Renunciation and Relinquishment of United States Citizenship: Discussion thread (Ask your questions) Part Two
Ask your questions about Renunciation and Relinquishment of United States Citizenship and Certificates of Loss of Nationality.
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NB: This discussion is a continuation of an older discussion that became too large for our software to handle well. See Renunciation and Relinquishment of United States Citizenship: Discussion thread (Ask your questions) Part One
Two bits and pieces from the last two months.
(1) Second post-renunciation crossing from Canada into US, distant from previous location, this time by car. Same experience. Border agent made a distinct point of remarking on U.S. place of birth in Canadian passport, and that was all.
(2) Helping a Canadian-only relative sort out multiple accounts, present for setting up new ones with major Canadian bank. The are-you-a-US-citizen question. Entirely separate and coincidental, helping relative to comprehend and complete W8BEN, came from same bank in the mail, first time form ever seen. If all Canadians get this one out of the blue, they’ll struggle with a virtually incomprehensible chunk of boilerplate. Bank’s cover letter was just as unhelpful as the IRS trash, actually compounded the confusion. If I didn’t know what this was already, I couldn’t have told without “research.” That nasty little box trolling for identification numbers for Canadians-only – at least it does say not mandatory – but you know too well that the average Canadian statist will provide all possible information.
@WhatAmI
Yes, there have been problems reported here at IBS about entering the USA post-renunciation. There was a report and a discussion here some time ago from someone posting as “Alex”. He had entered the USA once or twice without a problem, but one time he was detained for over an hour without explanation and without the possibility of contacting anyone. Certainly a disturbing experience.
@notamused, WhatAmI – yes, that was the one I was thinking of. Wasn’t allowed to contact his spouse who was also travelling with him and was left wondering what had happened to him. This is simply unacceptable just because someone has given up US citizenship. I hope he wrote to the Border authority to complain about being treated in such an unreasonable and frightening manner just because he was an ex-citizen.
I’d forgot about that. Here’s Alex’s description of what happened. He posted this in April 2013 and there is further discussion by him and others following it.
http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/renunciation/comment-page-11/#comment-258324
This was outrageous. There was absolutely no reason why they couldn’t have asked those questions at passport control and then let him through. A bit hypocritcal to wish him welcome to America having given him the fright of his life.
WhatAmI, we can only say that 99.9% of the time there should be no problems, but you can never forget about the possible 0.1% that will be otherwise. Point this out to your relatives and they will just have to make the decision for themselves.
It could always depend upon a number of factors, such as a blue moon, suspected marshian attack, or a random PRISM phone call from unknown to suspect. Yet, if kind and polite unsuspicious expatriates are frequently given unnecessary inquisitions when attempting to financially boost US tourism, then a pattern could be more easily identified.
I have a long, long list of non-US destinations and non-US people that I’d like to hopefully eventually visit before I die. Yet, I suppose the day might come when my 100+ million or so possible distant US relatives might convince me to spend US tourist dollars instead of traditionally dancing nude with the southern natives, getting lost in the Himalayas or fishing for food in the ice. Life is just too short. 🙂
The confusion and, some would say, sometime paranoia over dual nationality in the USA comes from the fact that the US does not have “nationality” (a Christian and Civil Law concept) except in the sense that the term has become also an international-law one. It has English Common-Law “allegiance”. It goes back to Jefferson and Hamilton (who argued over it), the War of 1812, and the Aeneas MacDonald case in England. American “exceptionalism” has brought a new gloss to the subject, as has the acknowledgment that African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans and women are “citizens”. Lots and lots of doctoral dissertations (including my own) and learned books have been written on the subject. My thesis advisor lectured on dual nationality at the Hague Academy some years ago.
This might be a bit off topic but thought I’d mention that I was harassed entering the US (at JFK on a flight from my then country of residence) as a US citizen with a US passport. The Immigration official was shockingly nasty to me because I couldn’t tell her the exact address I was going to be staying at!
I was quite naive at the time and It was only later that I found out she had no right even to ask the question, as being a citizen I shouldn’t have to account for my movements within the US.
@5thSwiss, I found your latest comment very interesting. Can you recommend an article-length elaboration of what you wrote?
It’s in my dissertation for Docteur en droit, which was never published in full. The part that scholars thought most interesting, “Nationality of the Unrecognised State”, was published at 50 I.C.L.Q. 849 (2001). Professor Verwilghen’s lectures are published in French as “Conflits de nationalités, Plurinationalité et apatridie” in Recueil des cours de l’Académie. I thought the subject useful and interesting but publishers didn’t and I went on to practice tax and insolvency law, not immigration and nationality. (I wrote the dissertation in English (my LLM mémoire on the law of domicile is in French) because it meant I didn’t need an editor and the university didn’t care. Although they had to import a jury member for the defense from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as it happened.
As you can imagine, the stuff seems so obvious to me as to need little elaboration. And I’ve been away from the subject for enough years so as not to appreciate that what is obvious to me is not to others. At the meeting at St Pancras Church Hall in London on Sunday that came out: when confronted by an IRS agent or a US border guard, one should not accept the assertion (or assumption) that one is an American citizen. Indeed, accepting that could be an exercise of an attribute of US citizenship that defeats a claim that one was expatriated or never became an American, etc.
Until recently nobody thought that holding American citizenship could have adverse consequences. Not since the Vietnam War, anyway.
@5th Swiss, Victoria has written a fair bit on various aspects of dual nationality and how it is viewed in several countries, allegiance, immigration, etc. She is a US citizen and longtime resident of France. She does speak and write French as well if you were to find reason to comment on the blog.
You might find it interesting http://thefranco-americanflophouse.blogspot.ca/p/pledging-allegiance-thoughts-about.html
http://thefranco-americanflophouse.blogspot.fr/p/the-diaspora-tax-war-of-2012.html
http://thefranco-americanflophouse.blogspot.ca/p/reflections-on-crossing-cultures.html
@SwissPinoy’s name reminds me: Filipinos became not US citizens but US noncitizen nationals (protégés) following the cession of the Philippines to the USA by the Treaty of Paris (1898). It was intended to get rid of them (an emotion and act of racism no doubt) in the mid-1930s but that didn’t happen in fact until 4 July 1946 (and then it took until 1999 for them to get rid of citizenship taxation that they inherited in 1913, but that’s another story). Those found within the USA in 1934) gained the status of green-card holders. U.S. law considered that the Philippine Independence Acts had established a distinct Philippine nationality subject to American immigration controls as from 1 May 1934 . Neither then nor earlier was the particular status of the Filipino Muslims of Mindanao specifically addressed in U.S. law. Peter G. Gowing and Samuel Kong Tan wrote their theses on the Muslim uprising. Those 1970s books haven’t had the attention they deserve in view of developments since.
Does anybody know if the US has a record of I-407 in Federal registry?
I told them I threw green card out 25 year prior to that.
@Money,
At the following link, you can see the I-407 Count and how it compares with the Federal Register and FBI NICS index.
http://sharepoint.glasscoin.ch/renounce/usa/Lists/Statistics/AllItems.aspx
Such is based on the following document that I got from Shadowrider:
http://sharepoint.glasscoin.ch/renounce/usa/Freigegebene%20Dokumente/Amount%20of%20I-407%20applications%20filed%20since%202000.pdf
Have we had the official renunciation figures for the 2nd quarter of 2013 yet? I know the FBI ones have been published, but I was wondering if the named list is out or are we still waiting for them to do their usual late publishing trick?
@Medea, the “Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen to Expatriate” list for the second quarter of this year has not yet been published in the Federal Register, nor is it scheduled to be published tomorrow. So the Secretary of the Treasury is again in violation of the law requiring its publication within 30 days following the end of the quarter.
When the list is published, it should be accessible from the first link in the list on this page:
https://www.federalregister.gov/quarterly-publication-of-individuals-who-have-chosen-to-expatriate
Is there a list similar 6039 for ex green card. I did not send anything to treasury just got form from border agent
Money. You can forget about it. They don’t have the time or interest to worry about you.
I have gone to Federal register for Abandoment of Lawful Resident no luck
The list of documents to be published in tomorrow’s (August 2, 2013) Federal Register has been released at http://www.ofr.gov/inspection.aspx#reg_T
It does not include the Treasury Department’s “Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen to Expatriate”. Apparently we will have to wait until next week, at the earliest, to see it. I suspect they are having the usual difficulty of deciding which of the many names of renunciants and relinquishers to include. That can be called “the Which Names Deserve Shame Problem”.
Meanwhile, the State Department still keeps secret the actual numbers of Certificates of Loss of Nationality that it is approving. Is it too embarrassing for them to admit how many U.S. citizens are voluntarily giving up their citizenship? Might people want to know why the numbers are increasing?
@AnonAnon, thanks. I thought it hadn’t been published yet, but I also wasn’t sure if I might have missed it. I want to see if I’m on the list. Guess I’ll have to wait a few more days.
@ Medea,
I’d like to know too. But didn’t someone here say they only listed covered expats, or something like that? They wouldn’t know that with me, at this point, because I haven’t done my final IRS filing. Perhaps I’m mis-remembering.
@Rev Susi, nobody knows how these lists are compiled (least of all the IRS, it seems!). Several theories abound, but none explains the reality. Some non-covered expats appear on the list, and some covered and many non-covered expats never appear on the list. A crapshoot, in other words.
Shadow Raider had written a couple of months ago that he made a Freedom of Information Request to the State Department for the total number of CLNs issued over the last few years.
I am very skeptical that his request will ever be honored. I suspect that the numbers will be very high in comparison to what the Treasury has been posting. The difference will be so great that it will create a political shit storm in Washington. Therefore, I seriously doubt the USG will ever release such information.
There is also a request for CLN numbers at Data.gov that has been pending since February:
https://explore.data.gov/nominate/2412
It is still possible to add comments to support that request.