After the jump I’ve translated an old article from Money Today that I came across recently. It was written in 2009, right around the time that MC the Max bassist Yoon Jae-woong renounced his U.S. citizenship, and mentioned a number of other South Korean celebrities — comprising both native-born U.S. citizens as well as naturalised and unnaturalised immigrants — who decided to stop being U.S. Persons.

With the release of the latest Federal Register “published expatriates” list, the demagogues in the U.S. media are coming out in force to spread their typical lies about how we U.S. Persons abroad are all mink-swathed Benedict Arnolds skipping out on our tax bills after enjoying the benefits of U.S. citizenship. So once again I repeat the simple truth which is illustrated by every non-U.S. media story about renunciants: those of us who give up U.S. citizenship have been contributing members of society in other countries for years. We are not fugitives from the U.S. who snuck out on the night of 14 April. Even before the recent U.S. crackdown on non-U.S. bank accounts, celebrities and ordinary people living ordinary lives outside of the U.S. were happy to give up a U.S. passport from which they derived little or no concrete benefit, so that they could step forward to further success in the countries where they actually lived.

해외 시민권·영주권 포기, 입대 선택한 ★은?	Which stars chose to give up foreign citizenship or permanent residence and enlist in the military?
http://www.mt.co.kr/view/mtview.php?type=1&no=2009091716463009100&outlink=1
머니투데이 김훈남 기자, 2009.09.19	Money Today reporter Kim Hoon-nam, 19 September 2009
해외 영주권 혹은 시민권을 획득해 국방의 의무가 없지만 성실히 군역을 이행한 스타들. 왼쪽부터 시계방향으로 제이윤, 이루마, 연정훈, 토니안 ⓒ사진=머니투데이 사진DB	If you obtain foreign permanent residence or citizenship, you no longer have any national defence obligation, but these celebrities are faithfully performing their military service. From the left in clockwise order: Jay Yoon, Yiruma, Yeon Jung-hoon, and Tony Ahn. Photograph ⓒ Money Today, photograph database
16일 신종병역기피 수법이 적발되면서 다시 병역비리가 수면 위로 떠오른 가운데, 엠씨더맥스의 제이윤(윤재웅·26)이 17일 논산훈련소로 입소했다. 제이윤이 미국 시민권을 포기하고 입대한 사실이 알려지면서 해외 시민권 혹은 영주권을 포기하고 성실히 군복무를 마친 연예인들에 대한 관심도 높아졌다.	On the 16th, there were disclosures of new methods of avoiding military service, and the topic of draft evasion has floated up again, but in the midst of all this, on the 17th MC the Max’s Jay Yoon (Yoon Jae-woong, 26) was admitted to the Nonsan Training Camp. It’s a well-known fact that Yoon gave up his U.S. citizenship so that he could enlist, heightening people’s interest in actors who gave up overseas citizenship or permanent residency and faithfully completed military service.

You might ask why one country keeps producing all these reports of renunciants who don’t appear in the IRS list — but as far as I can tell that impression is merely due to selection bias. There’s confirmed cases of people from a wide variety of countries who gave up U.S. citizenship but whose names don’t show up either — too many to lend credence to the theory that they’re all lying about their renunciations or that the reports are all due to media misunderstandings. It’s just that because of the military service angle, Korean media tends to be the most vocal when a Korean American man renounces, whereas most Japanese or Jamaican celebrities and their PR agencies don’t make a big deal out of the same event and so we don’t read about it as often in the papers.

I haven’t been able to find any clear reports on when Cha first obtained his green card, and anyway he had already given it up by the time Congress first decided to extend LBJ’s expatriation tax to green card holders. Yeon, however, appears to have been a “long-term permanent resident” for purposes of § 877(e): he was born in 1978, moved to the U.S. in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and then didn’t give up his green card until more than a decade later.

It’s also not quite clear when (or even whether) the Federal Register list began including green-card-holders: the law mandating publication (§ 6039G(d)) has always required USCIS to forward information about them to the IRS, and all we know is that a notice began appearing in the Q1 2012 “name-and-shame list” that “For purposes of this listing, long-term residents, as defined in section 877(e)(2), are treated as if they were citizens of the United States who lost citizenship”. The only other confirmed case I’ve heard of a long-term green-card-holder abandoning his status (Ok Taec-yeon, previously discussed here) is also from before 2012.

Yiruma, the sole British citizen mentioned in this article, is entitled under the British Nationality Act 1981 to resume his U.K. citizenship at any time he wants. Many of us Americans abroad have held U.S. citizenship all these years either through negligence or ignorance, or at most as a token of our identity, a reminder of our childhoods and our connection to the people in a distant motherland with whom we foolishly imagined we shared some bond. Other countries are happy to facilitate the maintenance of this kind of connection with their diasporae, and even to let them restore the bond if they had earlier decided to break it. The U.S. is nowhere near this mature: in the imaginations of the folks back home, we emigrants are un-American freeloaders whose very presence abroad imposes costs on the Homeland.

The logical step is for us to end the relationship in which both parties feel abused. Sadly, like in any other kind of human relationship, this only leads to further recriminations.

Crown J’s biography gives his real name as Kim Kei-Hoon, while Eru’s real name is reported to be Cho Sung-hyun. The latter name might also be spelled Jo Seong-hyeon or otherwise; South Korean media aren’t usually very careful about confirming what spelling a person prefers when they translate their articles into English. However, no person by any name similar to either of those has ever appeared in the Federal Register. I wasn’t seriously expecting that Crown J would, but Eru was a citizen, so his name certainly should have been published; I guess that just makes him one more example to add to the ever-growing list of people who failed to show up in the Federal Register after 2006.

On a slightly different topic: the Defence Media Agency was a special unit whose members were colloquially known as “entertainment soldiers”. After completing basic training, some actors & singers would be assigned to the unit to hold concerts for the troops to boost morale and appear on government propaganda programs. However, ordinary conscripts resented the special privileges enjoyed by “entertainment soldiers”, making the morale-boosting efforts counterproductive, and just a few weeks ago the government announced that it would eliminate the unit and reassign all the celebrities to ordinary duties.

Obviously, the pop stars & their managers won’t be too happy about this, but I highly doubt it’ll result in a decrease in the number of pop stars with U.S. citizenship or PR who choose to cancel it to serve in the army; they’re members of the society in which they actually live, and they’ll fulfill their duties in that society as the prerequisite to continuing acceptance.

All the recent jump in renunciations proves is that U.S. citizenship is not a status symbol or a mystic protective talisman, and when it becomes a barrier to their happiness in the places they call home, people will drop it like a stone. Even people in Seoul who live about two hour’s drive away from a thirty-year-old dictator with nuclear missiles and a starving populace.