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Comment by lazyasciiart | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to do anything to keep your American citizenship. You can't get rid of it without a significant amount of effort.

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America is one of the only nations in the world that taxes its expats also. You can't escape the USA. You are the property of the tax farm.

I believe the reason for this is simple (though understandably unpopular):

A lot of people that get rich because of America would just drop American citizenship once they do get rich to avoid paying back into the system that allowed them to become successful.

There is no other country that offers as much upward mobility as the US to its citizens. Hence the tax.

Also the services that the US Government provides to even their overseas expats is pretty remarkable. I’m not sure there’s another country in the world that can bail you out of a dicey situation within hours in almost any spot on earth.

You don't know what you are talking about. The US overseas generally won't lift a finger unless it has invaded the country in question. Canada, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Japan: all in fact assist.

Nope. First of all, social mobility in the US is not better than anywhere else (https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...) . Secondly, it's not that much harder to renounce US citizenship than other countries - in fact, in some ways it's easier because the US is the only country I know of that allows you to renounce citizenship without having another citizenship already. My point was only that you don't have to "actively keep" your citizenship, by visiting the US or any other means.

This is a pleasant fiction, isn’t it? A quick look will tell you that the US is far below the Nordic countries in social mobility. For instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

Maybe they meant to renew the foreign visa

But yeah that also wouldn’t require coming back to the US necessarily

Yeah, you would just drive to Laos or Cambodia or take a short flight to one of the nearby island countries for a week.

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