The increased exposure of risk to the consular staff is insignificant compared to normal life in the economy they're located in, and interviews could very easily be conducted in less harmful ways. Other (Judicial) processes including stat decs, evidence, cross examination all take place online when required. This is lie-detector class legalistic bullshit about f2f requirements. Specious.
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)
> “Coronavirus made me realize that in the US, if you’re not a member of the moneyed elite you’re left to fend for yourself with virtually no help from the federal government,” he said.
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.
Did they really ask for seven forms of ID? Exactly seven? In addition to your passport, you said they just lost it, did they say this in the letter? Did what they wrote say "7 ID's" or "seven ID's"? Not the same thing. Government-issued IDs right? Dual citizens only have six, they wanted your library card, your bus pass, like what are we talking about here? Did they give any examples of what you could provide? What do you propose they're trying to do, break a tie between the IDs of each gender (not kidding)? And you don't have a doctor. Or health insurance. But you're trans. Do you take no hormones then? You know what, as for the specific, very personal details of your sex change, I ask nothing.
> "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.
What is worse is that there is no recourse other than to visit an embassy. My understanding is that you cannot renounce citizenship on US soil. It’s obvious this was a planned decision to turn off the only available exit.
>My understanding is that you cannot renounce citizenship on US soil.
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.
Getting the Consular Report of Birth Abroad, passport and then Social Security number for my child was an eight month adventure that I started on as soon as we got home from the hospital.
I will again brag on how wonderfully easy it was to get the kid’s German passport by comparison.
The Consular services have been extremely poor throughout the pandemic. A lot of people have been waiting months, if not years at this point, beyond regular processing times for things that were basically formalities in the past.
Fascinating. I never really knew that many people are eager to give up their American citizen, though of course, as a percentage of the population, their percentage is quite low. Some reasons make sense, like the people who have moved to a different country but are unable to get a citizenship there due to them being American citizens.
>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 have been thinking about giving up my citizenship too. I was born in TX in the late 80s but been living in Austria since the early 90s.
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
It should be possible to get the birth certificate eventually, though Covid will slow things down.
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.
Of course the actual solution is to get rid of US citizenship. In the meantime for things like stocks, can you use a mailbox address or get someone to let you use their address? You’d need some sort of documents to be linked to the address for manual verification if denied automatic acceptance by any platform.
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.
Probably because the regulations imposed on American people are far stricter than in the jurisdiction of actual residence. The article mentioned FATCA, which is a great example.
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).
Dealing with the embassies and consulates during COVID is a nightmare. I was separated from my fiancée for 15 months due to consular ineptitude, mainly driven by higher level government policies on COVID. They even held my fiancée's passport, a non-US one, for over a month, which prevented her using the passport to travel to other countries to get back into the U.S.
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.
The United States has been _uniquely incompetent_.
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.
And people Back Home wonder why I never even attempted to put my husband through the whole Green Card process.
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.
How did you get the global entry sorted out? My application is struck for last 2 years and you cannot withdraw the application either and reapply either.
Good luck with Social Security as well. As far as I can tell, their physical offices closed in March 2020 and haven't re-opened. My local office number will reliably drop my call after 10m 30s on hold (line just goes silent) and I have no idea how long hold times actually are on the nationwide number, but I've gotten to the 90 minute mark several times.
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.
This isn't really about renouncing citizenship, it's more to do with how lazy and/or corrupt government employees are, and how we the sheeple have allowed them to get away with that for so long.
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.
Same thing with other governments. UK side it took me year+ to get the equivalent of a SSN(NIN) and taxpayer number. Both of which are well establish processes requiring limited actual work.
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
Readit News
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...
I will again brag on how wonderfully easy it was to get the kid’s German passport by comparison.
>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
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.