Somewhere out there on the Intertubes, yet another native-born U.S. citizen is spreading rumours that it’s impossible to get a U.S. work visa after giving up U.S. citizenship. We already discussed in a previous March 2013 post that this is untrue; the article I translated then gave examples of ex-citizens who’d renounced as recently as 2011 and had been able to move back to the United States.
That article also claimed it’s probably impossible these days to re-naturalise after giving up citizenship. However, even further back in December 2011, in an article I missed at the time, the World Journal (a Chinese-language newspaper in the U.S.) interviewed three people who claimed to have done precisely that in the mid-2000s. (As Phil Hodgen has previously pointed out, the IRS even has regulations to handle the question of exit taxation against a person who expatriates twice, though probably that occurs more often when both of the expatriations — or at least one or the other — consist of green card abandonment rather than giving up citizenship.)
There’s two catches. First, all the people who moved back to the U.S. and stated they’d re-naturalised are Taiwanese politicians, who could truthfully claim that they’d only renounced U.S. citizenship to comply with Taiwan’s laws, not because they’re a bunch of radical tax-evading money-laundering drug-dealing terrorists who idolise a violent anti-American militant. Furthermore, ex-citizens don’t enjoy any special immigration privileges; the three interviewees were able to get green cards so easily only because they had U.S. citizen spouses or children, and they still had to wait to apply for naturalisation like any other immigrant.
