Severing ties with the US can take more than a year and cost thousands of dollars. But Paul, Ella, Margot and thousands of others feel they have no choice
When Margot went to renounce her US citizenship earlier this year, she wasn’t able to do it in the UK, her home of 30 years. The waiting list to renounce US citizenship at the London consulate is more than 14 months. It’s a similar story in Sydney and most major Canadian cities. Many European cities currently have six-month waiting lists.
So Margot found herself in the lobby of the consulate in Ghent, Belgium. One wall was covered by a picture of Boston Harbour, where she was born. The other had three portraits:Donald Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, their faces glistening – to her mind, with sadistic triumph (the lighting may have been a factor). Momentarily, she felt caught in a vice: everything she loved about her nation; everything she hated. Then she went in, swore under oath that she knew what she was doing, wasn’t being coerced, and wasn’t renouncing her citizenship for the purposes of tax avoidance. The official’s tone was neutral, slightly bored.
The questions are read from a laminated card, the oath is perfunctory, your passport is retained – you can ask for it back, with holes punched in it to represent its cancellation, after your request is approved.
In the 00s, the numbers of US citizens renouncing were in the hundreds annually; since 2014, they’ve been in the thousands. This is expected to be a bumper year (matching2020’s 6,000-plus)because the US government’s charges, after a protracted group legal battle, have beenreduced from $2,350 to $450. Neither figure comes close to the true cost of renouncing if you get a lawyer, which, with no complications at all, will cost $7,000 to $10,000, says Alexander Marino, who heads Moody’s, the largest renunciation law practice in the world.
But why would anyone want or need to renounce their US citizenship in the first place? Americans have long joked about pretending to be Canadians when they’re abroad, just out of embarrassment at hailing from a country that’s notably arrogant or exceptionalist. But recent developments in the US – its atmospherics, its internal divisions as well as its foreign policy – are of a different order of magnitude. Mary, 73, moved to Canada in 1987 and became a dual citizen in 2006, without ever thinking she wanted to renounce. The turning point, she says, “was literally the night of the 2016 election. I was at my son’s house. By midnight it was looking like, ‘Oh my God, the man’s going to win.’ I finally fell asleep – vodka can only do so much – then I woke at 2am, the house next door had a huge screen, and all it said was: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump.’”
Paul, 55, lives in Helsinki but had to travel to Milan for a consulate appointment – on his 51st birthday. “My present to myself was divorcing Uncle Sam,” he says. “It was the end of 2020, when Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court. There’s a picture of the swearing-in ceremony, where you can see her with this zealous smile on her face. That was half of it. The other half was that filthy, narcissistic smirk on Trump’s face. His eyes are barely open – it’s not a smile of joy, it’s not a smile of, ‘Hey, cool, this happened.’ It was, ‘I have you right where I want you.’ I saw that picture and five minutes later, I was Googling ‘find a renunciation lawyer’, and five minutes after that, I had sent an email to them.”
Joseph, 36, living in Norway, is just as blunt: “I don’t want to be a citizen of a dictatorship. I feel like a lot of people think that the test of the American system is going to come at the next presidential election and I think they’re wrong. We’re going to find out whether or not this government is willing to give up power democratically this November [at the midterm elections]. I have strong doubts as to whether they’re going to give up power.”
Ella, 66, left the US for Germany 34 years ago. She had wanted to renounce her citizenship for a decade before she finally exited in 2021, but “my husband stopped me. He was born to German parents in Romania, and wanted to return to Germany but for many years wasn’t able to – he’d experienced what it’s like to be stuck in a country where you weren’t allowed out. He said: ‘If there’s a war in Europe, we want to be able to live in America.’” Now it looks pretty unlikely that the US would offer some stable haven to her, and more likely that it would have started the war.
Almost everyone I spoke to for this piece wanted their names changed, and that’s with good reason. In very limited circumstances, the US government can reject your renunciation of citizenship altogether, but a much more common outcome is that you become a “covered expatriate”, which is a tax classification and a disaster financially – it lasts for ever, your children will be liable for US inheritance tax – but it also means you may be denied re-entry to the US or questioned at the border. If there’s anyone you love in the country who’s too ill to travel, it’s possible you’ll never see them again. And while, once you’re through the process – which most of these interviewees are – the US is not permitted to persecute you by law, few trust that this would stop it. Every quarter, a federal register of renunciations is published online; serving no practical purpose, the register feels vindictive. “Some have dubbed it the name-and-shame game, it doesn’t have any legal purpose,” says Marino. In short, everyone just wants to keep their heads down, a long way away.
Source: Drudge Report
