Americans seeking to renounce their citizenship are stuck with it for now
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is a pretty bogus decision. But, not an unusual one. US consular services are notoriously finicky to deal with, as any applicant for a complex visa (Iranian nationals, indonensians) or citizenship/residency can attest.
(Not affected party in any way btw, I only go on what my friends who have dealt with US embassies and consulates tell me, and their stories are universally consistent)
Most poignant quote in the article.
I am a US citizen and my passport renewal came up during the pandemic. I thought that's fine, I'm not traveling anyway. Well I am also a US citizen with the complexity of a sex change in my distant past. I've had the right passport decades ago.
After I sent in my routine renewal, I got a letter back saying that the US Department of State lost my old passport in processing. They wrote that I would need to send in seven pieces of identification, an explanation of why my passport was lost(!), have somebody come in person and vouch for me, in addition to a letter from a doctor confirming specific, very personal details of my sex change. I don't even have a doctor or health insurance, or seven IDs. It went back and forth in a humiliating, kafkaesque nightmare until I wrote them a letter saying I'm not sending anything more. My senator did not even give me the courtesy of a reply (bite me, Chuck Schumer, I bet your party will still talk about how you are God's gift to LGBTs).
> "I wish you the best of luck getting rid of that passport. Good riddance."
That was written by somebody below in this thread. I was trying to keep mine. Somebody told me that State Dept. has a backlog of a million passports. The American government, and administration, is utterly failing. Citizens at home cannot get basic services, meanwhile Biden is getting ready to play army in Asia again. I guess he never watched The Princess Bride.
> "I wish you the best of luck getting rid of that passport. Good riddance."
I wrote that. I thought of editing what I wrote for clarity. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Not good riddance of the passport. Good riddance of you as a citizen. Well I guess both. It's not pejorative, it's win-win. You don't want to have that passport, and I don't want to stick up for you if you won't stick up for the team. I'd like to but it's too much liability, I have to help only people who would in principle help others too. Evidently you don't care about that. And you wrote a letter telling them you're not sending anything more? And you're insulting a senator for not writing back, publicly? Did you vote for that senator from abroad or did you vote against him, did you not vote? Do you think the State Department will be more helpful now?
How can I interpret what you said in the best possible light, like where to begin? Just make two pieces of the puzzle fit together. I generally believe people's stories regardless of whether they're lying. I think it's good for people to be believed, even if it's by one person, just for a little while, just to know someone can trust them. Later I reevaluate and maybe change my mind.
I want to believe. Help me.
I know nothing about this except 5 minutes of googling, but seems like USCIS does process renunciations on US soil:
>Further attempts by prisoners to renounce under 1481(a)(6) continued to be stymied by a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services policy that applicants had to attend an in-person interview and demonstrate that they could leave the U.S. immediately upon approval of renunciation. [0]
Reading between the lines though, the process seems far harder than doing it aboard because you must demonstrate "intent to relinquish U.S. citizenship", meaning cutting off all US ties and establishing foreign ties, and that's hard to demonstrate when you're physically inside the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relinquishment_of_United_State...
The gist is that the us gov pretty much has full discretion to “not believe” your renunciation if they desire. In practice the us gov seems to be unwilling to officially entertain renunciations except through very narrow processes.
The important quote is this: “ For all the acts listed above, it is not enough to appear to commit the act—even voluntarily—to lose U.S. nationality; the person must also commit the act in order to relinquish the nationality.”
It seems US gov policy is to interpret the law linked in the parent comment such that nearly no one (even traitors and rebels!) have the intent to renounce US citizenship and furthermore it is almost impossible to unambiguously prove that intention.
Since no other nation is going to presume to tell the US gov who its citizens are (not), there is very little recourse or due process available.
I will again brag on how wonderfully easy it was to get the kid’s German passport by comparison.
So you need to have a specific address in the US.
This makes sense. You shouldn’t be able to vote for an alder person in a different ward. But it requires a specific, “in US” residence.
If you don’t have a specific address in the US, (you’re permanently residing outside the country) your last state of residence should be able to provide you with “President Only” ballots.
I’ve never heard of this actually happening though.
The US embassy has no involvement in any of this whatsoever. They will refer you to the clerk of courts (or whatever).
Realistically, do everything you can in the US (including absentee voting if possible).
Edit: keep in mind, many places have over a dozen distinct election events over a 4-year cycle. Presidential, presidential primary, mid-term, mid-term primary, non-partisan, non partisan primary, local school board, etc.
Some states combine this into as few elections as possible, some as many elections as possible.
I once tried to vote in every election. Lack of publicity made this impossible. For many minor elections, there was no public info on the candidates for, say, clerk of court primary elections.
My only major hiccup is that the MA secretary of state's website www.sec.state.ma.us (which has the info about upcoming elections, the tool to check your registration, and the instructions for voting overseas) is blocked in Japan "for cybersecurity reasons". I've tried contacting the department of state and my state representative about this, but nothing's come of it.
The government of Cambridge on the other hand has been quite pleasant to deal with.
You’re at the mercy of your local election officials.
>Marie Sock, the first woman to stand as a presidential candidate in the Gambia, was forced to pull out of the race recently after she failed to get any response to her request to renounce her US nationality from the US embassy.
>She explained in a video posted on Facebook that under Gambia election law, presidential candidates must be sole Gambian nationals.
Although cases like these should be fastracked IMO.
I recently married but it was not easy to do so because I was born in the US as the gov here didn't like my birth certificate (missing an "apostille") and I needed a document from the US that they couldn't give me in time (or at all because they said I need to be there in person but they're not open for in person visits) because of Corona.
I ended up finding a loop hole meant for war survivors that can't get a hold of documents which allowed me to marry my Austrian wife without the apostille.
Didn't get easier though because all shared banking accounts we have, she has to report to the IRS too, we both have to sign a waiver to be excempt from banking confidentiality and I have to send them my tax papers every year despite never having earned a single dime in the US any paying full taxes herein Austria.
Also Austrian banks and even European trading sites won't give me access to the stock market (they just say you were born in the US, we can't let you trade stocks over their platforms) but I don't have an address in the US so I can't do it on an US site either.
This article gives me less hope of fixing these things in the future
Apostilles are signed by the secretary of state in the state in which you reside.
They can apostille any document, including ones they don't issue (e.g. you can get a birth certificate from NJ apostilled in NY or get a _foreign birth certificate_ from a tiny eastern european country apostilled in NY, neat!).
You apostille a document on top of getting it notarized by a public notary.
You need to travel to your capital to do this.
Typically, it can be done same-day (at least it can in NY and NJ).
I highly, *highly* recommend paying somebody to apostille your documents. They can almost always notarize them as well. It's a royal pain to do yourself otherwise.
Funny enough, getting apostilles is trivial in other countries and costs you nothing. Your documents often already include it and, if you reside in a foreign country, your country's embassy will notarize and apostille it for you. Not so in the United States.
My father died in Thailand without a will, and settling his estate involved proving that I was the only person left to inherit. That meant a very long chain of authentication of birth certificates, death certificates, and divorce documents.
For example, I ordered my grandmother's death certificate from the city of Chicago, got it authenticated by the Illinois Department of State, got that authenticated by the US Department of State, got that authenticated by the Thai embassy in the US, got that authenticated by the Thai government in Thailand.
Repeat for for another dozen documents. I was able to do it all remotely, by mail, but it took more than a year.
When it was all done, I went in front of a judge in Pattaya in Thailand. I was worried that some Thai lady would suddenly appear claiming to be his wife (I suppose that happens at least once a week there). But in the end it was anticlimactic.
It’s annoying but possible. If you don’t have any one you can try this with in the US, it’s a long shot, but m I wouldn’t mind helping out. You can see my bio on HN and from there you can see I use my real identity. To help with initial trust.
The banks know where the commercial mailing/forwarding services are. They somehow keep a database of them. They're fine with you using a mail forwarding service as a mailing address, but they will want to see a residential address where you live. If you can't show a residential address in the United States, banks and brokers can and will freeze or close your account.
I've learned my lesson. Pro tip: never tell the banks that you're living abroad. You're always taking an extended vacation. And always have a trusted friend or family member whose residential address you can use in the United States even if all your physical mail gets sent to your mail forwarding service.
To my (very) limited understanding, the IRS will use any means to say that you don't quality for this. This includes not closing out old driver's licenses, failing to submit mailing address changes, etc.
So yeah the solution is like you said in the last paragraph.
As a side note, whenever I opened an account with financial institutions, I have to deal with FATCA paperwork that asked me to confirm that I'm not US citizen every time. It barely makes sense as I was born a Thai citizen and never renounce it, yet I have to complete the FATCA declaration. I couldn't imagine what will happen if someone declared that they are subject to FATCA (at best, probably red tapes, or at worst, being kicked out of their service).
I've described it as intentional incompetence. We couldn't even sell her car due to lack of government support in terms of policies, so we were forced to pay for a car and insurance for a car we didn't want and wasn't being used.
And I would say that COVID didn't start all this, it just gave these agencies another excuse. Even my application for Global Entry has been a nightmare, where it's been practically impossible to schedule an interview. I tried getting my application reviewed sooner by contacting the department twice before traveling back from a foreign country, because if you've been conditionally approved, you can interview upon return at the airport. I had applied like seven months before this international travel. I contacted them before leaving and then another time before I was coming back. They responded saying that there's nothing they can do, that I just need to wait. Well, they conditionally approved my application literally one day after I arrived back in the U.S. Since then, it has been impossible to schedule an interview, unless you want to drive eight hours and trust the appointment will be upheld, and they don't accept walk-ins. I've basically thrown away $100.
Early on when the world was in flux circa March 2020, my friend needed to get in touch with the US embassy because countries were shutting down so suddenly. He was in Brazil at the time. The US embassy decided that day to close early due to concern about the pandemic and that they needed the off-office-hours time to work (or something like this). They wouldn't reopen for about a week.
By contrast, my friends in the old country have had zero issues getting a hold of their embassies while living abroad. All very prompt. I had a passport renewal that took a month to process in the summer 2020.
Very bizarre. This whole pandemic has made me blackpilled on the US.
tone: Honest, non-snarky question.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/31/how-the-trump-administr...
Permanent residence in Germany was an absolute breeze, and all of the Foreigners’ Offices I’ve worked with have been anywhere from acceptably competent to outright helpful.
It appears that you can do some select things online, but if not? Alternative is to send your documents (which usually involve things like passport, and sometimes state ID aka driver's license) and hope they'll return it in 10-14 days... Just putting both of those things in the same envelope seems like a huge risk to me.
I've been able to submit civil court proceedings at my local district court (in CA), have them get processed and resolved. Sure, there was a break or two in there for temporary closures, and things got delayed. (It closed down for a while back in Dec 2020 but hearings were processed when it reopened in the spring, for example.) Point is, it still /happened/, even with some delay. So why can't the SSA or State Department process anything at all? The amount of institutional failure in the federal government offices right now is pretty alarming, and I haven't seen a lot of attention to this fact.
For example, in Oregon, our Department of Motor Vehicles basically decided to shut down for 18 months. Good luck taking a driving test, transferring a car title, etc.
In contrast, my local supermarket, staffed with people who are paid a pittance compared to government employees, didn't even have 18 hours of of downtime because of Covid, let alone 18 months.
Doubtlessly all those "frightened" government employees were quite willing to take their full salaries during their high stress 18 month sabbaticals.
In contrast the EU settlement scheme process was fast and efficient despite being objectively more work to process (arbitrary pdfs like bank records, lease contracts etc that basically require human judgement) and obviously not battle tested.
...I conclude it is a matter of motivation. The latter had huge political exposure and pressure to make sure it gets done
Finding an accountant to do both US and Canada taxes is both difficult and expensive (over $2000/year), so they want to renounce ASAP.
Also there's huge legal jeopardy for undeclared foreign retirement accounts.
Can't you write a letter to a US official saying "As of 31st Dec, I renounce my citizenship". If the USA can't organise an interview before that, that's their problem...
There's good reasons for it, the embassies actually deal in bomb threats and hostage situations and the like, and if it were that easy to drop your citizenship there would 100% be coercion to forfeit the protection of the Department of State. They might not always help you, but in principle they would, unless of course you're no longer an American. That's why you have to forfeit citizenship inside the embassy, where you can signal if you're being coerced. Same as getting a passport renewed, it's a process, it's made in USA and shipped to your embassy. If you don't pick it up within the time window, I forgot how many days, it is destroyed and you have to start the process over again.
Forgetting for a second the unique personal characteristics of America, the apple pie, the baseball, etc. In historical terms, you know how unique it is to be a citizen of the dominant state of the time, no matter which it is? Like being a Roman in Rome's heyday. The vast majority of people in history did not have that amount of freedom. Even today most don't.
And if you're an American overseas and can't deal with the times America isn't on a winning streak, or you feel the taxes are too great a burden for you, or you can't trade the stocks on your app, I wish you the best of luck getting rid of that passport. Good riddance.
And are shut out of retirement savings in both our chosen homes (no bank wants to deal with FACTA for non-rich customers, and PFIC will eat up any gains should you find a bank willing to let you buy ETFs) and Back Home (no US brokerage will sell an EU resident even the most boring of S&P 500 ETFs).
In exchange for paying a lot each year to prove that I don’t owe anything Back Home, and keeping Uncle Sam out of my husband’s business and bank accounts, we have to file separately Here, costing a few thousand more Euros in already impressive taxes.
I love Back Home, and am particularly proud of what my grandfathers did Here in WW2, but Back Home seems to be doing all it can to prevent me from having a normal, middle class life and planning a decent retirement over Here.
So the way we ended up in this situation is that taxes were demonized. Everybody wants someone else to pay taxes, the middle class wants the rich to pay more, the rich I think want higher taxes on high wage earners as though earning a lot each year were the same as a great fortune (this is what Bill Gates says), the poor have really little say, but it's the same thing, they don't want to bear the burden. Nobody wants to bear the burden. Guess what? Nobody bears the burden then [1]. But that can't happen, it's unthinkable. And that means instead of taxes being a friendly system, like getting funds together with your friends to plan a surprise party for a birthday (don't argue that that isn't the exact same thing) it's a system that needs to hunt people down, catch them unawares, and always be suspicious of being cheated because that's exactly what's happening the whole time. Did you think maybe instead of paying a tax lawyer those thousands to protect you from the IRS you just said to the IRS, hey you know what here, here's the money I was going to spend on a tax lawyer, I was going to spend it on doing the math but maybe that's too expensive[2]. Instead of proving I owe nothing, maybe do that, and then pay some amount of money to them.
Spending that money on math isn't worthwhile. It's stupid anyway, the math is actually decorative, the reality is fat pigs get slaughtered. It's not because they're a bureaucracy and that's bad it's because they're the one and only bureaucracy that is holding back all kinds of demons, the only one that will be loyal to Americans, and you can't just crap out on it. It's no different than in WW2 like you said. America could totally have decided not to intervene in Europe after Pearl Harbor, and just fought Japan. It was a choice. It could have gone either way. People think it was a sure thing because it was decided by vote and the vote was very one-sided, almost unanimous. They think it's a statistics thing, like you could have predicted it. Sure.
It's about collective freedom, really. When I pay taxes that I'm not obliged to pay, and make sure the IRS gets a good margin off me, I turn my personal freedom into collective freedom. Mine and other Americans, including yours in fact. I'm putting the decisions we make together above the decisions I make alone. You have the right, but not the obligation, to do the same. You're doing your best, but I think you can do better. What you put in might even benefit a third person, an American who's reading this.
It's not actually a math problem. It's a question of sacrifice. Freedom has a price. You have to sacrifice things. Not give in to some temptations no matter how many times they ask. If you give it up, how will you get it back?
[1] If the burden goes without being borne, hell breaks loose. The military can barely afford to surrender to the enemies America very much does have. There's no entitlement spending as though that were any less unacceptable. And freedom is lost. No big deal right? Hey, maybe you can go somewhere else and become a citizen of that place, can't be any harder to become one of them than it was for them to become one of us, right?
[2] This is related to the Silva Paradox: what is the cost of solving a problem including the cost of tallying costs? The costs can be time, money, energy. It means taking the cost of accounting into account.
No other democracy taxes its citizens living outside the country on money they earned in their countries of residence. For example, Germany would not tax my husband on money he earned while living and working in the US, and would not require him to file income taxes. He would be perfectly free to have both a 401k and Roth account without any concern for reporting back to Germany, as long as he was still a US resident. Should he decide to move back to Germany, it would be easy enough for him to transfer that money to similar German accounts, perhaps with some penalties on the way out.
I do not have a parallel ability to save for my retirement as a US citizen in Germany. FATCA makes US citizens with small accounts radioactive - we cost far more to deal with than we’d likely pay in fees. I’m thankful to still have a plain checking account - I know other Americans who had theirs closed.
I’m a reasonably content German taxpayer, feeling like I get relatively good value for my tax euros. I’m a sour US tax filer, feeling like my country is doing all it can to force me to work till I’m 70, despite not actually collecting any taxes from me, because I pay so much more in tax to Germany than I’d ever owe in the US (thank God for the small mercy of the US-German tax treaty)
Save your vinegar for Americans who want that American cake without paying any taxes, and spare those of us who are eating (and paying for) Strudel or baklava.