Peter Spiro has talked about the possibility of Secret Americans (put the passport in a drawer and forget about it) on Opinio Juris and one of his latest posts about it is well worth reading.
So how could this phenomenon be measured? What would be the indicators? Passports not renewed? Any ideas, anyone?
Unfortunately, the available statistics are not very good. The Bureau of Consular Affairs publishes four tables of passport application/issuance statistics. At first glance, two look useful for our purposes: “Passport Issuance by State per Fiscal Year (2007 to 2013)”, and “U.S. Passports Issued per Fiscal Year (2013 – 1996)”.
You might think of subtracting the former number from the latter to get the number of passport issuances abroad. That at least gives us a baseline figure: in 2007, State seems to have issued 298,509 U.S. passports abroad. After that, things get more complicated, because in 2008 they introduced “passport cards”. From then on, the overall passport issuance statistics are given both with passport cards included and broken out, but it’s not clear how to interpret the state-level statistics: passports cards included or excluded, or number of applications whether for passports or cards or both?
Whichever interpretation you prefer, it’s hard to make much sense of the numbers. There’s clearly been a decline in passport issuance abroad between 2011 and 2013, but does that still leave us above the 2007 issuance level, or below it? How much of that is normal cyclical fluctuation, and how much of that is due to members of the diaspora deciding that now is a good time to avoid any contact with the increasingly diaspora-hating Homeland government?
In general
First, keep in mind that not all passports issued abroad are to people actually living abroad; some go to Homelanders who have lost their passports while on a trip overseas. But these shouldn’t be very many — offhand I couldn’t find any statistics for the numbers of Americans who lose their passports, but over in the Mother Country, only around 30,000 passports get reported missing per year.
The U.S. has only about three times as many passports in circulation as the U.K.; even if Americans have a higher propensity for losing their passports, this phenomenon should only account for maybe a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand passport issuances abroad per year. Finally, it’s not clear that these passport statistics include limited-validity passports anyway.
If state-level statistics exclude passport cards: 83% drop in passport issuance abroad in 2012?
| FY2007 | FY2008 | FY2009 | FY2010 | FY2011 | FY2012 | FY2013 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (a) Total of “Passport Issuance by State” | 18,084,289 | 15,792,148 | 13,078,238 | 13,534,817 | 11,091,274 | 11,767,067 | 12,083,150 |
| (c) “U.S. Passports Issued” (excluding passport cards) | 18,382,798 | 15,942,976 | 12,625,453 | 13,238,212 | 11,440,061 | 11,825,684 | 12,120,892 |
| Passports issued abroad (if (a) excludes passport cards) | 298,509 | 150,828 | -452,785 | -296,605 | 348,787 | 58,617 | 37,742 |
If the state-level statistics do not include passport cards, we are left with the amusing conclusion that the State Department issued negative three quarters of a million passports to U.S. citizens abroad in FY2009–2010. (Or that someone fat-fingered the numbers.) However, let’s ignore those two years and look just at the overall trend. Under this assumption it seems that passport issuance to citizens abroad remained in the low hundreds of thousands before suddenly falling off a cliff in 2012.
That year 2012 was, of course, the same year when FATCA publicity began in earnest, and the first full year of operation of the Isaac Brock Society. No doubt some U.S. citizens who’d moved abroad in 2002 and had no contact with the U.S. government since then probably realised that 2012 was not an opportune moment to remind the Homeland bureaucracy of their existence, especially given the requirement under 26 USC § 6039E for State to forward passport application information to the IRS.
But five-sixths of them seems an improbably large decline — even under the most extreme assumptions, I estimate that only about 25% of American parents who had kids abroad are deciding to hide their kids from the U.S. government by not filing a Consular Report of Birth Abroad. And finally, these numbers are too small to account for any passport issuance to Homelanders who lost their passports while on holiday abroad.,
If state-level statistics include passport cards: 1.5 million passports per year issued abroad???
| FY2007 | FY2008 | FY2009 | FY2010 | FY2011 | FY2012 | FY2013 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (a) Total of “Passport Issuance by State” | 18,084,289 | 15,792,148 | 13,078,238 | 13,534,817 | 11,091,274 | 11,767,067 | 12,083,150 |
| (b) “U.S. Passports Issued” (including passport cards) | 18,382,798 | 16,132,536 | 14,170,171 | 14,794,604 | 12,613,153 | 13,125,829 | 13,529,757 |
| Passports issued abroad (if (a) includes passport cards) | 298,509 | 340,388 | 1,091,933 | 1,259,787 | 1,521,879 | 1,358,762 | 1,446,607 |
Let’s start by assuming that the state-level numbers do include passport cards. This would imply that passport issuance to citizens abroad more than quintupled between 2007 and 2011 for no reason I can discern, and remains at the improbably high level of nearly 1.5 million.
There was indeed a huge surge in passport demand in both Canada and the U.S. beginning in 2007, generally attributed to the entry into force of Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) rules requiring proof of nationality for air travel between the two countries. The most common proof of nationality, of course, is a passport — in fact it was often the only one available, until some U.S. states & Canadian provinces started producing “enhanced driver’s licences”.
Passports have the dreaded “place of birth” field, and so a number of Canadians born in the U.S. — including some people here at the Isaac Brock Society — encountered U.S border guards who told them that, as “Americans”, they should get U.S. passports. In some cases, this was done in a friendly manner: well-meaning but ill-informed Homelanders genuinely see a U.S. passport as a good thing to have, and so they think they’re doing foreign visitors a favour by informing them of their eligiblity. In other cases, this was a not-so-veiled threat: you have a U.S. passport so you’re a U.S. citizen until we say you’re not; get one of our passports or we’re gonna ruin your visit.
However, there’s no way this phenomenon could account for seven million U.S. passports issued abroad between 2008 and 2013 (even if a million of those went to Homelanders who’d lost their passports while on holiday). This would require nearly every U.S.-born person or child of an American emigrant deciding to get a U.S. passport during that period — whether they never had a U.S. passport in the first place, had one that expired long ago, or had a current one that they inexplicably decided to renew years before it expired. (And since this would mean nearly every single American and potential American abroad now has a U.S. passport, almost none should be applying for new ones until around 2018.)
If state-level statistics represent applications: hard to interpret
| FY2007 | FY2008 | FY2009 | FY2010 | FY2011 | FY2012 | FY2013 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (a) Total of “Passport Issuance by State” | 18,084,289 | 15,792,148 | 13,078,238 | 13,534,817 | 11,091,274 | 11,767,067 | 12,083,150 | |
| Successful applications | Lower bound (3% rejection) | 18,382,798 (1.07% rejection) |
15,572,706 | 13,623,793 | 13,584,949 | 11,667,849 | 12,106,583 | 12,293,686 |
| Upper bound (1% rejection) | 15,893,793 | 13,904,696 | 13,865,051 | 11,908,423 | 12,356,203 | 12,547,164 | ||
| Passports issued abroad (if (a) is applications) | Lower bound (3% rejection) | 298,509 | -219,442 | 545,555 | 50,132 | 576,575 | 339,516 | 210,536 |
| Upper bound (1% rejection) | 101,646 | 826,458 | 330,234 | 817,149 | 589,136 | 464,014 | ||
The remaining possibility is that the state-level statistics represent the number of successful applications. One application can be either for a passport card, a regular passport, or both; those who apply for both fill out only one application form, and are only counted once in the application statistics. That is, in fact, the basis for the numbers in the BCA’s table on “Passport Applications Received”.
State doesn’t tell us the rejection rate or any other statistics that might be useful in figuring out the number of successful applications; however, you can calculate the acceptance rate by using passport issuances divided by passport applications from 2007 or earlier (when every application was for precisely one passport without any passport card). There shouldn’t be too much time mismatch between the two statistics, since passport applications are generally processed in a matter of weeks, rather than months or years like CLN applications. This gives us an estimated passport application rejection rate of between one and three percent, roughly. So let’s assume that the rejection rate remained in that range between 2008 and 2013.
The resulting numbers for passport issuance abroad are all over the place, ranging from the low to high hundreds of thousands. This isn’t completely implausible given the size of the diaspora, but the only thing we can really say with a reasonable degree of certainty under this interpretation is that fewer passports are being issued abroad in 2013 than in 2011. The exact degree of the decline depends on your assumption for what the passport application rejection rate (and hence the number of successful applications) should be in each year — the drop could be as slight as one-fifth, or as sharp as three-quarters.
State keeps better statistics internally
Of course, someone could always write to the State Department and ask what their statistics mean. Maybe State even knows the answer and would be willing to give it to us, unlike the CLN statistics. However, if you’re going to go to all the trouble of writing, why not ask for better statistics than the ones they release on the internet? For example, in 2010, Dr. Claire M. Smith for the Overseas Vote Foundation was able to obtain more detailed statistics on passport issuance following Consular Reports of Birth Abroad for her paper on “Civilian Americans Overseas and Voter Turnout”, which even included a regional breakdown of births.
Outstanding, Eric. Thank you!
It really is hard to interpret. I’m thinking a FOIA for some of these numbers to see if we could get better data.
Of course, after my last try at doing that (FATCA-related request) I was told to go pound sand. However, I have vacationed well this summer and I’m getting my motivation back.
@Eric – It IS confusing and I too have tried to make heads or tails of it. Let’s start with what we know. Passport cards are the equivalent of “enhanced driver’s licenses” in some Canadian provinces. They may not be used for travel by air and thus can only be used at land or sea crossings and only in the N. American/Caribbean sphere. Further, passport cards can be issued to someone who already has a passport. In short, while I think they introduce a level of confusion, I think that passport cards can and should be disregarded by and large from any analysis of US passports issued to/held by long term non-residents.
The interest in the exercise was and is determining how many of the estimated one million “US Persons” in Canada are, to borrow a phrase from the field of religion, “practicing Americans”. I would loosely describe these as people who do some or all of the following three external “acts of citizenship”: holding a passport, voting, filing tax returns. I think it is fair to say that no matter how you slice the numbers, only a minority of US Persons potentially impacted by FATCA can be said to be “practicing Americans” (using my loose definition). Unfortunately, precision (and in particlar, precision as regards the number of “practicing Americans” in Canada) is hard to come by. This WILL be a useful part of Mr. Arvay’s argument (blunting the “just renounce” argument – these are not “free riders” seeking the inestimable blessings of US citizenship coupled with a selfish refusal to submit humbly to its burdens: for the most part, Canadians with US indicia caught by C31 are simply Canadians with no ACTUAL current connections to US citizenship. Given the utility of this evidence, it would be helpful if our Brocker community could roll up its sleeves and help to develop the evidentiary basis to establish:
– how many tax returns filed in the US by Canadian residents?
– how many passports outstanding issued by consulates or embassies in Canada?
– how many votes cast or ballots applied for from Canada?
Note, our data on all of these will be imperfect (or at least mine was). However if we collaborate in true “wiki” style, we might collectively do a better job than any of us do individually.
Tax Returns: others have spent much more time than I browsing data bases on this. I have seen for example a reference to 31,000 returns claiming earned income exclusion from Canada (or it may have been foreign tax credit from Canada?). I have seen data showing less than half a million returns designated “international” (sent in from post offices outside the US). We will need to get PRECISE data with footnotes (i.e. source cited accurately) to be able to use this. Clearly the number is a fraction of the approx. 8 million expats claimed by the State Department.
Passports: I would be inclined to ignore the passport cards and focus on State Department statistics on total passports outstanding (not merely issued in a given year). 2007 is a good baseline since cards were not issued that year. The data I downloaded from State (and I guess I will need to go back and identify the source link if the litigation team is going to be able to use it) was 18.3 million passports issued that year out of 82.1 million passports in circulation. Of the new passports, 1.62% were NOT issued out of any State. As such, I concluded that the TOTAL of passports held by non-residents will not exceed that total (1.62%). I couldn’t tell much about how many of the 82.1 million total outstanding passports were issued outside the US. As you point out, some of those would of course be lost passports or temporary non-residents (somebody sent to work in London for three years is still a Canadian resident for tax purposes unless they sever links). The figures get messed up after 2007 since I have no idea how many Canadians, for example, got themselves a passport card as a simple US citizenship certificate to stick inside their Canadian passport when crossing the border. I doubt it’s a big number, but I can’t tell unless State publishes more detailed stats. You are correct that the total number of passports outstanding has actually dropped quite a bit (after spiking up following 9/11 and increased security issues). Bottom line is something like a million passports are apparently outstanding to people outside the US. It would be useful to refine that number more and, if possible, figure out the Canadian number. Still, only a fraction of the total potential diaspora of US Persons actually walks around with a US passport in their pocket (or in their safe deposit box).
Voting – haven’t looked this one up. I have seen others cite half a million world wide if I remember correctly. Again, if we can get better numbers or Canadian numbers it would be helpful.
The point of all of this – and it is not a HUGE point, just one that will be useful – is to note that FATCA sweeps in lots of people with only nominal or stale ties to the US. Given the lack of mandatory CLN’s, under US law for citizenship purposes (or even for tax purposes prior to s. 877), it is more logical to assume that most if not all of the non-practicing Americans are not actually American at all yet C31 and the IGA deems them “guilty” and thus susceptible to having their Charter rights violated until the discharge a burden of proving their innocence to an unknown standard (“reasonable explanation” for lack of a CLN – in whose judgment?).
Impressed by your analytics
@Anne Frank, “having their Charter rights violated until the discharge a burden of proving their innocence to an unknown standard (“reasonable explanation” for lack of a CLN – in whose judgment?).”
That should be a further point in the challenge.
The Government will say someone needs to “only” provide a “reasonable explanation” as to why they do not have a CLN.
But you have now nailed it, the standard is not defined!!
Two points to consider:
First, the relationship of military station abroad to carrying of U.S. passport.
Second, this passport renewal exception for Canada.
http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/passports/renew.html
I clicked on the link for 26USC 6039E and saw this:
“(b) Information to be provided
Information required under subsection (a) shall include—
“(1) the taxpayer’s TIN (if any),”
I find the inclusion of those two little bracketed words “(if any)” to be very revealing. The use of these words would seem to me to indicate that the US government is recognizing situations in which a passport applicant may not have a TIN. Ergo, it is tacitly recognizing that there may be passport applicants who are *not* US taxpayers because taxpayers have to have a TIN to pay their taxes!
Any thoughts on this?
@MuzzledNoMore: if you don’t have an SSN in the first place, the Internal Revenue Manual says:
http://www.irs.gov/irb/2012-13_IRB/ar14.html
This suggests that never having been issued an SSN is indeed “reasonable cause” for purposes of the $500 fine. Unfortunately, either way the IRS gets the passport applicant’s name, address, and other identifying information.
A bit more info here
http://www.irs.gov/irm/part20/irm_20-001-009-cont02.html#d0e5357
Eric: Thanks for the reply. Do I understand that if you fill out a passport application with zeros that you are actually signing up for a $500 penalty if you do so? Or do you mean that showing you had no SSN is reasonable cause that you should *not* be assessed this penalty?
@usxcanada:
What is that relationship? Surely they can renew their passports on-base, and don’t have to go to an embassy or consulate? (Don’t actually have any idea how that works, myself.)
State is running another passport demand forecasting study
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/10/27/2014-25473/30-day-notice-of-proposed-information-collection-passport-demand-forecasting-study
Just came across the form letter that the IRS uses to warn people who didn’t provide an SSN with a US passport application. They estimate that they’ll need to use this on 2,000 people per year.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/05/04/2015-10321/proposed-collection-comment-request-for-form-13997
South Korean passport issuance by overseas diplomatic missions:
http://www.mofa.go.kr/state/publication/whitepaper/2014/20141028/2014_etc.pdf#page=27
2008: 190,791
2009: 229,370
2010: 197,863
2011: 174,319
2012: 146,040
2013: 115,952
31.4% decline from 2010 to 2013, mirrored by overall downward trend in passport issuance (down by 18.5% from 2010 to 2013). I think the explanation is that there was a surge in people renewing their passports after South Korea introduced biometric passports in 2007 (since visa-free entry in some countries demanded biometric passports), and now that most people who want one have one the rate of issuance is declining to its earlier level.
I may have underestimated that. State is expecting 527,334 people per year to file Form DS-64, “Statement Regarding a Lost or Stolen U.S. Passport Book and/or Card”. Not clear how many of those are abroad, but it seems far more Americans than Brits lose their passports.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/05/26/2015-12647/30-day-notice-of-proposed-information-collection-statement-regarding-a-lost-or-stolen-us-passport
FWIW. An updated DoS/ BCA Fact Sheet is available dated May 2015. It mentions that 8.7 million US citizens live abroad:
http://travel.state.gov/content/dam/travel/CA%20by%20the%20Numbers-%20May%202015.pdf
The last East German prime minister, Lothar de Maizière, is quoted as saying that watching East Germans leave when the country was collapsing was watching “our future run away”. At some point the US politicians may begin to panic. Some figures on the evolution of Americans living abroad:
1999: 3’784’693
2009: 5’256’600
2011: 6’320’000
Jan 2013: 6’800’000
May 2014: 7’600’000
May 2015: 8’700’000
Source: DoS
The purported numbers of US citizens abroad (“living” is undefined) is meaningless. The US Government does not necessarily know who its citizens are unless they have a passport or were born and are known to be living in the USA. There was and is no basis for the sudden increases in reported population. Under a million tax returns are filed from abroad (including APO/FPO and US territories with mirror taxes (meaning most locals do not file federal returns). The more interesting data, especially for this Web site, relates to unreported births of those with a probable claim to US nationality, those who have discarded (or not renewed) passports and have no intention of traveling to the USA (and who may seek their own (“other”) government’s protection as international law may allow them to do.
It was American Citizens Abroad that first put forward a number around 7 million. It’s in the State Department’s budgetary interest to accept an exaggerated and unprovable number.
For many purported US citizens abroad the major issue is not taxes or FATCA but PFIC. In those countries without tax treaties addressing pension issues and child benefit programmes (as in Canada with RDSPs) the PFIC implications can be catastrophic. The number of families abroad affected — whether they know it or not — probably numbers in the millions. Few could afford the costs of US tax return preparation, much less OVDP or any other resolution.
Those with the nationality of the country where they live may benefit from exclusion clauses in the mutual collection of tax debt provisions being proposed for new treaties, but that leaves open the question of EU/EEA/Swiss citizens exercising their right of establishment. There is also the proposed extradition treaty provisions relating to tax crimes, although bad experience with the US-UK treaty (presented as an anti-terrorism agreement but in fact largely used to extradite individuals accused of tax crimes who are then denied legal aid and commonly forced into plea bargains: see “Natwest Three”) may mean that not every foreign country will agree.
The FIFA extradition requests may teach us something about USG practice in extraterritorial law.
I haven’t found online any estimate for the number of enhanced driving licenses issued by those (border, I think) states that issue them. They need to be taken account of in estimating demand for passports.
@foo wrote: “What is that relationship? Surely they can renew their passports on-base, and don’t have to go to an embassy or consulate? (Don’t actually have any idea how that works, myself.)”
US Military personnel do not need passports. They may travel with ID card and orders http://www.andersen.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=20575
For travel outside of NATO countries, even within Schengen, a passport may be convenient since most Schengen countries require every adult to have ID and many police may not understand NATO issues and privileges.
“Official” (i.e. service, maroon-cover) and no-fee passports are available to military members and dependents assigned abroad.
Noncitizen family members get visa assistance (at post) and use their country-of-origin passports. This applies also to family members of Foreign Service employees.
Military facilities have arrangements with the relevant US consular office for issuance and renewal of passports. SOFA (i.e. NATO and other) visas may be issued (or arranged) by the post itself. When, many years ago, I had occasion to see this in operation in Germany, the military personnel office stamped the passports itself. That is not the case for the UK, where the USG refunds visa fees paid by military and nondiplomatic civilian staff.
More here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Amil%20sofa%20visas
from this FIFA media article: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/fifa-corruption-the-officials-are-caught-in-the-web-of-us-legal-imperialism–where-double-standards-dont-get-in-the-way-10286757.html