Many American expats in Europe that have acquired the right for local nationality give up their nationality for that reason.
That's only if you're lucky, and move to a country with a no-double-taxation treaty. There's only a few of them. No tax treaty, you pay the full amount due to both governments (after excluding your US foreign earned income allowance ~$90K).
Worse, if you live in a foreign country and start a business you now own what the US considers a "foreign controlled corporation" and your new nightmare begins. Not to mention many banks won't do business with you abroad because of FATCA and you have to report your balances annually to FinCEN or risk forfeiture of 50% of the balance in the account. And you can't open a brokerage account in a foreign country because you can't have an account not overseen by the SEC.
Then if your child is born abroad with no other connection to America they'll suffer the same fate for the rest of their lives unless they renounce, which itself comes with substantial costs.
I think the number of renunciations is fairly low because most dont make >90K in foreign countries, and FATCA is new-ish.
which states that, worldwide, just over 5,000 Americans renounced citizenship in 2017. There are also about 9 million Americans living abroad and ~1 million living in Europe. So, no, I don't think that even if all 5,000 were in Europe that 0.5% renounced their citizenship would count as "many".
Quick research: Kaiserslautern Military Community has ~50k people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiserslautern_Military_Comm...
Now that's the largest, but by far not only location with US Military presence in Europe.
" Defined that way, you should expect that any person going to work outside of his or her country for a period of time would be an expat, regardless of his skin colour or country. But that is not the case in reality; expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people going to work abroad.
Africans are immigrants. Arabs are immigrants. Asians are immigrants. However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for ‘inferior races’. "
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...