Renouncing US Citizenship

Many posts have discussed citizenship and expatriation.

Terry Ward at CNN:

Official government figures related to Americans renouncing citizenship are difficult to pin down.

A State Department spokesperson said in an email to CNN that it does not publish statistics on the number of US citizens who choose to renounce their citizenship, adding that the Treasury Department publishes a quarterly IRS report on expatriations. The IRS told CNN that it does not have compilations of the number of annual expatriations.

But according to Americans Overseas, a resource for US citizens living abroad that tallies the number of names reported within the quarterly IRS reports, 4,889 people are listed on the agency’s list for 2025, the highest number since 2020 when the figure spiked to 6,705. The organization said it is receiving significantly more inquiries about renunciation this year and is predicting a 15% increase in expatriations over last year, with numbers expected to remain elevated over the coming years.

Americans Overseas is currently advising roughly 40,000 US citizens, most with dual citizenship, in Europe and throughout the rest of the world who are either in the process of renouncing or inquiring about pursuing it, according to Daan Durlacher, co-founder of Americans Overseas.

Durlacher said he isn’t seeing all the names of clients he knows have renounced their US citizenship in the IRS reports, and he suggests that the figures are underreported. The IRS did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about the reports.

“These numbers are not complete, and I don’t know why,” said Durlacher, a dual Dutch and US citizen who was born in the Netherlands to an American mother.


To renounce something means to give it up, usually by formal declaration. Indeed, renouncing US citizenship is both a formal and legal process that requires potentially arduous paperwork as well as appearing for an in-person oath in front of a consular officer at a US embassy or consulate office outside of the US, along with other requirements.

Negative Net Migration

Many posts have discussed citizenship and expatriation.

Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson  at The Wall Street Journal:

In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration?

Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.

Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn’t collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics from more than 50 countries show that Americans are voting with their feet to an unprecedented degree. A millions-strong diaspora is studying, telecommuting and retiring overseas.

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The U.S. experienced net negative migration—an estimated loss of some 150,000 people—in 2025, and the outflow will likely increase in 2026, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank. The number could be larger or smaller because official U.S. data doesn’t yet fully capture the number of people leaving, Brookings analysts noted. The total in-migration was between around 2.6 and 2.7 million in 2025, down from a peak of almost 6 million in 2023.

The U.S. saw 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million “self-deportations” last year, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of 15 countries providing full or partial 2025 data showed that at least 180,000 Americans joined them—a number likely to be far higher when other countries report full statistics.

 

Expatriation 2025

Many posts have discussed citizenship and expatriation.

Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray at Gallup:

For the second straight year, about one in five Americans say they would like to leave the U.S. and move permanently to another country if they could. This heightened desire to migrate is driven primarily by younger women.

In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups.

The percentage of younger women wanting to move to another country first rose decisively in 2016, the final year of President Barack Obama's second term. That year, Gallup surveyed the U.S. in June and July, after both parties’ presumptive nominees were set for the November election, which Donald Trump went on to win. Desire to migrate continued to climb afterward, hitting 44% in President Joe Biden’s last year in office and remaining near that level in 2025. This suggests a broader shift in opinion among younger women, rather than a solely partisan one.

Moving to Russia

Peter Savodnik at The Free Press:

I spoke to twenty American expats, all men, who have moved to Russia over the past four years. They told me they moved to Moscow or St. Petersburg or the wild east—Siberia—because they no longer believed the one person they once thought could save America—Donald Trump—could still save it. America, they felt, was beyond saving now.

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No one was bothered by Putin being a dictator or invading Ukraine. That was, they agreed, understandable, what with NATO having expanded east and the United States having spent the past two and a half decades “meddling” in Russia’s backyard. (That was how most of them described U.S. support for democratic activists in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and other post-Soviet states.)

Peter Frohwein, who, like most recent expats, had never been to the former Soviet Union until recently and had a tenuous grasp of the Russian language, said of the war, “When someone says it’s a Russian invasion, that’s not even true.” He thought the United States, not Russia, had instigated the war by installing a friendly regime in Kiev.

Desire to Expatriate

 Monmouth Poll:

One-third (34%) of Americans would like to go and settle in another country if they were free to do so. Fifty years ago, this number stood at a much lower 10%. The Gallup Organization asked this question in eleven different national polls between 1948 and 1995. During that time, the desire to emigrate never went higher than 13% (1972) and dipped as low as 5% (1950). In fact, the number of people wanting to leave the country averaged 6% in polls taken between 1948 and 1960, hovered between 9% and 13% in the early to mid-1970s, and was a similar 9% to 12% in the 1990s.

Over that time, political independents have been somewhat more likely to want to move out of the U.S. than partisans. That remains true in the current poll, with 41% of independents saying they want to resettle in another country, compared with 35% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans. Fifty years ago, 13% of independents wanted to leave, along with 10% of Democrats and 9% of Republicans. The last time Gallup asked this question – in 1995 – these results stood at 17% of independents, 11% of Democrats, and 6% of Republicans who wanted to settle outside the United States. 

More Americans Are Renouncing Citizenship

Many posts have discussed citizenship and expatriation.

Robert W. Wood at Forbes:

2020 has already seen a big uptick in the number of Americans giving up their citizenship. So says the U.S. government’s 2020 second quarter list of published expatriates, the second highest number ever. Every three months, the U.S. Treasury Department publishes the names of individuals who renounced their U.S. citizenship or handed in a long-term green card. For the second quarter of 2020, the name and shame list included 2,406 people. That may not sound like many, but it’s the second highest number ever. The first quarter of 2020 tally was the highest quarter of all time, and with 5,315 leavers in just six months, the total for 2020 should be over 10,000. That is nearly double the number for 2016. The quarterly public list is required by law, but it seems likely that the actual number of expatriates is higher, since many apparently are not counted. Curiously, both the IRS and FBI track Americans who renounce. Of course, to give up your U.S. passport, you first need to have or citizenship somewhere else.

"Would you like to move PERMANENTLY to another country?"

Julie Ray and Nelli Esipova at Gallup:

Though relatively average by global standards, the 16% of Americans overall who said in 2017 and again in 2018 that they would like to permanently move to another country -- if they could -- is higher than the average levels during either the George W. Bush (11%) or Barack Obama administration (10%).
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The 30% of Americans younger than 30 who would like to move also represents a new high -- and it is also the group in which the gender gap is the largest. Forty percent of women younger than 30 said they would like to move, compared with 20% of men in this age group. These gender gaps narrow with age and eventually disappear after age 50.

"Sovereign Citizens"

At The Washington Post, Peter Holley writes about accused killer Markeith Loyd:

Loyd’s Facebook page makes no explicit mention of the sovereign belief system, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t immersed in the movement’s ideas, according to Bob Paudert, a 35-year law enforcement veteran who trains police departments around the country on how to identify and avoid violent confrontations with sovereign citizens in their communities.

Judging the references in his statement, Paudert said, Loyd used the language of “a hardcore sovereign” and speculated that he may have come into contact with the ideology in jail.

“There’s plenty of sovereigns in jail,” Paudert said. “They’re just like gangs. They’re in prison as well, and once they get there, they try to recruit while they’re incarcerated. It’s not uncommon for people to become radicalized once they’re behind bars.”

So what did Loyd’s statements mean?

Paudert said many sovereigns believe the U.S. government sells its citizens’ future earnings to foreign investors when they are born. Adherents often believe the funds are secretly kept by the U.S. Treasury in a secret trust that is only accessible to those who opt out of their “corporate” status, which splits them off from their flesh-and-blood self in the eyes of the government and keeps them subject to U.S. and international law, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The amount of money sovereigns believe they’re owed is based on their lifetime earning potential and can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to tens of millions, depending on the particular strain of sovereign precepts they follow, Paudert said.

“They believe that if you renounce your citizenship, then you can get into that account and draw out all the money that the government owes you,” he added. “It can all sound very unusual to people who are not familiar with their ideas.”

Using information from government reports and the trials of tax protesters, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated in 2011 that the number of people testing out sovereign techniques nationwide was about 300,000, with one-third of those being “hardcore sovereign believers.” Among the movement’s best-known acolytes is Terry Nichols, who helped plan the Oklahoma City bombing, according to the FBI.

Expatriation Trends

On February 10, Adam Taylor reported at The Washington Post:

This week, the Treasury Department released its quarterly list of individuals who had chosen to “expatriate” — i.e., renounced their U.S. citizenship or gave up their rights to permanent residence.

The list is notable for a couple of reasons. First off, Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is on it. This means that Johnson, a dual-national who was born in New York City, has finally renounced his citizenship (as he had long promised he would). Secondly — and far more importantly in the grand scheme of things — the list shows that Johnson is just one of a total 5,411 individuals to expatriate in 2016.

As law firm Andrew Mitchel LLC noted on its blog, this was a 26 percent increase over 2015, when there were 4,279 names on the list. And it is a 58 percent increase over 2014, when there were 3,415 names on the list. As data collected by the firm showed, while the number of individuals who expatriated from the United States had stayed pretty flat from the 1960s — and actually dipping for a while in the 1990s and early 2000s — over the past five years it has dramatically surged upward.

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The United States is one of the only countries in the world that requires its citizens and permanent residents to file taxes even when they live abroad. Eritrea is the only other country to have a similar policy. This unusual policy a relic of the Civil War and the Revenue Act of 1862, which called for the taxing of U.S. citizens abroad — in part to punish men who fled the country to avoid joining the Union army.

This is no new policy — Americans abroad have always been covered by federal tax laws. However, things changed in 2010, when the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) was enacted. This law essentially requires foreign financial institutions to check whether an account holder is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. In some cases, Dunn said, they would ask for proof that the account holder is not a U.S. citizen.

The end result here is that whereas in the past a U.S. citizen abroad might be able to get away with not filing their U.S. taxes, that has become vastly less likely under these new circumstances. In some cases, this can be extremely costly: Johnson was known to have racked up a large U.S. tax bill for the sale of his home in London, even though he had not lived in the U.S. since he was a small child.

Taxation and Renunciation of Citizenship

The Wall Street Journal reports:

U.S. offices abroad reported that 1,001 U.S. citizens and green-card holders had renounced their allegiance in the first three months of the year, according to Andrew Mitchel, a lawyer in Centerbrook, Conn., who analyzes Treasury Department data. That figure puts 2014 on track to top last year's total of 2,999 renunciations, he said, which was the most since the government began disclosing the data.

Helping boost the exodus, experts say, is a five-year-old U.S. campaign to hunt for undeclared accounts held by Americans abroad.

Aggressive enforcement of tax rules for American expatriates and their families has prompted some middle-income earners to renounce their U.S. citizenship rather than risk sizable taxes and penalties. 

Since 2009, the government campaign has collected more than $6 billion in taxes, interest and penalties from more than 43,000 U.S. taxpayers. Federal prosecutors have filed more than 100 criminal indictments, including the high-profile case of Beanie Babies inventor Ty Warner, who last year pleaded guilty to tax evasion involving secret Swiss bank accounts.

The tax dragnet has also swept up many middle-income Americans living abroad, prompting some to give up their U.S. citizenship. While people who renounce aren't freed of taxes due for past years, they don't want to risk sizable taxes and penalties for them and their children in the years ahead, experts say. Nearly 8,000 taxpayers have renounced U.S. citizenship in the past five years, Mr. Mitchel found, compared with fewer than 5,000 in the preceding decade.

"The increase is due to current and future changes in tax law and enforcement," said Freddi Weintraub, a New York attorney at the Fragomen firm who specializes in immigration law. She said in recent years she has seen a threefold increase in expatriation inquiries related to taxes.

Renunciations

AP reports on the increase in the number of people renouncing US citizenship:

The jump in renunciations reflects evolving views about national identity, said Nancy L. Green, an American professor at the L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. When the U.S. got its start, citizenship was defined by "perpetual allegiance" — the British notion of nationality as a birthright that could never be changed.

American colonists rejected that to justify becoming citizens of a newly independent country. But changeable citizenship wasn't widely embraced until the mass immigration of the late 1800s, says Green, a historian of migration and expatriation.

Even then, U.S. artists and writers who moved to Europe in the 1920s were criticized, suspected of trying to avoid taxes. Until the 1960s, U.S. citizenship remained a privilege the government could take away on certain grounds. It's only since then that U.S. citizenship has come to be viewed as belonging to an individual, who could keep — or surrender it — by choice.

The Expatriation Act

At The Los Angeles Times, Richard Simon reports:

Daniel Swalm was researching his family when he came across a disturbing episode in immigration history. That discovery would lead to a move in the U.S. Senate to apologize for action the nation took more than a century ago.

Swalm discovered that under an obscure 1907 law, his grandmother Elsie, born and raised in Minnesota, was stripped of her U.S. citizenship after marrying an immigrant from Sweden.

Swalm had never heard of the Expatriation Act that required a U.S.-born woman who married a foreigner to "take the nationality of her husband."
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The law, passed at a time of heightened anxiety over the growing numbers of "new immigrants" from eastern and southern Europe, came in response to a belief that U.S.-born women marrying foreigners were forsaking their allegiance to the United States, [UNC historian Candice] Bredbenner said.

"A citizen woman's marriage to a foreigner became vulnerable to interpretation as a brazenly un-American act," Bredbenner wrote in her book, "A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Citizenship and the Politics of Marriage."

At the time, magazines wrote about American women marrying European nobility in pursuit of titles. "For some Americans, a titled American was an affront to American ideals," Bredbenner wrote. But thousands who lost their citizenship were average women who lived in immigrant communities, she added in an interview.
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After women pushed to win the right to vote — secured when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920 — Congress in 1922 acted to allow most, but not all, American-born women who married foreigners to be U.S. citizens. But those who married men ineligible for citizenship, such as Chinese immigrants, still forfeited their U.S. citizenship, until that restriction was later repealed.

Seeking and Renouncing Citizenship

Some American Samoans have gone to court to seek citizenship.  At CNN, Danny Cevallos explains:

The Citizenship Clause provides that "[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

American Samoa is certainly "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. But residents must also be born "in the United States" for the constitutional right to attach. Unfortunately, for 14th Amendment citizenship purposes, the Territories have never been considered "in the United States."

No federal court has ever recognized birthright citizenship as a guarantee in unincorporated Territories. In fact, federal courts have held on many occasions that unincorporated Territories are not included within the "United States" for purposes of the Citizenship Clause. Because these residents have no Constitutional, automatic right to citizenship, Congress can pick and choose how they become citizens. In fact, it has done just that: granting citizenship at birth to residents of other Territories.

For example, residents of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are citizens if born there. But that citizenship does not flow from any constitutional right. Rather, Congress has chosen to pass independent legislation giving those residents citizenship.

Indeed, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court observed in one opinion that the only remaining noncitizen nationals are residents of American Samoa and Swains Island. When it comes to citizenship in the Territories, Congress can giveth or it can choose not to giveth, and the Constitution gives those residents no recourse.

At NPR, Ari Shapiro writes of the unanticipated consequences of the  Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act.

Most countries in the world don't tax their citizens living abroad. So, for example, a Spaniard living in Canada won't pay Spanish taxes. Instead, he'll pay Canadian taxes. But the U.S. taxes American citizens wherever they are in the world.

"If I can compare it to romance, I say the U.S. is like Fatal Attraction," says Suzanne Reisman, a lawyer in London who advises Americans abroad. "Once they've got you, they never let you go. You have to renounce your citizenship, or you have to die."

So today, Americans who don't like the Fatal Attraction relationship are giving up their U.S. citizenship in record numbers.

In Switzerland, so many people want to renounce their citizenship that the U.S. Embassy actually has a waiting list.

"I want to be clear: It's not about a dollar value of taxes that I don't want to pay," says Brian Dublin, a businessman who lives near Zurich. "It's about the headache associated with the regulations, filing in the U.S., and then having financial institutions in the rest of the world turn me away."

Dublin says he is ready to renounce, despite the ties he feels to the country of his birth. "I grew up in America. I love my country. But I just feel that the current regulations are onerous."
Officials from the Treasury Department, the State Department, the IRS and Congress spoke on background for this story. None would talk on tape.

They all generally agree on the facts of the situation. Even so, there is very little pressure to change it. As one Senate staffer pointed out, nobody in Congress represents overseas Americans. And government officials think this law is succeeding at catching the tax cheats. That may be worth the side effect of losing a few thousand American citizens every year.

Expatriation 2013

Many posts have discussed expatriation.  On Thursday, attorney Andrew Mitchel wrote:

Today the Treasury Department published the names of individuals who renounced their U.S. citizenship or terminated their long-term U.S. residency (“expatriated”) during the fourth quarter of 2013.

The number of published expatriates for the quarter was 630, bringing the total number of published expatriates in 2013 to 2,999. The total for the year shatters the previous record high of 1,781 set in 2011 and is a 221% increase over the 2012 total of 932. 

 

We do not believe that the primary reason for the increase in expatriations is for political purposes or for individuals to reduce taxes. Instead, we believe that there are likely three principal reasons for the recent increases in the number of expatriations:

Increased awareness of the obligation to file U.S. tax returns by U.S. citizens and U.S. tax residents living outside the U.S.;

The ever-increasing burden of complying with U.S. tax laws; and

 The fear generated by the potentially bankrupting penalties for failure to file U.S. tax returns when an individual holds substantial non-U.S. assets.

The increase in expatriations may also be partly due to a 2008 change in the expatriation rules.

Relinquishing Citizenship

Our chapter on citizenship discusses ways in which Americans can stop being Americans. The Washington Post reports:

This item just in via an “activity” report from the U.S. Embassy in Bern, Switzerland, headlined “Soul Legend Relinquishes U.S. Citizenship.”

“Long-time Swiss resident Tina Turner” was in the embassy Oct. 24 to sign her “Statement of Voluntary Relinquishment of U.S. Citizenship under Section 349 (a)(1) of the INA” — the Immigration and Naturalization Act.
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The key word in the embassy report apparently is the term “relinquishment.” That means, a knowledgeable source told us, that she did not “formally renounce her U.S. citizenship under 349(a)(5) Immigration and Nationality Act, but took Swiss citizenship with the intent to lose her U.S. citizenship.” As opposed to formal renunciation — a much more complex process, we were told — there are no “tax or other penalties for loss of citizenship in this fashion.”

Taxes and Expatriation

A number of posts have discussed expatriation, the process of losing or giving up citizenship.

At the BBC, Thomas Geoghegan reports that 1,131 people renounced US citizenship in the second quarter of 2013, compared with 189 during the same period in 2012. The apparent reason is the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act, a new law that will require financial institutions across the world to report the assets and incomes of all US citizens with more than $50,000 on their books.

Suddenly, some expats are waking up in a cold sweat. They have always had to file tax returns and disclose foreign accounts on a form called the FBAR, although in practice many didn't. But now Fatca means they have to be more rigorous or face huge fines, in the knowledge that the US authorities could know a lot more than they have in the past. 

Many would say the IRS is only trying to get what it is owed, but critics say that in trying to track down the wealthy tax-dodgers, ordinary people are being dragged into an expensive and time-consuming form-filling nightmare. And for some, it's become too much. 

Bridget, who asked the BBC not to use her real name, gave up her US citizenship in 2011, 32 years after leaving for a new life in Scandinavia. 

"This has nothing to do with avoiding taxes. I was never in danger of having to pay taxes in the US since I pay more here. The issue for me was that it was becoming harder and harder to follow the tax code and comply. It was difficult already but when I knew Fatca was coming, I thought, 'Do I want to go through with it anymore?'"

Expatriation and Taxation

Our chapter on citizenship discusses expatriation. Bloomberg reports:

Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship surged sixfold in the second quarter from a year earlier as the government prepares to introduce tougher asset-disclosure rules. 

Expatriates giving up their nationality at U.S. embassies climbed to 1,131 in the three months through June from 189 in the year-earlier period, according to Federal Register figures published today. That brought the first-half total to 1,810 compared with 235 for the whole of 2008. 

The U.S., the only nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside, is searching for tax cheats in offshore centers, including Switzerland, as the government tries to curb the budget deficit. Shunned by Swiss and German banks and facing tougher asset-disclosure rules under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas are weighing the cost of holding a U.S. passport. 

“With the looming deadline for Fatca, more and more U.S. citizens are becoming aware that they have U.S. tax reporting obligations,” said Matthew Ledvina, a U.S. tax lawyer at Anaford AG in Zurich. “Once aware, they decide to renounce their U.S. citizenship.” 

Fatca requires foreign financial institutions to report to the Internal Revenue Service information about financial accounts held by U.S. taxpayers, or held by foreign entities in which U.S. taxpayers hold a substantial ownership interest. It was estimated to generate $8.7 billion over 10 years, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. 

Patriotism and Public Opinion

At AEI, Karlyn Bowman, Jennifer Marisco, and Andrew Rugg summarize surveys on patriotism and related matters:

How patriotic?: Last year, when the Pew Research Center asked people whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “I am very patriotic,” 52% said they agreed completely with it and another 36% mostly agreed. Only 9% mostly or completely disagreed.

Patriotic activities: The Public Religion Research Institute recently asked respondents how likely they were to engage in a variety of patriotic activities. Eighty-one percent said it was very likely they would thank a member of the military for their service. Sixty-nine percent said the same about singing the national anthem, 59% displaying the American flag at their home or car, 53% attending a public 4th of July celebration, and 50% said they would make a special effort to buy products that are made in American.

Canada, here we don’t come: In an April CBS News/Vanity Fair poll, 92% of those surveyed said they had never thought of moving to Canada. In another question in the poll, a resounding 70% answered “no” when asked if there were ever a time when they wished they were not an American. Of the remainder, 9% said they wished they weren’t an American when the government does something they don’t like, 7% when watching reality TV, 4% when doing their taxes, and 3% when travelling abroad.

Thomas Paine: Forty-four percent of Americans surveyed by CBS News/Vanity Fair pollsters were able to identify Thomas Paine as an American revolutionary who wrote Common Sense, and another 40% were not.

I pledge allegiance: In the poll, 61% told the interviewers it was very important for children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each school day and another 22% said it was somewhat important. More than 70% of Republicans, Democrats and Independents, respectively, said this was very or somewhat important.

If the Founding Fathers were alive…: The patriotic sentiments stand in stark contrast to views about Washington, DC. In Gallup’s June sounding, only 27% were satisfied with the way things were going in the country and 71% were dissatisfied. In a new mid-June Fox poll of registered voters, just 35% said they trusted the federal government. In another question in the poll, Congress had a 15% job approval rating. Only 13% said they thought the Founding Fathers would approve of how things are going in Washington today, while 82% disapproved.

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A Case Against Noncitizen Voting

Previous posts have discussed ideas about noncitizen voting. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall writes about a New York City Council proposal to let noncitizens vote in municipal elections.

To me, it’s definitely a bad idea. That’s not, I hope it’s clear, because I’m anti-immigrant. I’m very pro-reform and pro-legalization. But citizenship itself is a critical thing to me — and I suspect that opinion is shared by many residents and currently undocumented immigrants who are clamoring to get a chance to join the club.

I’ve written about this several times in the past. But I believe in what I think of as ‘thick citizenship’, a robust bundle of rights and responsibilities. Being a citizen of the United States isn’t just a matter of carrying a US passport or being able to vote. It’s much more foundational than that. It’s a commitment to a political community, albeit a vastly large one. And it’s because of that that I don’t think there should be such a thing as dual citizenship. In my mind it’s almost a contradiction in terms.

To me, thick citizenship is really at the root of our equality as Americans. The mix of rights and responsibilities that come with it are what makes the Salvadoran immigrant every bit as much an American as someone whose ancestors have been here for centuries. We’re all equal because we’ve all made the same commitment as citizens. Being an American citizen also matters for how you’re taxed and where you keep your money.

That’s what makes the plutocrat who renounces his citizenship for tax purposes really execrable and someone who I don’t think should be allowed ever to enter the country again.

Particularly as our society becomes more economically stratified, citizenship is the sheet anchor of what keeps us fundamentally equal, at least in key ways. It’s the basis of every citizens claim on the larger national community. If our citizenship isn’t common, what really connects the affluent educated New Yorker who can live or work anywhere on the globe to an impoverished young woman in South Texas with none of those freedoms or opportunities?

If Latin American immigrants maintain citizenship in the countries of their birth, doesn’t that undermine the claim to full equality here?

Moving from Mexico, Moving from the USA

Many posts have dealt with immigration and expatriation. Here are some fascinating data from Gallup:

As lawmakers in the United States ponder the shape and form of comprehensive immigration reform, residents of Mexico -- the country that has been the largest source of U.S.-bound immigration over the past decade -- are no more likely than U.S. residents are to express a desire to leave their home country. Eleven percent of Mexicans say they would leave their homeland if given the opportunity -- a decline of about half from 21% in 2007. Likewise, the 11% of Americans who would emigrate has changed little over the past four years.

The U.S. has long prided itself on its ability to attract rather than lose residents, and some have seen Mexico as the main hub for U.S.-bound immigration. The Gallup data call into question these long-held assumptions because as many Mexicans would leave Mexico as Americans would leave America.

The percentage of Mexicans willing to leave Mexico changed significantly over 2012. In December 2012, Mexico's desire to migrate statistic was 11% -- identical to that of the U.S. An earlier survey in May 2012, conducted during a presidential campaign that reportedly stoked popular anxieties as to the future direction of the country, found the percentage at a higher 17%, a result that may be a one-time anomaly. Overall, for 2012, an average of 14% of Mexicans said they would leave their country, a result that is not statistically significant when compared with the 11% of U.S. residents that would leave if given the opportunity