex here?
Another sign of an inferiority complex? Being unable to accept, or feeling hostility and resentment to the notion that there are opinions in the world that are not necessarily of the American way.
Frankly, people like that really need to just stay home where it’s safe for them.
Dual citizenship that is recognized and not overtly fought against is relatively new, which might explain some of the American attitude when coupled with the fact that, for the most part, they are a destination for migration rather than a place people leave in large numbers.
But, this sort of attitude is not exclusive to to the US. Even here in Canada, which has a lot of immigrants and like the US is a nation that grew up from an immigration standpoint, there are a lot of people who are suspicious of duals and even consider duals or permanent permanent residents to not be “all in” in terms of commitment to Canada, its laws and values. There is a lot of grumbling about duals who live in other countries to – as though it was some kind of scam (which according to my husband, it has been in the past).
The media and the entertainment industry do a lot of foster the idea that living outside the US means excepting lower standards of living, less personal freedom and “socialism”.
And the school systems push the “America, fuck yeah” patriotism pretty hard (though it’s been amusing to me to view something similar in the Canadian school system via my daughter’s social studies program).
Bottom line though is inescapable. For whatever reason, the USG needs to push the idea that rich people and corporations are using other countries to hide money that rightfully belongs to the US taxpayer. Expats are just collateral damage and since we were never viewed favorably to begin with – so what?
Americans who have never left the country have zero concept of what that even is, what the rules are about it at all. I had an uncle ask me quite casually one day about “not being American anymore” He actually thought, assumed that because I had lived in Canada for so long, I was no longer American. This was before I even had dual citizenship! I was shocked that he thought that, at the time. Not anymore.
There is a type of brainwashing that goes on similar to what American’s accuse the Chinese of doing to their population. The message is given from birth. “There’s no decent moral reason to not live here if you can. It’s okay for military and temporarily but, all others are to be treated withs suspicion.”
Much like a huge cult. They cannot envision a moral human being choosing to not live within their borders therefore any “punishment” given for doing so is totally justified. They are so brainwashed these ideas that considered thought is not even needed. There is a knee jerkish response if you ever try to speak to most Americans about any of these matters. Pretty scary when you break it down to what it really is.
@Yogagirl, then it would be so much easier for all of us if they would just return to the time when they disallowed dual citizenship. Then we could automatically opt out and so many thought they had done before. Let that be that. Instead they have to trap you in a box that won’t let you go without a big process. God if so many are trying to “get in” and immigration reform is such an issue right now, then surely they could easily let some of us just go.
Is it that they don’t want the world to see how many are wanting out these days? It’s almost funny how they think if you want out you must be somehow insane or a traitor. No, I just don’t want to pay financial homage to you for the rest of my life when I don’t live there. The idea that anyone should do so is immoral, yet they believe it is right. We just have differences we cannot resolve.
Atticus, it would probably be easier to hide the defectors if dual citizenship was disallowed. No paper trail at all if it was simply automatic.
No, it’s about control and using expats as beach heads in other countries. In earlier times using us as anchors wasn’t as feasible but technology has made it so much easier to track us, tag us and then start trolling that it’s probably just to hard for the USG to resist.
Perhaps we should be pushing for inclusion in the new immigration bill. We are, actually, an issue that belongs there since the US has taken a rather non-comittal official stance on dualism. They neither encourage nor deny but yet they admit that they see us as being subject to them and their rules first whether we reside there or not. To me, this sounds like they don’t really recognize dual citizenship and perhaps it is time they took a stance. I would personally be ok with the idea that we are automatically chucked out of the fold upon acquiring another citizenship. It’s a cleaner and more efficient way to deal with this and it forces us to really think about what we are doing.
Ultimately, with the push to world wide tracking of citizens by nearly every nation (the US is the leader but they aren’t the only ones), we may yet see a return to the uni-citizen but in the meantime, it’s gonna suck.
@YogaGirl
But that’s just the thing. I’m not really looked as though I’m some sort of threat here. Not in the matter that America looks at foreigners. For example, my Canadian wife has never really felt comfortable in America even while visiting, and she has said in no uncertain terms that she ever wanted to live there. It’s all in the prevailing attitude of the people in general. With that being said of course, one thing that’s for sure is that no matter where you go, you’re always going to find the occasional dink. However, a country that talks a good game about freedom and liberty while on the other side, has a police state mentality that demands conformity and obedience, that spies on its own people, (who seems to be okay with it) that is scornful of those that question her policies, (unjust political based IRS audits) that is aggressive at those that take a stand for what’s right, (to persecute in the name of national security) and that is jealous and spiteful at those that choose to have a better life elsewhere, (persecuting and harassing us via policies) well, that’s a whole lot of dinks! Certainly at a minimum, that at least the whole government is full of them.
Honestly, if the US took a stand that they will no longer recognize dual citizenship, it would be at least consistent with the prevailing attitudes there. But if they did that, then they can’t use FUD terrorism at those who thought they lost US citizenship when they acquired a foreign citizenship of their choice, and then loot them of their hard earned retirement to fund their ridiculous military industrial prison complex.
Perhaps, it is ultimately my more of an anti-American attitude that finds me more acceptance here in the end?
Perhaps we’d get a stronger response if duals demanded loss of citizenship as opposed to asking for residence-based taxation, real representation in the Congress, etc. IRS wouldn’t like it but the overwhelming majority of US citizens who can’t accept who we are would probably demand it from them.
@mjh49783
I’m curious if you felt anti-American when you came here. I certainly wasn’t and was extremely upset to be the only USC in the room when others were dissing everything US, etc. I found it rude, at the very least. I worked very hard at being a “reasonable” American if you will and I thought most people were okay with that. Comments such as “but you’re a Canadian” or “You’re American? But you have such good manners,” made me realize how hopeless it was. I remember reading something that was completely baseless in my son’s civics book (I think he was in grade 9) – I thought it was one thing for the CBC etc, to enjoy the bashing but something else again, to see it being taught.
Of course, after the first 4 months of FUBAR terror, things began to reverse. And I suppose now, there is no one anywhere, who could possibly be more anti-American than I am. I wonder if writing such a thing prompts some alarm in their surveillance or among those who supposedly reading our blog. As if hating what they have done amounts to wanting to harm the US. Which of course, is not what is meant. Do you think if homelanders really listened to our stories, that they would blame us for our own situation?
@patricia
Nothing would end extraterritorial taxation faster than all USPs abroad doing their taxes 😉
I had to ask myself something while reading this. Do I feel Canadians who choose to live outside of Canada are less Canadian than me? Hell no, but then I value Canada’s diaspora. They’re one of the best ways for a nation to expand its knowledge about the rest of the world. To be objective however, I’ll need to ask some born in Canada people about how they feel about Canadians who choose to elsewhere.
From reading its behaviour, the US really only seems to want to know about the rest of the world what it can impose on it, from its wars to its culture and its goods and services.
@Yoga Girl
“America, fuck-yeah” I LOVE “Team America”! Here’s a taste for those who’ve never seen it. I highly recommend watching the entire movie:
I think we all have had similar experiences to one degree or another regarding being an American abroad. My own mother in law didn’t want my husband to marry me because I was American and worse from the south! It took nearly a decade before she accepted me as a good and decent person despite my upbringing. I’ve dealt with school teachers who asked my son to bring in a book to read, who upon seeing the book threw it back and my son saying “That’s an American book!” he was four. Same year had my son come home from school and say “Mom, are grandma and grandpa bad people?” This was in reference to things he heard at school about “Americans.
I did the same as you noble and tried through actions to show I was kind and decent, didn’t always agree with the American government, volunteered in my community and was met with anti American sentiments until I “proved” myself. Been told “Oh, but you aren’t like those other Americans.” on and on.
I felt defensive, misjudged as a person, and guarded even in my own Canadian family at times. Well, now seeing how they would feel as they do or come to feel that way it’s a LOT easier.
One advantage of giving up U.S. citizenship is that I can no longer be accused of being in any way a part of that governments harmful decisions. I don’t think the U.S. realizes the amount of good will over the years ex pats have created abroad. It’s very valuable and they are throwing it all away.
LOL!!!! Trey Parker nails it! *dies laughing ova here* as my Jersey friends say.
I can only speak from my experiences outside the US from a Canadian experience perspective and yes, there is – as you all note – a very definite disdain for the culture, values, religious zealousness and the politics (which is odd given the general high regard for Obama – though that is on the decline, maybe b/c we have our own budding rock star in Trudeau?).
I wasn’t a rah-rah type when I left the US. I actually saw it for the opportunity it was, living and putting down roots outside the US b/c it had been clear to me since the beginning of the last decade that the US was in serious decline. But I’ve never personally experienced any prejudice. I have noticed it but people are usually quite surprised to discover I am an American. This despite having somewhat of a drawl that is distinctly US.
My husband lived in the US for a time, worked there and thought about getting a green card, and is glad now that he didn’t. He is quite anti-US. The child is almost completely indoctrinated as a Canadian (she once wanted to know if Grandma had a gun b/c her teacher told her that all Americans own guns, and I have had to work to correct some of the worse viewpoints she’s picked up mostly from school). I feel out of place in the US anymore except when I am visiting my hometown, a quaint small town that grows a bit bigger as time goes on but never loses the backwater feeling I remember as I was growing up).
I like the idea of duals pushing for lose of citizenship rather than going after the worldwide tax of income angle. It’s something that home-landers would probably support, given that they think we are traitors and/or tax cheats anyway. An automatic loss for those who sought citizenship and possibly a firm time deadline for those growing up dual due to birth or naturalization as children. Give them til 21 and then consider the option void? It would be better than what we have now. And the USG couldn’t argue that it stripped us if we were informed that this is the way it was. It would still be a choice we’d make.
@nobledreamer
Actually yes, I was already feeling pretty anti-American for years when I came here. A lot of it was from post-9/11 disillusionment, along with personal experiences, and the strong, nagging feeling in my mind that a society that cherishes concepts such as freedom and liberty wouldn’t be dismantling its own democratic institutions piece by piece. If the government there can do all those things while the people there chant “USA! USA! USA!” while being willfully oblivious to all that they’re losing, then what is there that’s even worth fighting for anymore? Seems better to look for something new to believe in instead of staying where I felt I no longer belonged.
At least that’s my gist of it.
As for our sentiments causing any alarm with the US, I don’t know. I doubt it, but in these paranoid times, who can really say for sure? I don’t hate them. I just don’t want to be associated with the kind of shenanigans that the US likes to pull in this world any longer.
As for people with prejudiced notions and those that base their notions on stereotypes and useless generalizations, well, I just ignore them as the idiots that they typically are. But, one embarrassing experience that I had was nearly five years ago where I was putting the bag of milk in the milk pitcher, and cutting the corner of the bag so that it can pour. Never dealing with milk in bags before, I thought I’d give it a try, and that went all wrong. I cut the wrong end, and not only that, I more or less hacked it open because I used a knife instead of the cutting tool that comes with the pitcher. It put a smile on my in-law’s face, that’s for sure. ;^)
And as for the homelanders, if only they would listen and not be blinded by stupid nationalism, it might be interesting to hear their thoughts on the matter. Unfortunately, I have trouble even getting some of my own family to understand. Easier for them to shrug as if to say, ‘oh well’ instead of saying something that results in a confrontation, or cause them to think that they might not have it as good as they think they do. But, if I wait until they’re also bitching about the government, I’ll just chime in and bend the conversation a little bit. They only know what they know, and not what you know. So, it’s best to relate to them on their terms before you start bending their ears, and just keep things politically neutral. It’s not a left vs. right thing anyway, or at least it isn’t to me.
The Miami Herald today contains an article trade titled “Smaller Firms Urged to Enter Latin Market, by Mimi Whitefield, a MH business writer.
Here is a link to the article. I have posted a comment on-line on this article.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/20/3462121/smaller-companies-urged-to-break.html
I have also sent an email to Mimi Whitefield, the Business Section who wrote the article touching on additional points not mentioned on the comment I posted. Here is the text of the email.
Dear Ms. Whitefield,
,
Thank you for our article on this subject in today’s Miami Herald.
I hope you will take a minute or two and read the comment I posted on-line about this conference.
The sponsors really missed the boat in failing to identify the largest and most formidable barrier against American small business entrepreneurs in being successful in the Latin market.
Believe me, I know. “Been there, done that,” as they say
I’m 82 years old and fully retired now, but when I was a lot younger I was running a very successful business in Rio de Janeiro selling US exports in that market, building a new home there and expecting to spend the rest of my life there.
But Congress had other ideas. Senator William Proxmire (D,WI) charismatically proclaimed that any American who would live outside of the United States was a tax evading traitor, which quoting his own words he described as “spending his tax evasion dollars, swathed in mink, at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo. “ He further proclaimed that having Americans living abroad served absolutely no useful purpose in selling US exports. At that time the US was the dominating force in the world export market.
Congress bought his bill of goods, lock, stock and barrel and enacted the Tax Reform Act of 1976, which President Ford signed on October 4, 1976. It was retroactive to January 1 of that year. This law drastically increased the US taxation on Americans living abroad. The moment that law was signed my cumulative Brazilian plus US tax increased to 181% more than any other non-US person in Brazil – Brazilian or from any other nation – with my exact same income and family status.
I could not survive. I stopped construction of our new house, closed down the business and came back home. Within a few months a French company with no previous presence in Brazil had established a company in Rio, hired most of our former employees and taken over the new market which I had laboriously opened for imports from the US. Eight years later that French company accounted for $1 billion in French exports to Brazil while the US share of that specific market, with no Americans there beating the bushes, dropped to practically zero.
Hundreds of thousands of overseas Americans came home for exactly the same reason; particularly small entrepreneurs who were literally destroyed by this tax legislation. In 1975, before this legislation, the US registered the largest trade surplus in our nation’s history, but with this mass forced abandonment of foreign markets, 1976 saw the largest US trade deficit ever recorded up to that time. And since then the US has never even once recorded a trade surplus. Our US 1976-2012 cumulatively trade deficit exceeds $9 trillion, even though American products are highly competitive with those of other industrialized countries which, instead of classifying their citizens who go abroad to sell them as tax evading traitors, treats them as the patriots they are for relocating overseas and capturing the markets that create manufacturing jobs and economic prosperity back home. It is only the US that double taxes its citizens abroad, not to generate tax revenue but to keep them home. There are so few abroad that this tax generates but a pittance in tax revenue for the US Treasury – about $5 billion/year. The IRS, by comparison, admits it pays out $20 billion for fraudulent child tax credits for children that don’t even exist.
And hardly a week passes without at least one conviction for $60 or more million here in Miami alone for Medicare fraud.
Trade missions and our president going abroad to Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere to “talk trade,” accomplishes nothing. It takes feet on the ground in foreign markets to capture the business. Our industrialized nation competitor countries all have them but, thanks to our own unique tax laws, the US does not. That is what makes the difference.
Germany today, with an economy 1/’5 the size of ours and with labor costs 56% higher than in the US, exports more than the US, has balanced trade with China and has its lowest unemployment rate in the past 21 years.
The US 12-month trade deficit through April 2013 is $721.billion and increasing at the rate of $1.97 billion per day. Germany has a trade surplus of $251.6 billion. Our US trade deficit represents 60% of all of the trade deficits of the world. Since 1976 the US Congress has taken numerous additional measures to “punish” US citizens who go abroad which have made the situation steadily worse. Today it is nearly impossible for a US citizen to survive living abroad unless he becomes a naturalized citizen of the foreign country where he lives and formally renounces his US citizenship before a US consular officer outside of the United States. Renunciations are up by a factor of 6 in just the past four years. Once renounced, this decision is irreversible and the person can never recuperate US citizenship again. It is pretty drastic action which no American should be forced to take in order to survive living and working in another country.
For representatives of the US Government to lead US entrepreneurs at this conference to believe that they can really be successful in addressing the Latin America market with all of this unique and superfluous US tax baggage imposed on them, by our own government, is the height of hypocrisy.
But anyway keep up the good work, Mimi. I am a loyal reader of your articles.
Kindest regards,
Roger Conklin
We are the only country except a small North African Country to tax their citizens where ever they are in the world. Our Ambassador to the U.N. took to the floor of the General Assembly to criticize the African country for the practice, not realizing we do the same thing.
Leo Linbeck had the solution and spent millions of his own money to try and get the FairTax enacted. he failed because there are a hundred million leeches making a living off the Marxist Income Tax, which was prohibited by the founders but somehow got passed when the Marxists scattered around the world in the early 1900’s.
Our economic and employment problems would disappear if the FairTax would simply get passed!
FATCA is possible in large part because of technology and that today, Big Data, its collection, analysis and retention is part of our lives. Before Big Data the IRS had no practical way of enforcing the long existing laws and policies (as oppressive and ridiculous as they are). Same is true with regard to NSA collection – once our lives moved to the Cloud, to Facebook, GMail, on-line banking, etc….it all became open season for the US government. In the name of counter terrorism they have the capability and the authority to hoover it all up and then use it for non counter terrorism purposes (i.e. IRS, FBI, et al) side stepping proper criminal procedure.
@Steve Klaus,
The information age has expanded the concept of ‘war’ and birthed new tools to both attack and counter-attack.
@mjh49783
You reminded me of something about the milk bags.I had never seen such a thing- and when I first looked at one, I thought the milk was loose in the bag, not that 3 separate, sealed smaller bags were in the larger, outside one. I just couldn’t get over how weird that was and how on earth all the milk didn’t spill out easily, given there was only a plastic tie-thing to hold the bag shut. It took me a long time to realize there was something other than scissors to open them-and I always made the hole waaaayy too big.
I came here in 1982. Not that there weren’t things the US had done that others disliked us for, but there was nothing anything like 911 and what followed. I guess I always kept my dislike for the govt quite separate from my feelings toward the people who made up the country. I still think most with attitude are those who have never been anywhere and I can forgive them for that, if you know what I mean.
@Yoga Girl
I was never a rah-rah type either but was just so surprised that the dislike was so personal, I guess I got defensive. It would come and go over the years but I was always surprised when it came back. Not so great at doing as mjh says “ignore them as the idiots they typically are.” My accent is sometimes noticed but not as much as at first. I even tried to hide it after I realized it gave me away. I used to call it my “Toronto voice” which was really necessary when I was working downtown. I think it is less noticeable now because so many CDN idioms are now normally part of my speech, and that, just naturally. 🙂
Unfortunately, much of America simply doesn’t understand or care about the rest of the world. West and East Coast yes, they’ll have some broader views and possibly those on the northern and southern borders. But the big bit in the middle, well for them New York or LA is foreign territory. None of my family has ever had a passport except my first cousin who is British born anyway. Only two have ever even lived outside of the state they were born in. It’s probably better now, but when I was a kid any news from other countries was extremely rare; it was all US based. So it’s no surprise that they think America is the only place to be, because for them it is. It’s all they know and all they hear about.
@mjh49783 I too am reminded by you of the milk bags and how unusual they were. I too had to perfect my opening of them. I came to Toronto with my husband in August 1969. Reading this post I find I am going down memory lane and remembering my first impressions of Canada…no strings on tea bags, concrete sidewalks, not wooden ones patrolled by Sargent Preston and his dog King…There were tall buildings and the TTC, Toronto was very much like NYC, which I loved. Also everyone spoke English. Another significant fact is Canadian dollar was worth 14 percent more than the American dollar. We only came with $200 US so we had to stretch that quite far.
We met Canadians of all ages and everyone welcomed us and helped us out with household articles and finding a flat. I had never heard of a flat until I lived in one..
Relatives from the US came up and found Toronto clean, courteous and big…(I read their post cards).
My brother lost on two different occasions his camera in downtown Toronto and sunglasses on the TTC . Both were returned to him. He was astounded.
I loved the diversity of different cultures which was the same reason I loved NYC. My sons grew up in a little United Nations in their classrooms.
Unfortunately I found that my relatives did not consider Canada a good place to live.. America was, in their opinion, the best country to live in and when I told them I wanted to live here always and became a Citizen in 1993, they considered me a traitor.
My brother considers the USA the greatest, mightiest, richest and most free country in the world. He is very proud to not know much about the rest of the world. It was the best decision in my life to come to Canada. My sons were born here. My younger son and husband’s ashes on our favorite beach and I shall join them when I die.
@northernstar
Your story brought tears to my eyes. Your love for Canada makes it a better place for all Canadians. Thank you for coming here!
@Northernstar, yes what a wonderful story! That’s how I came to feel, it’s how I felt really from the beginning which is why I was so happy to stay and raise my son here.
I think noble said it best as to getting used to the anti Americanism. And now that I think of it, it’s a little funny. I think I felt as liberal as I was and as much as I disagreed with U.S. policy that I was on the same page as they were and certainly didn’t expect comments to become personal on those issues. At any rate that all seems a distant time now.
Northernstar your comments are indeed wonderful!
What I found interesting was that once I’ve landed, I had friends that were actually willing to come across the border to help me get my stuff from my old apartment. That is in sharp contrast to having family here that’s less than an hour away, and none of them are willing to cross the border for even a brief visit.
Alas, my wife and I only have ourselves to blame for moving down to Southern Ontario to be closer to family, but now we’re planning to move back up north to be back with our good friends.
All in all, I’ve don’t regret moving to Canada at all. Not one bit.
And yes, tea bags without strings seem strange, but yet it’s trivial to just fish them out with a spoon, just before I add in the sugar. But what I really like are the butter tarts. ;^)
“But what I really like are the butter tarts. ;^)”
The maple syrup!! I can’t stand the syrup my family uses when I go back for a visit now. Only the real Canadian deal for me.