More Americans Giving Up Citizenship Than Reported

Overseas Exile
March 19, 2012

Important Note: I am not a lawyer and the following is my ad-hoc interpretation of data. Do not consider the following to be a legal description of your situation.

When I wrote about US Renunciations Hitting New Record, Eric from notlearningcantonese wrote:

And not to sound like a tin-foil-hatter, but I’ve personally come to the conclusion that renunciation statistics are deliberately being under-reported. I didn’t believe this theory at first because the one renunciant I know personally (a classmate) actually did show up in the list, but every time I dig into the numbers I find something suspicious. E.g. there’s about 8,000 Americans per year naturalising in EU countries, according to Eurostat — but the number who naturalise in countries which disallow dual citizenship is greater than the number of names in the “name and shame” list.

And that got me to digging. What I needed, specifically, was source data. First, I grabbed the list of Americans who have acquired EU citizenship. Their interface is an abomination, but once you’ve assembled the correct data, you can export it in a variety of formats.

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This article was posted: Monday, March 19, 2012 at 12:26 pm

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