John Richardson
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

Thank you for this article and the obvious time and effort spent thinking about these issues.

The history of U.S. citizenship reflects that the United States has long used “citizenship” as a weapon against various individuals and groups (usually the threat of “stripping” people of their citizenship). The consequences of this history culminated in the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Afroyim v. Rusk in which the court ruled that the “citizenship guarantees in the 14th Amendment meant that (1) U.S. citizenship belonged to the individual and not to the U.S. government and (2) that Congress could NOT strip citizens born or naturalized in the U.S. of their U.S. citizenship without their consent. The majority opinion concluded with the following language:

“Citizenship is no light trifle to be jeopardized any moment Congress decides to do so under the name of one of its general or implied grants of power. In some instances, loss of citizenship can mean that a man is left without the protection of citizenship in any country in the world — as a man without a country. Citizenship in this Nation is a part of a cooperative affair. Its citizenry is the country, and the country is its citizenry. The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship. We hold that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to, and does, protect every citizen of this Nation against a congressional forcible destruction of his citizenship, whatever his creed, color, or race. Our holding does no more than to give to this citizen that which is his own, a constitutional right to remain a citizen in a free country unless he voluntarily relinquishes that citizenship.”

Let’s consider what this language might/should mean in relation to two of the groups that your article considers.

First group — Accidental Americans in France or elsewhere:

As you point out these people are citizens of other countries (say France) and do NOT regard themselves as U.S. citizens. Okay, even if they are citizens under U.S. law, the judgment in Afroyim suggests that they have a constitutional right under U.S. law to voluntarily relinquish U.S. citizenship. Obviously the forced payment of $2350 to relinquish coupled with the notion of tax compliance fees, etc. does seem to burden their right to relinquish.

Second group — U.S. citizens living outside the United States who are “tax residents” of other countries:

The combined effects of: FATCA, U.S. “citizenship-based taxation”, and being “tax residents” of another country has made it impossible for U.S. citizens living outside the United States to BOTH: (1) Retain U.S. citizenship AND (2) be compliant with the enormous number of U.S. laws that regulate their lives. In other words this group of people are now FORCED to renounce their U.S. citizenship. I don’t believe that U.S. citizenship-based taxation is unconstitutional per se, but I do believe that when the volume, weight and confiscatory nature of the requirements reaches a level where people can no longer retain U.S. citizenship, then it reaches the point where we have (as per Afroyim) the “forcible destruction of citizenship”.

It has reached the point where the only Americans abroad who can retain U.S. citizenship are those who do not file U.S. taxes (sad but true).

As far as the poor souls born on the border whose citizenship is now being questioned:

The time has come for the legal profession to step up, get actively involved and expose the administration for it’s unprincipled, unjustified and unprovoked attack on a group of people who really didn’t choose where they were born anyway.

Because U.S. citizenship is primarily the result of having a “U.S. birthplace” all of these abuses are (in various ways) based on a circumstance over which a person had no control.

Nobody chooses where they were or were not born!

    John Richardson

    Written by

    Citizenship lawyer — based in Toronto, Canada http://www.citizenshipsolutions.ca