Many of us emigrants here at the Isaac Brock Society have a rather low opinion of U.S. immigration lawyers. Whether it’s mainland China’s one-trick-pony visa consultants who push their wealthy clients into getting utterly unnecessary EB-5 green cards, birth tourism promoters who forget to mention to their decidedly more middle-class clients how much trouble they will have enrolling their American baby in schools in their home countries, clueless Floridians who can’t possibly understand why someone who lived in Canada for four decades wouldn’t want a U.S. passport, or racist San Buenaventura nutters on Yahoo! Answers who go around claiming that oil sheikhs would pay a million dollars for a U.S. passport, this species of attorney often combines greed, jingoism, and complete ignorance of local laws in their clients’ countries of citizenship or U.S. tax laws relating to immigration and citizenship status.
So it’s fortunate to see there are at least some exceptions; let us give credit where credit is due. In an article in India Abroad magazine entitled “Pitfalls of renouncing citizenship”, immigration lawyer Tahmina Watson of Watson Immigration Law in Seattle gives a surprisingly fair and accurate overview of the heated topic of renunciation of citizenship, stemming from a situation that one of her clients faced.
