No, seriously, they totally do! Don’t believe me? Just look at the latest and greatest non-binding bipartisan resolution from Capitol Hill, brought to you by Senators Al Franken & Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI):
A resolution expressing the regret of the Senate for the passage of section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907 (34 Stat. 1228) that revoked the United States citizenship of women who married foreign nationals.
The Expatriation Act of 1907 was not completely repealed until 1940, meaning it took the U.S. government 33 years to fix the problem they created, and 74 years after that to admit that it was a dumb idea in the first place. Hope you aren’t planning to hold your breath for Washington to repeal FATCA and apologise for all the modern-day national origin discrimination which it’s causing.
The relevant section of the Expatriation Act of 1907 read as follows:
§ 3. That any American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband. At the termination of the marital relation she may resume her American citizenship, if abroad, by registering as an American citizen within one year with a consul of the United States, or by returning to reside in the United States, or, if residing in the United States at the termination of the marital relation, by continuing to reside therein.
This section was partially repealed by §§ 3 and 7 of the Cable Act of 1922 (42 Stat. 1022) … but only for those whose spouses were not “ineligible to citizenship” in the United States:
§ 3. That a woman citizen of the United States shall not cease to be a citizen of the United States by reason of her marriage after the passage of this act, unless she makes a formal renunciation of her citizenship before a court having jurisdiction over naturalization of aliens: Provided, That any woman citizen who marries an alien ineligible to citizenship shall cease to be a citizen of the United States. If at the termination of the marital status she is a citizen of the United States she shall retain her citizenship regardless of her residence.
If during the continuance of the marital status she resides continuously for two years in a foreign State of which her husband is a citizen or subject, or for five years continuously outside the United States, she shall thereafter be subject to the same presumption as is a naturalized citizen of the United States under the second paragraph of section 2 of the act entitled “An Act in reference to the expatriation of citizens and their protection abroad,” approved March 2, 1907. (ed.: “When any naturalized citizen shall have resided for two years in the foreign state from which he came, or for five years in any foreign state it shall be presumed that he has ceased to be an American citizen.”)
“Alien ineligible to citizenship” was a code-phrase for Asians. In short, if you were married to someone from India or China or other countries whose immigrants seemed racially threatening to the fevered imaginations of Homelanders, then the government and the masses of newly-empowered Homelander women voters didn’t care about your citizenship problems. Instead you were stuck waiting until the Nationality Act of 1940 repealed the remaining provisions relating to denationalization of American women married to un-Americans and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 eliminated the whole racist category of “aliens ineligible to citizenship”.
Contrary to common misconceptions, the Expatriation Act of 1907 was not directed solely against women, but against many other people who lived abroad, even if they had no foreigners in their immediate family:
§ 6. That all children born outside the limits of the United States who are citizens thereof in accordance with the provisions of section nineteen hundred and ninety-three of the Revised Statutes of the United States and who continue to reside outside the United States shall, in order to receive the protection of this Government, be required upon reaching the age of eighteen years to record at an American consulate their intention to become residents and remain citizens of the United States and shall be further required to take the oath of allegiance to the United States upon attaining their majority.
What’s more amusing is the voting record of these Senators from Wisconsin and Minnesota who are giving themselves a public pat-on-the-back for having oh-so-much-more enlightened views on citizenship than their predecessors. The three sponsors of S.R. 402 who were in Congress when FATCA was passed all voted in favour of it (Franken and Klobuchar in the Senate, and Baldwin in the House after earlier co-sponsoring Lloyd Doggett’s similar Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act). Baldwin also is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which again this year has repeated their perennial tiresome proposals to eliminate the FEIE. Et cetera, ad nauseum.
In other words, they represent the exact same political sentiments which motivated the Expatriation Act of 1907: that people who are intimately connected to foreigners — whether by marrying them or simply by choosing to live among them — are suspicious and un-American and must be placed under enhanced scrutiny and heightened restrictions and extra burdens to ensure they aren’t cheating all the Real Patriotic Citizens. The only difference is that the Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot express these discriminatory sentiments through the nationality law any longer, so instead they express them through the tax law.
And in a crowning touch of irony, the racist Cable Act was actually less restrictive than the modern-day citizenship-based taxation regime: American women in the 1920s could marry Latin Americans and Africans and Eastern Europeans (just not Asians) without losing their U.S. citizenship, but American women and men in the 2010s who dare try to be self-employed in Latin American and African and Eastern European countries are punished with double social-security taxation due to the lack of totalization agreements — which until 2001 were signed solely with Western European countries or countries with settler populations of predominantly Western European extraction, and even since then have only featured two Asian countries and one Latin American one among the new signatories. (Note also that this double taxation is not ameliorated by the § 901 Foreign Tax Credit, which applies only to income taxes, and to add insult to injury there’s the “windfall elimination” provision on top of that.)
A final quote, from S.R. 402:
Resolved, That the Senate—
(1) acknowledges that section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907 (34 Stat. 1228) is incompatible with and antithetical to the core principle that all persons, regardless of gender, race, religion, or ethnicity, are created equal;
(2) expresses sincere sympathy and regret to the descendants of individuals whose citizenship was revoked under section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907, who suffered injustice, humiliation, and inequality, and who were deprived of constitutional protections accorded to all citizens of the United States; and
(3) reaffirms the commitment to preserving civil rights and constitutional protections for all people of the United States.
Prediction: sometime in the early decades of the 22nd century, Senators will take a break from their busy schedule of imposing rightful punishments on those ungrateful traitors who fled the Mother Planet for Mars and the Moon to issue a heartfelt apology to our Canadian and Danish and Japanese descendants for how FATCA messed up great-grandma’s life, and again “reaffirm their commitment to preserving civil rights and constitutional protections for all people” (besides those extraplanetary whiners who refuse to pay their fair share).
Let’s just hope they don’t try to unilaterally restore our great-grandchildren’s “U.S. Personhood” while they’re at it. And that some brave souls will form a Robert Heinlein Society to point out their hypocrisy.
To be blunt, all the Pre-Supreme Court laws where actually a blessing. Why? It made it difficult to keep your US Citizenship. The pendulum has now swung the other way and it is extremely difficult to shed US Citizenship which is against the 21st Century Western Norm.
I am sure many long for the days when to get rid of it, all you needed to do was go and vote in your local election and it was done, no paper work, no long drives, no multiple appointments after long drives and no high fees.
Is anyone else astounded at what a taxpayers money goes towards financing? THIS is what they waste their time doing when there are much more pressing matters going on? The few women this concerns cannot compare to over 7 million expats with pressing and serious concerns?
My oh my. I didn’t know you used to lose your citizenship for having married a foreign national. What goes around comes around doesn’t it because in a sense that’s what’s happening now again to some people. It just took them all this time to make laws that would result in the same thing.
I WISH I’d lost my US citizenship when I married my Canadian only spouse!
@Whitekat, yes for some that would’ve made things so much easier.
I wish there had been a class to attend on the possible fall out of marrying a foreign national and moving abroad. Who knew? Who could have guessed all this draconian baloney would be the result. What sane person would have thought so.
One hand in D.C. never knows what the other hand is doing, so of course they can’t warn anyone of anything because they don’t know. Let the chips fall where they may seems to be their attitude. It’s of no consequence to them so they simply don’t care.
The irony of the apology above. I’m shaking my head over that one.
I am surprised they are not going to give retroactive and likely posthumus US Citizenship.
What a horrid thought.
@George: apparently the guy lobbying for this resolution (one of Franken’s constituents whose grandma lost citizenship under the 1907 Act) actually asked for posthumous citizenship restoration, but Franken told him that wasn’t possible:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-lop/wp/2014/04/03/franken-so-sorry-for-that-terrible-law-100-years-ago/
Here’s an op-ed he wrote in the local paper:
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/186542121.html
The kindest and least offensive thing I can say about this is that I guess I have simply lost the capability to understand his mentality.
Thanks for that @Eric. Learned a lot. Confirms that I was right to think that holding my breath for the great USA to mend its ways on any even small portion of our issues from abroad wasn’t going to work. I finally had to exhale, expel my US citizenship, and take a new breath in as an expatriate and a Canadian citizen only.
This whole subject is fascinating – I’m trying to figure out if it would have affected my grandmother.
Following the various threads, I found this:
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0g500376&chunk.id=d0e1630&toc.id=&brand=ucpress
There’s a master’s thesis waiting to be written, for someone looking for a subject, on the cultural roots of American attitudes to citizens outside the country. (The State Department’s use of the term “absentee citizen,” in the context of “absentee citizenship” being framed as a problem to be solved, is worth a post in its own right.)
Now with FATCA, when a US citizen marries a foreigner it’s the foreigner that loses his or her citizenship.
All the F-ers in Congress wanted to do with FACTA and applying FBAR to American citizens living outside the U.S. was to 1) create a situation that was so financially threatening to Americans that they wouldn’t claim the Social Security benefits they’d been paying into for 30 years or longer (I knew the U.S. was going to try to wiggle its way out of paying our SS to Americans abroad, and 2) to try to create a disincentive for even moderately wealthy Americans from avoiding tax by moving to Canada It’s hard to think of Canada as a tax haven, but I would guess that for those with assets over $1million (perhaps even less) there are loopholes in Canadian tax law that we Canadians of average income don’t have access to, simply because of our average income level. It would have been less messy for everyone if the U.S. had used whatever leverage it has with the Canadian government to close such loopholes, rather than pressure our spineless government into handing over our confidential financial information to a foreign government.
Has any Judge heard the Charter Challenge that was brought as regard the IGA?
@George
Re: “I am surprised they are not going to give retroactive and likely posthumous US Citizenship.”
They are, for taxation purposes, giving retroactive posthumous citizenship.
The retroactive citizenship, being of the Code Sec. 877A type, the deceased will be subject to tax. But it does not confer on them the right to vote, or leave and enter the U.S. at will, etc.
http://maplesandbox.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Malevolent-time-machine_Expats-Live-in-Fear_MJM.pdf
See last paragraph on page 7.
WOW!! An apology, only 100 years too late!
This gesture probably didn’t take much time or effort. It was probably read to an empty chamber as such measures often are.
@Susan Oudekirk
About fifty years ago Canada had some questionable tax provisions, but Canada definitely is now one of the cleaner countries. That is what I find so loopy about FATCA: the IRS is looking at loads of places where tax evasion is highly unlikely. A few countries tax their citizens who move to tax havens, especially high net worth individuals moving to Monaco, but the U.S. is the only one daft enough to pursue non-rich citizens in notoriously high tax countries. No wonder they have to raise money through penalties.
@Publius
No… the low to middle class can’t fight this with our limited funds or we didn’t have good experts to help that didn’t gouge us also. Rich already have experts to help & dang good lawyers to help them structure their means… I was stupid… I dumped it in a bank or did my own investing… Should have put my stuff in a coffee can & buried it…. lol
They waste time and funds on this when there are bigger problems that need their immediate attention?
Actually, the US is standing to lose significant overseas bank deposits from places like Panama, Argentina etc because the condition of FATCA (reciprocity) means that those governments will be able to chase “tax cheats” (or refugees – depends on how you look at it of course) into banks in Florida and Texas. I read recently that several hundred million in deposits have already moved out just on the threat of reciprocity. One man’s tax cheat is another man’s political refugee. Just ask those who fled the (ostensibly legal if morally reprehensible) Nuremberg laws before the war. Plus ca change.
@Susan I think you’re on to something regarding SS. There’s been a drive by both donkeys’ and elephants to find ways to cut into it without it actually looking as if that’s what they’re doing.
@ Susan O
Like Atticus, I think you are onto something too. My husband has decided not to claim SS — at least not until he is 70 or older (that’s providing it is still available then) — because after he is free and clear of the USA he doesn’t really want to get entangled again. Maybe that is what they are counting on.
I have my suspicions you will see the end of the USA dollar dominance by July 1 2014. This slap in the face to other countries has them thinking and really thinking hard. This is being seen as a wake-up call to other countries to rid themselves of the fact that their countries success is based upon the success of the USA. The USA is heading for financial failure and the notion that all other countries will fail as well doesn’t sit well with the people who live in these countries. Fatca is a wake-up and a dam good one…… you’ll see!
@native canadian
I agree with you about the loss of teh USD as prominent and reserve currency but I think it will be more gradual unless of unforseen shocks……. and am in the process of liquidating my last USD account stateside….
as I have said before apart from myparents, one or two cousins and 2 very good friends, I would not work, visit or travel there if it were not absolutely necessary for family reasons.
keep the faith brockers, just waiting for opening of the next phase of the 3C F fund for the challenge….. i only wish we had the Calgary 411 equivalents inthe UK along withall the other Fantublous CA folks that got IBS going…. you give me hope.
@CRYSTAL LONDON “you give me hope”
My sentiment as well.
The conclusion I see with our “system” the way it is, unless there is either bloodshed or illegal things done, our government will continue with their “dictatorship” ways. sorry to say that, but seems to be true.
Americans: This Is How Free You Really Are
Among all the great stories and conversations passed down from the ages, probably my favorite is one from the ancient historian Lucius Cassius Dio about Roman emperor Caracalla.
Caracalla ruled in the second century AD, and he was notorious for bankrupting the Roman treasury and waging costly, unnecessary wars.
Dio tells us that Caracalla made “one excuse after another and one war after another; but he made it his business to strip, despoil, and grind down all the rest of mankind.”
Under Caracalla, Rome was broke. And Dio recounts a story between the emperor and his mother Julia:
Julia to the emperor: “There is no longer any source of revenue, either just or unjust, left to us.”
The emperor replied, pointing to his sword, “Be of good cheer, mother: for as long as we have this [the sword], we shall not run short of money.”
Caracalla’s words summed up Roman tax policy at the time. It is perhaps not too far from modern tax policy either.
Today is tax day in the Land of the Free– the deadline for roughly 150 million individual tax returns to be filed.
Of course, those who refuse will be hauled off to prison at the point of a gun (we’ve advanced beyond swords). And everybody knows it.
The IRS is legendary in this respect. Those three simple letters inspire fear, dread, and panic across the world.
The IRS “brand” is probably almost as famous as Coca Cola… but for all the wrong reasons.
It seems completely incongruent for a nation that is supposed to stand for the ideals of freedom and justice to be world famous for its medieval prosecution of tax policy.
And there’s one clear example that I want to tell you about today.
If you are a US taxpayer with foreign financial accounts (such as a bank, brokerage, or potentially even a gold storage account overseas), there’s a fairly new disclosure form that you must file to the IRS today along with your 1040.
It’s called form 8938. And if you’ve never heard about it, I definitely recommed you speak to your tax advisor pronto.
Like all of these other tax forms, they threaten you with all sorts of fees, interest, penalties, and of course, jail time.
(The US is one of the only civilized countries in the world where taxation creates -criminal- liability. Again, totally incongruent.)
What’s interesting about this is that it’s possible there could be certain instances and certain places in the world where the local privacy laws could make it -illegal- to disclose this information to the IRS.
But the US government doesn’t care.
And on page 7 of the instructions for form 8938, they say that even if “a foreign jurisdiction would impose a civil or criminal penalty on you if you disclose the required information,” then they still expect you to file the form.
File the form and go to jail. Don’t file the form and go to jail.
Is this really what a ‘free society’ puts its citizens through?
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-15/americans-how-free-you-really-are
@Native Canadian
Yes sadly we must become like our neighbors to the south and arm ourselves to defend ourselves. This is totally normal in the USSA and man Canadians do the same but with stricter gun laws of course. We MUST, all Canadians arm ourselves in some manner. It is INEVITABLE that our governments will attack it’s citizens and forewarned is forearmed. This is why I keep suggesting that people who believe in working inside the system are delusional. The New World Order is upon us and things will never return to the good old days will not return
The Prophecy of our Times
While your facts and some adjectives are not completely accurate, I just completed a dissertation on the topic and Candace Bredbenner published a book about called A nationality of Her Own highlighting the American response to the 1907 Expatriation Act, I am glad that some people are having a discussion about this aspect of American history. Interestingly, the events in America regarding the 1907 law, the Cable Act of 1922, and the four other laws meant to amend both laws, not to mention the Montevideo Convention, were part of an international movement to repeal such laws in countries all over the world.