Update, 24 April 2014: As it turns out, Adam Geller of the Associated Press has finally overturned my prediction that you’d never see Davis’ story in the U.S. media; he interviewed Davis for his story “More renounce U.S. citizenship, but deny stereotype”:

When the team’s owner suggested last year that he join Taiwan’s national team, Davis says he found little motivation to keep his U.S. citizenship. “When you think about who I am as a black guy in the U.S., I didn’t have opportunities,” he says. “You get discriminated against over there in the South. Here everyone is so nice. They invite you into their homes, they’re so hospitable. … There’s no crime, no guns. I can’t help but love this place.”

Geller’s story also contains other familiar names. I’m very happy to see that my initial prediction turned out to be wrong, and that the Isaac Brock Society is succeeding in drawing media attention to the real diversity of motivations among people who decide to stop being U.S. citizens.

Here’s another story you’ll never see in the U.S. media about an American planning to renounce U.S. citizenship to naturalise elsewhere: Quincy Davis, a Los Angeles native & Tulane University graduate who left the U.S. in 2006 to join a basketball team in Cyprus, and now plays in Taiwan. Davis applied to naturalise as a Taiwanese citizen last month so he can represent his adopted home in international competitions; United Daily News reported last week that his application is still in progress. After the jump I’ve translated a longer article from earlier last month about his reasons for naturalising in Taiwan, and the issues he faced.

Davis’s case falls somewhere in between the NBC Nightly News myth of “wealthy traitors fleeing the country to avoid the estate tax” and the more common reality of ordinary people who have lived in other countries for decades and are happy to give up U.S. citizenship to become full members of their societies. Davis is certainly well-off, but nowhere near as well-off as the Homelanders who are moving to Puerto Rico and — unlike actual emigrants — thereafter enjoy a complete exemption from capital gains tax on U.S. assets. And moreover, like nearly everyone else who comes to the decision to give up U.S. citizenship, he left the U.S. as a young adult in the course of pursuing success, put down roots elsewhere, and has a dream to keep chasing after he’s no longer a U.S. citizen.

Which of course is why you’ll never see the Homeland media print a word about him in between their endless repetitions of the names of Kenneth Dart, Eduardo Saverin, and Denise Rich.

And if that wasn’t enough, there’s reports that another American basketballer in Taiwan — Rolando Howell — is also thinking of renouncing U.S. citizenship.

One of the ex-Americans whom Davis might face on the court is the former Eric Sandrin — now legally known as Lee Seung-jun — who naturalised as a South Korean citizen in 2009 so he could represent the country at the 2010 Asian Games. Other U.S. natives who have given up citizenship so they could represent their chosen homes in sport include Sandrin’s younger brother Daniel who is also now South Korean, equestrian Jennifer Snow Lee of Hong Kong, as well as skater Cathy Reed and sumo wrestler Takamiyama Daigorō (the former Jesse Kuhaulua) both of Japan.

Americans often look down on athletes and entertainers who achieve success overseas rather than in the U.S. — witness the derogatory descriptor “big in Japan”. This is part of the more widespread view that you have to live in the U.S. in order to be “truly American”; in the American national mythology of reverse migration, the only people who leave the U.S. for other countries are “failed migrants”: the sick, the indigent, the “self-deporters”, and the losers who “couldn’t assimilate”, whereas the ones who stayed are defined circularly as the “successful” by their U.S.-born descendants.

Recently in Taiwan, there’s been some discussion about amending the nationality law to permit applicants for naturalisation to retain their earlier citizenships; native-born citizens in Taiwan are already permitted to obtain other citizenships without giving up their green passports, and the amendment has been described as simply levelling the playing field. One of the legislators behind the push is Hsiao Bi-khim, herself of mixed race and a former U.S. citizen as well — she renounced in 2000 when she first ran for legislative office, and suggested the amendments last December.

However, this proposal is not necessarily popular among existing naturalised citizens, who often feel that willingness to give up your previous citizenship is a reasonable mark of commitment to one’s new country. One proponent of this view is T.C. Lin, a former American who naturalised in Taiwan in the mid-1990s — back when that involved six months of hanging around in Hong Kong as a stateless refugee waiting for two countries’ bureaucracies to push papers around — and did his two years in the army at the height of the third Taiwan Straits crisis, when Beijing was busy lobbing missiles into the Pacific Ocean.

Amusingly enough, Lin was among the first group of renunciants who ever had their names officially published as part of a State Department list of one thousand names in 1995 — before then, the identities and total number of renunciants were closely-guarded government secrets. Soon after, mendacious Congresscritters like Lloyd Doggett proclaimed him and everyone else in that list to be part of a dangerous wave of “economic Benedict Arnolds” who “have grown so prosperous, they can denounce [sic] their citizenship and discover one day that the Port Royal Golf Course in Bermuda is their hometown”, in order to justify raising the renunciation tax and applying it to ex-green card holders as well.

If Hsu had been better-advised about his negotiating strategy, he would have pointed out to Davis that if he doesn’t naturalise, his bank is probably going to kick him out sometime next year — Taiwan has announced that it will negotiate a FATCA IGA with the United States, specifically a “Model II” agreement. No doubt the agreement will contain a clause mandating that the few banks which want to qualify for the extremely narrow and restrictive “local FFI” deemed-compliance category will be prohibited from discriminating against Americans — but it will contain no such restriction on other banks. Taiwan’s discrimination laws will be of little aid to Davis in trying to right this situation either, since they focus primarily on employment discrimination rather than discrimination against customers.

Even before the raise he’s been promised, Davis was already earning a six-figure salary, and so probably owed a few thousand dollars a year in U.S. taxes, plus whatever he’s paying to accountants to keep him compliant on the intrusive and dangerous paperwork the U.S. uses as an excuse to slam emigrants with $13,000 fines on $21/year tax deficiencies. And of course, as few Homelanders understand, emigrants also have to pay taxes in the countries where they actually live — in Davis’ case, at Taiwan’s top marginal rate of 40%, higher than in the United States.

This part about restoring U.S. citizenship is of course complete nonsense, but it’s an article of faith among rabble-rousers on both sides of Taiwan’s political spectrum that some government officials on the other side who lived in the U.S. before are faking their renunciations, and these myths about the ease of regaining citizenship — roughly the Taiwanese equivalent of U.S. conspiracy theories about Obama being Kenyindonesian and Romney being Mexican — have unfortunately leaked down into ordinary non-political discourse. Allegedly, these officials renounce their U.S. citizenship only to go resume it through some mysterious procedure described nowhere in the Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Manual, which in reality instructs consular officers to warn soon-to-be-ex-citizens that renunciation is final and irrevocable.

Since Davis is not married to a U.S. citizen, his only option for moving back to the U.S. is through an F1 green card sponsored by his parents. According to the State Department’s latest visa bulletin, the current wait time for an F1 (at least for people other than mainland Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, and Mexicans) is seven years. If Davis meets the right non-American woman while he’s waiting and decides to settle down with her, his parents or his siblings will have to file a new F3 or F4 petition for him, and his wait time goes up to more than a decade. Furthermore, as South Korean newspapers have pointed out, even ex-U.S. citizens who returned to the U.S. with green cards generally have not found it possible to re-naturalise.

All this assumes the U.S. immigration laws don’t change. With immigration reform in the pipeline, a number of provisions could make it even harder for Davis to qualify for a green card. First, the F4 (sibling) category might be eliminated entirely. Second, the F1 and F3 categories might be restricted to children under the age of 31 — Davis already turned 30 in February. And finally, if demagogues like Jack Reed, Chuck Schumer, and Orrin Hatch have their way, Davis could be permanently exiled from the land of his birth and not even allowed to come back as a tourist.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that Davis simply doesn’t have any interest in moving to the U.S. after he retires from his basketball career in Taiwan anyway, and his public comments were simply part of his negotiating strategy.