More than 3,400 Pakistanis have renounced citizenship in the past five years, which the Express Tribune describes as a “worrying sign”:
More than 3,400 Pakistani citizens have renounced their nationality in the last five years after adopting the citizenship of other countries while another 1,500 want to give up their association with the homeland. Around 251 Pakistanis have adopted the nationality of Canada, 171 of the United States, 145 of Australia, 121 of New Zealand, 75 of Norway while 54 chose to become citizens of Denmark. The rest went for the citizenship of other countries in Europe and the Middle East, immigration officials told The Express Tribune.
As the article goes on to point out, Pakistan allows dual citizenship with a variety of countries in Europe, North America, and the Middle East, meaning that those emigrants could have retained their Pakistani citizenship, but instead explicitly rejected that choice. In doing so, they voluntarily gave up a variety of benefits which the Pakistani government offers to its citizens abroad, such as evacuation from war-torn Yemen — a “benefit of citizenship” which the U.S. has not seen fit to extend to its own diaspora (contrary to all the Homelander myths about black helicopters coming to rescue us wherever on Earth we might go).
According to recent estimates, the Pakistani diaspora is about the same size as the American diaspora: each comprises seven million citizens living outside of their respective countries. But the number of Americans who have given up their citizenship in the past half-decade is at least in the low five digits.
FBI statistics on Americans giving up citizenship
The FBI had 14,337 entries listed in the “Renounced U.S. Citizenship” category of the NICS gun control database as of 31 December 2009, and 27,240 entries five years later — an increase of 12,903 people over that period. FBI spokesperson Stephen G. Fischer, Jr. claimed in comments to Patrick Cain of Global News that about 2,900 of the 3,106 entries added to NICS in one giant batch in October 2012 reflected a “backlog” rather than contemporaneous renunciations. However, even if we make the excessively conservative assumption that none of those 2,900 renunciants were from 2010 or 2011, that still leaves us with 10,003 renunciants from 2010 to 2014.
Furthermore, the NICS database does not include relinquishers — those who commit expatriating acts under 8 USC § 1481(a)(1) through (4). NICS includes only those who swear an Oath of Renunciation under § 1481(a)(5). (Theoretically, it would also include people who renounce before the Attorney General in time of war under § 1481(a)(6). However, this procedure has not actually been available since World War II ended, and recent efforts to make use of it have been unsuccessful — see my summary on Wikipedia for details.)
Based on data from 1994 and 1995, we previously estimated that relinquishers are about 2/3rds to 4/5ths as numerous as renunciants. That would suggest around 6,666 to 8,000 relinquishers from 2010 to 2014, giving us a total of five times as many Americans as Pakistanis giving up citizenship. However, this out-of-date ratio of relinquishers to renunciants is likely to be too low — thanks to last year’s enormous State Department fee hike for renouncing citizenship, relinquishment has become a far more attractive option than renunciation (even with the possibility that State will take far longer to adjudicate a relinquishment notification as they search for evidence that you exercised some benefit of U.S. citizenship so they can yell “Gotcha!” and deny that you relinquished). As a result, we’d expect the relative number of relinquishers to have increased rather than decreased.
IRS statistics on Americans giving up citizenship
For the period of January 2010 to December 2014, the IRS listed the names of 10,663 “published expatriates” in the Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate, which appears in the Federal Register. This number is barely larger than the number of renunciants added to NICS over the same period (not counting the October 2012 backlog), even though the Federal Register is supposed to include both renunciants and relinquishers (who are roughly as numerous as renunciants, or only slightly less so) while NICS includes only renunciants. Many ex-citizens’ names have been proven missing from the Federal Register list, a trend which appears to have begun around 2006.
The IRS claims that “for purposes of [the Federal Register] 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.” (“Long-term residents” are those who held green cards for 8 out of the last 15 years; they are deemed to “expatriate” when their green cards were “administratively or judicially determined to have been abandoned” or revoked — 26 USC § 7701(b)(6).) However, the claim that the list includes former green card holders is pretty much mathematically impossible.
According to data released by USCIS in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, 65,772 people filed Form I-407 to give up their green cards between October 2009 and May 2013 — an average of 17,937 for each twelve months. Not included among those 65,772 are people whose green card was terminated by other means, such as deportation or claiming non-residence under a tax treaty. According to statistics obtained from DHS by UC Berkeley’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, about six thousand to ten thousand green card holders are deported from the U.S. each year. Four thousand taxpayers per year file Form 8833 to take a “treaty-based return position”, according to IRS Paperwork Reduction Act filings — however, many of those are likely to be dual-resident corporations rather than green card holders residing abroad.
All in all, that suggests that about 120 to 140 thousand people officially ceased to be green card holders from 2010 to 2014 — around twelve to fourteen times as many people as appeared in the Federal Register “published expatriates” list over that same period. Even if only a tiny fraction of them were long-term green card holders, it’s clear that the Federal Register list was too small to have included their names.
Conclusion
Roughly 3,400 Pakistanis gave up Pakistani citizenship from 2010 to 2014, while at minimum ten thousand Americans gave up their citizenship during that same period.
However, at least for now, Homelanders can take pride in the fact that their citizenship might not yet be quite as unattractive to the American diaspora as Ghana’s citizenship is to the Ghanaian diaspora — though that conclusion depends on whose estimate of the Ghanaian diaspora population you use. Furthermore, the gap is closing quickly — in March 2015 alone, the FBI added 1,030 new entries to the “Renounced U.S. Citizenship” category in NICS, bringing the category total to 28,646 people, according to the latest report.
The US statistics are grossly understated. Who believes that the average amount of renunciations per country is 3415/190= 18 renunciations per country.
Qty Korea:
Qty London:
Qty other UK:
Qty Canada:
Qty Germany
Qty AUstria
Qty Switzerland:
Ask any legislative assistant you can to contact the DOS congressional liaison (Scott Boswell, hill-liaison@state.gov), and ask him for the number of cases of loss of citizenship (renunciation and relinquishment) recorded in the Consular Workload and Statistics System (CWSS). They should be able to obtain the numbers and respond very quickly because it’s an electronic database
I understand you’re making progress in this area, Mark Twain.
South Korean consulate in Los Angeles processed 161 renunciations of SK citizenship from January to March 2015 (and released the statistics on April 2, unlike foreign affairs departments in some other countries)
http://www.koreatimesus.com/increasing-number-of-korean-americans-renounce-s-korean-citizenship/
According to latest Ministry of Foreign Affairs Statistics (2013), Los Angeles has about 190,000 South Korean citizens and 320,000 U.S. citizens of Korean descent living there (not clear how many of the latter were duals-at-birth and whether or not they did choice of nationality procedures upon majority).
https://web.archive.org/web/20150413053109/http://www.mofa.go.kr/webmodule/htsboard/template/read/korboardread.jsp?typeID=6&boardid=232&seqno=347383&c=&t=&pagenum=1&tableName=TYPE_DATABOARD&pc=&dc=&wc=&lu=&vu=&iu=&du=
Q1 2015 “published expatriates list” will be late (as it has been for nine out of the ten previous quarters also)
https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2015/04/29
Q1 2015 “published expatriates list” will be at least a week late
https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2015/05/06
Also, 91 out of 4 million Portuguese people abroad renounced their citizenship in 2014. In other words, the American diaspora has at least 20x as high a renunciation rate as the Portuguese diaspora
http://portugalresident.com/more-portuguese-are-giving-up-their-citizenship
Thanks Eric.
Of the 91 Portuguese citizenship renunciations, “the data shows that most of the renunciation requests came from Portuguese people living in Norway (21), Andorra (19) and Luxembourg (12).”
Norway and Andorra do not allow dual citizenship for naturalizing citizens so the 40 naturalizing in those two countries had no choice once they decided to naturalize. Tiny Luxembourg, which allows dual citizenship, has about 82,000 Portuguese citizens so 12 renouncing shouldn’t get anyone too excited.
Portugal should probably focus on why four million Portuguese live abroad.
@Eric
Allou said it was out on May 2. She was not on it after 2 yrs. I just took a look. 16 pages.
@Heidi: Got a link? Did they change the title? If I search for “expatriate” I don’t see anything new, just the Q4 2014 list from February (which was also 16 pages in PDF format). May 2 was a Saturday, no FR edition that day.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2015-02-11/pdf/2015-02850.pdf
Eric
I think Allou (and now I) may have it wrong. It was last quarter of 2014 published in Feb 2015. Sorry.
Q1 2015 list is out
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/05/08/2015-11213/quarterly-list-of-individuals-who-have-chosen-to-expatriate
34 pages, 41 names per full page, 19 names on the first page and 5 on the last page = I think 1,336 names but I haven’t double-checked it. Note that this is smaller than the NICS renunciants-only total for the same period.
Thanks, Eric. I also counted 1336 names. This is the longest list ever.
“Note that this is smaller than the NICS renunciants-only total for the same period.”
1,336 (lower than renunciants-only) x $2,350 renunciation fee = $3,139,600
So, for one quarter, the US extorted more $3 million from people living outside the US, that didn’t want to be taxed by the US. NICE HAUL!
FBI NICS running total of renunciations is available as of June 30, 2015. For the period Jan to Jun 2015, 2,877 US citizens renounced their US citizenship, according to the FBI (30,117 – 27,240). This is an average of 479.5 per month. Annualizing for full-year 2015 suggests that 5,754 will renounce their US citizenship before this year ends.
As always, the FBI figures do not include relinquishments.
@ Innocente
Wow…another record number of renouncers. The politicians have to take notice!! It’s too bad the relinquishments aren’t added to this number. It would be an embarrassing number for the US.
It could be argued that the IRS, part of the US Treasury, has an incentive to underreport the expatriation figures to avoid embarrassing Treasury officials Robert Stack and Mark Mazar. Contrary to what Robert Stack wrote in Myth vs. Fatca in the fall of 2013, Americans are giving up their US citizenship in ever increasing numbers because of Fatca.
My expectation is that the IRS will continue to report total expatriations as approximately equal to the total of renunciations reported by the FBI. Aside from Patrick Cain at Global News, few journalists have shown an interest in investigating this obvious underreporting.
Numbers need to be believable and favorable to the boss, but not necessarily right. This is a form of what accountants call “managing the numbers”.
The Ministry of Truth controls both, the scheduling of appointments as well as the number of expatriations that are reported.
In July 2014 Robert Stack testified before the US Senate Finance Committee, urging its members to takes steps to prevent further tax inversions by US corporations. According to the Irish Times:
“The US Congress must pass legislation to prevent American companies relocating their legal headquarters overseas and stop rewarding countries that practise “race-to-the-bottom tax competition,” a senior US official has said.
US treasury official Robert Stack urged the powerful Senate finance committee to pass a law that curtails “inversions” where a US company acquires a foreign rival allowing them to shift their head office to a low corporate-tax country, including Ireland, to avoid the higher American tax rate of 35 per cent. ”
The article further states:
“Forty-seven US companies have reincorporated overseas in inversions over the last decade, most since 2008, according to the Congressional Research Service, the policy research unit in Congress. That compares with just 29 inversions in the previous 20 years.”
http://www.irishtimes.com/business/us-congress-urged-to-prevent-tax-inversions-1.1874735
In September 2014 the US Treasury issued rules, effectively immediately, to restrict tax inversions. In March 2015 the Financial Times reported: “A crackdown by the Obama administration on ‘tax inversion’ deals, which allowed US companies to slash their tax bills, has had the perverse effect of prompting a sharp increase in foreign takeovers of American groups. ”
The WSJ reports today in the article “The Tax Inversion Wave Keeps Rolling”:
“despite Washington’s efforts last year to protect the U.S. corporate tax base, revenue keeps trickling out. Since the Treasury rules went into effect last fall, 55 U.S. companies have been sold to or targeted by foreign buyers, many of those acquirers formed by inversions themselves, according to FactSet.”
Robert Stack’s bold statement that Fatca would not cause Americans to renounce their US citizenship was wrong. US Treasury’s efforts to reduce tax inversions by US corporations has prompted them to do just that. Robert Stack may not only be a propagandist and a liar, but, as his track record shows, also a fool.
Expat honour roll will be late again
https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2015/07/29
Out of 75 lists from Q4 1996 to Q2 2015, only 20 have been published on time; since Q1 2013, only 1 out of 11.
Remember everyone: be a good citizen! Obey the tax law!
Thanks, Eric. It’s a sprint between the Federal Register list and the ADCS Summary Trial as to which will happen first — a rare and tiny bit of drama in this long and tedious marathon. 🙂
As if we needed any better reasons to renounce/relinquish. I posted this elsewhere at IBS today, but it just signals the US mindset. I just came upon it, and don’t know how far it got or whether it was just posturing:
Charlie Rangel proposes to raise a “war tax” in the currency of both lives and taxes to spend for the ever escalating US wars;
“……Rangel’s Draft Act requires all men and women between the ages 18 to 25 to register for the Selective Service System and for the reinstatement of a lottery to draft them into the military whenever an authorization on the use of military force or declaration of war is in effect. According to the Selective Service System, there are currently nearly 16 million men registered within the Selective Service System. By requiring women to register, Rangel’s bill would double the number of U.S residents available for military service. It would also be in line with the Pentagon’s updated policy to include women in combat.
The War Tax Act requires that current and future war funding be paid for with revenue increases. A permanent federal income tax, made possible by the 16th Amendment in 1913, was employed to help defray the costs of America’s involvement in World War I. In 1968 a temporary 10% surtax was imposed to offset the escalating costs of the Vietnam War. Taxes were raised in 1990 in part to pay for deficits increased by the first Gulf War. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are a major exception to this tradition. Together they are variously estimated to have cost us cost from $4 to $6 trillion–the most expensive wars in our history…… ”
http://rangel.house.gov/press-release/rangel-introduces-bills-require-military-draft-and-tax-times-war
Thanks @Eric,
Re the latest anticipated “Expat honour roll ” I was wondering, but knew that the one thing we could count on for sure is that it would be late.
From US lawmakers and government minions:
To Citizens;
Do as I say, not as I do.
The list for Q2 2015 is up in preview today at
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/07/31/2015-18813/quarterly-list-of-individuals-who-have-chosen-to-expatriate
It’s out. Short one. 10 full pages, 19 names on the first page, 32 names on the last page, 41 names per full page except page 11 with just 40 names (due to an entry with several middle names taking up two lines) = 460 names. NICS added 1,471 renunciants over the same period (total estimate of at least 2,700 renunciants + relinquishers, based on old 1994/1995 ratio of 4 or 5 relinquishers per 6 renunciants).
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/07/31/2015-18813/quarterly-list-of-individuals-who-have-chosen-to-expatriate
Full post coming once I cross-reference it with other lists of names
As usual, it is a bit strange. There are two entries for
DAVIS ANDREW JOSEPH
Is that for two different people with the same name?
Also, for some reason, although most of the names are listed in all uppercase letters, a few are in mixed case.
I haven’t counted the list. As usual, people can try to read meaning into the numbers, although many of us know that is a fools game.
Eric, I didn’t mean to suggest that “fools game” applies to you. I look forward to your post. It’s the media people who take the Federal Register numbers as definitive that are the fools.