A client has a pending application to cancel his U.S. citizenship at the Vancouver Consulate. Today he received the following email from the Consulate:
From: “Vancouver, ACS Department” <vancouveracs@state.gov>
Date: November 8, 2011 7:47:00 AM PST
To: FirstName LastName
Subject: RE: CLN forms – FirstName LastNameThere is currently a back-log in respect of Loss of Nationality cases. Cases are responded to by turn. We request your patience.
U.S. Consulate General
American Citizen Services
Vancouver, BC, CANADAPrivacy/PII|
This email is UNCLASSIFIED.
If you want to terminate your U.S. citizenship before the end of the year:
Make an in-person appointment at an Embassy or Consulate.
Do not mail in your application to terminate citizenship. Do it in person.
If I could put twinkle stars surrounded by rainbows to draw your attention to those two sentences, I would. I’m just not that good at HTML.
You can go to any Consulate or Embassy in the world. It is worth buying a cheap ticket to fly somewhere to do this. Make it a vacation — go to Singapore or Bangkok or Frankfurt or somewhere else.
There is no guarantee that you will have your application processed before year-end. When you mail the documents to the Embassy or Consulate you do not know whether they arrived in good shape. By setting an in-person appointment, you will know for a fact that you terminated your citizenship on a particular day.
Even if your documents arrive by mail, and the Consulate acknowledges receipt, you face a second risk. If your documents were mailed and were incomplete, they will be rejected and you will have to start over. If you made a mistake on your paperwork, you can fix it on the spot if you are sitting in front of the Consular official.
I get the feeling that the number of people terminating U.S. citizenship has jumped dramatically. I wonder whether the U.S. government publishes statistics on this. Yes, I know that there are quarterly statistics for people expatriating under Section 877A, but I question whether those are complete and accurate.
Regular people who do not live in my world (international taxation) are flabbergasted when I tell them that U.S. citizens are turning in their passports right and left. It is simply inconceivable that someone would do such a thing. Sometimes the reaction turns to an implicit character assassination of the person relinquishing citizenship: they must be a bad person in some way. Tax dodger. Non-patriot. Someone unwilling to support his country.
Meh.
It is more interesting to me to watch the outbound flow of intellectual (and financial) capital in a semi-scientific way and formulate a hypothesis. Why are these people choosing to terminate citizenship of the most powerful country in the world? Keep an open mind. Formulate a testable hypothesis. Adjust it when the data indicate the hypothesis fails.
Me? I know what they tell me. Multiple anecdotes don’t create a data set. But I hear them again and again report:
At the moment the number of people leaving might be small, and their actions dismissed in a hand-wavy fashion. But they should not be dismissed. Their actions are an indicator of something gone awry.
The United States has been built on immigration. Out-migration tells us something isn’t working. (Hah. Tell that to the State of California. “Oh, no. Everything is fine!” Same thought.) When people vote with their feet — and are willing to pay a staggering tax to do so — they are sending a message.
I don’t think anyone is listening. And this, unfortunately, is to the greater harm of the United States.