In a press release on his website, Jack Reed announces that he and Chuck Schumer have moved an amendment to the immigration reform bill to make “covered expatriates” — people who give up U.S. citizenship and meet certain asset thresholds, or who have missed some of the ridiculously time-consuming piles of tax paperwork required of citizens living abroad within the past five years — into permanent exiles from the United States, in similar terms as Schumer’s failed Ex-PATRIOT Act last year.
Contrary to Reed’s mendacious claims, this amendment does not just affect people who “accumulat[e] wealth and benefit from the greatness of the United States and then renounc[e] their citizenship to avoid paying their fair share of taxes”. As even a cursory glance at Wikipedia confirms, the overwhelming majority of people who give up citizenship have lived abroad for many years and became successful thanks to the countries in which they actually live, not the United States which they made a conscious choice to leave behind.
