Yes that was my understanding of the situation. Feel free to explain why I’m wrong, that’s why I asked the question. Even the term “foreign national” is something I’m not familiar with and it’s not entirely clear whether you would even use it in some of the cases cited in the article considering that one individual is self described as living overseas when he renounced his citizenship.
A foreign national is anyone that is a citizen of a foreign nation. If an American is renouncing their US citizenship, they must already have gained citizenship of another nation, which makes them a foreign national once they no longer have US citizenship.
If they had no legal rights in the United States, there would be zero tourism or business travel from foreigners to the US because any American could do whatever they want to that foreign person (steal from them, con them, murder them, you name it) without fear of legal repercussions.
So yes, foreigners have the right to use American courts if the injustice they are alleging happened on American soil.
I have a few weird questions if you have time to answer them. How does it work in the case where the person was outside of the USA at the time, seeing as they were not on USA “soil” at the time? It’s just that one of the parties (in this case the federal government) has to be on USA soil?
And how does that work if, say, you’re standing on the USA side of the Mexican border and you throw a brick at someone on the Mexican side? Could the Mexican citizen in this case file a lawsuit in a USA court?
I am not the OP, nor am I a lawyer, but I believe I am informed enough to answer these.
How does it work in the case where the person was outside of the USA at the time, seeing as they were not on USA “soil” at the time? It’s just that one of the parties (in this case the federal government) has to be on USA soil?
Yes. In this case, the alleged offense (the cost demanded for renouncing citizenship) took place by the US federal government on American soil, which is why they can use through American courts.
The reason why they probably wouldn’t be suing through the court system of the country they immigrated to is because other countries do not have the authority to dictate how much money the US is demanding. But at the same time, there’s technically no reason to pay the US either if you never plan on going back there, given that the US has no power to arrest people in foreign soil…unless the two countries have an extradition treaty in place (and much of the first world does). The US would then have to sue for extradition within the court system of the other country first, and then you’d be facing a lawsuit in the US over unpaid fees.
The threat of the latter is also assuming the fee justifies the court expense spent pursuing it, which I doubt it would. I met a lot of American expats in China who technically owe the US government thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes/fees/etc but aren’t even worried about going back to visit because the government would be spending far more pursuing legal action than they stand to make from the suit. The only time one should be worried is the rare example where the government might want to make an example of someone, or if you’re a mob boss or something and that’s the only concrete offense they can jail you for.
And how does that work if, say, you’re standing on the USA side of the Mexican border and you throw a brick at someone on the Mexican side? Could the Mexican citizen in this case file a lawsuit in a USA court?
Now ain’t that the tricky scenario. A similar case actually came up recently, with Hernandez v. Mesa and it was ruled at the time by the conservative-stacked Supreme Court that the US government was not responsible for prosecuting a crime where the victim was not in the US and not an American citizen. But the fact that there were dissenting opinions from all of the non-conservative judges, who are themselves legal experts on the constitution, shows that this is a very contentious gray area.
I guess the takeaway from this is that the person in this hypothetical scenario would be better off filing suit from Mexico and pushing for extradition, as the two countries have an extradition treaty.
Wow thank you! Bonus points for citing case law and referencing dissenting opinions. To go back to the original article, one thing I did not consider that even though one man was not on US soil he still would have been a US citizen when he was charged the fee. Only after the fee was paid was his citizenship renounced. For some reason it’s funny to me that if not for that fact, the government may have been able to argue that based (on face value) on Hernandez v. Mesa that he wasn’t in the US nor a citizen at the time!
Court jurisdiction can become a really complicated question, but citizenship of the parties has nothing to do with it. If a court has jurisdiction, doesn’t matter if the plaintiffs reside on Mars.
The law and courts apply to anyone with standing. Have you not read news stories when illegal immigrants are challenging their detention? Or Guantanamo prisoners petitioning the court that they shouldn’t be tortured? This is the same thing.
You say inhabitants but it’s clear from the article that at least some of the litigants were not inhabiting USA territory. And I thought the entire point of setting up Guantanamo Bay was that it “technically” wasn’t US soil therefore they are not afforded the same protections.
You are right; it’s not inhabitants. It’s anyone with standing.
I edited my reply for clarity.
French citizens who are rear ended by an American during their vacation, for example, but must return home the next day, still have screws to the courts.
As one would expect.
The location of a person when they file a lawsuit has no bearing on its validity.
That wasn’t me being shitty. That was me asking a genuine question in order to understand just how unfamiliar they were to this subject. Once they answered, you’ll find I explained the entire thing to them.
Do you always assume the worst in people? Real question.
I mean, it’s like asking how can you order food in a restaurant of a different country you’re not a citizen of? Like, you might not be familiar with the topic but you’re assuming some limitation that makes no sense and doesn’t exist.
Except you’re comparing LEGAL SYSTEMS with ORDERING FOOD
They aren’t comparable.
I’m almost positive I could navigate ordering food from almost anywhere in the world, as long as I could speak their language.
But I don’t for a second think I could navigate their legal system, and in quite a few cases from my understanding, I wouldn’t be able to do anything at all as a foreigner.
Sure, it MIGHT be similar enough. But I’m not going to risk it, and I would prefer to at least ask someone with more local knowledge than myself. Probably a lawyer but if it’s only passing curiosity, a simple question on a website will do.
Well yeah, i couldn’t make a lawsuit in my hometown or in a different country without a lawyer either. Yes, you get a lawyer and they file a lawsuit in the appropriate court, whether it’s your home country or a foreign country. Yes, the process will be different but it doesn’t matter which country youre a citizen of.
I know that if you are a US citizen in France a lot of bank will refuse to open a bank account for you.
It’s due to the fact that they need to report to the IRS the banking informations of all US citizen and they just don’t want to spend any money on that.
Plus even if you are not taxed you still have to declare to the IRS your revenues every year.
Some people are US citizen without every putting a feet in the US, I totally understand that they would want to renounce their citizenship.
The rich have other ways to avoid paying tax. Hell, arguably the US is a tax haven for the rich, compared to many many countries. IRC Trump paid no tax 10/15 years due to reported losses. I suspect this was plain old tax avoidance. People like Bezos, Musk or Buffet pay almost nothing.
For example, when I worked at a European bank, we would often refuse US citizens anything but the basics. The IRS and US government is notoriously over-zealous and the US is one the few countries which applies double taxation. Many banks therefore avoid American passport holders like the plague. There are stories of people having their bank accounts summararily closed or frozen:
Often these were people who hadn’t been in the US since childhood or at all, earned and paid (up to 10x higher) taxes in Europe than they ever would in the US, but still got fucked over by the IRS and a country they would never visit (again). The US is one of the only countries in the world that does double taxation.
These weren’t rich people. Almost all of them were middle-class. Plenty were unemployed or earning less than 20k a year.
For middle-class people, it’s especially problematic come pension time, when time came for the payout of a European pension plan or the sale of the family home. Stuff they’d already paid tax on to the country they’d lived in most of their lives, but are forced to give America ‘its share’ despite getting less than nothing in return.
Plenty of them are also unable to vote in the US, because they never had a last residence, voting is a state matter, and it’s made needlessly complicated for foreign residents. Taxation without representation.
Thereby handily ignoring the rest of my comment, because you’d prefer to think of anyone who wants to renounce citizenship as a rich tax evader, rather than admit that there are plenty of reasons why someone might not want to have American citizenship, because shockhorror not everyone wants to be American, live in the US, or loves the US. Especially if they’ve never lived there or visited.
Imagine having been born in Italy during a long holiday, and for the rest of your life being forced to fill in Italian tax forms, despite working a minimum wage job and having no idea how the Italian system works and barely speaking the language. And when you try to get a loan from a American bank, they say no, because they’d have to file relevant paperwork with the Italian equivalent of the IRS.
Imagine a scenario where you gained Italian citizenship through an accident of birth. Your parents were on holiday, your mother went into labour a bit earlier than expected.
Is the only reason you wouldn’t want to be Italian that you want to avoid paying tax there?
By some calculations, there may be as many as 30,000 people among the estimated 5 million to 9 million US citizens living abroad who would like to begin the renunciation process but can’t.
…
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.
…
He became disillusioned when he learned that because his son was born outside the US he would not be eligible for US citizenship, and yet because of James’s citizenship he would treated as if he were a US taxpayer. That struck him as a modern form of taxation without representation. For the past year he has been trying to get through to an official who will help him renounce his citizenship, without success. “I never asked for US citizenship, and now I’m not even allowed to give it up.”
But here’s the fun part, you still have to file a tax return every year! Even if you’re well under the threshold! And trying to find someone living abroad who is versed in American expatriate tax law is expensive! And I can’t afford it!!
I am hiding from the IRS and have been for 16+ years.
How can you file a lawsuit in a country you are not a citizen of, against a country you are not a citizen of? Real question.
Do you really think foreign nationals aren’t afforded legal rights within the United States? Real question.
Yes that was my understanding of the situation. Feel free to explain why I’m wrong, that’s why I asked the question. Even the term “foreign national” is something I’m not familiar with and it’s not entirely clear whether you would even use it in some of the cases cited in the article considering that one individual is self described as living overseas when he renounced his citizenship.
A foreign national is anyone that is a citizen of a foreign nation. If an American is renouncing their US citizenship, they must already have gained citizenship of another nation, which makes them a foreign national once they no longer have US citizenship.
If they had no legal rights in the United States, there would be zero tourism or business travel from foreigners to the US because any American could do whatever they want to that foreign person (steal from them, con them, murder them, you name it) without fear of legal repercussions.
So yes, foreigners have the right to use American courts if the injustice they are alleging happened on American soil.
Yes that makes sense now, thank you!
I have a few weird questions if you have time to answer them. How does it work in the case where the person was outside of the USA at the time, seeing as they were not on USA “soil” at the time? It’s just that one of the parties (in this case the federal government) has to be on USA soil?
And how does that work if, say, you’re standing on the USA side of the Mexican border and you throw a brick at someone on the Mexican side? Could the Mexican citizen in this case file a lawsuit in a USA court?
I am not the OP, nor am I a lawyer, but I believe I am informed enough to answer these.
Yes. In this case, the alleged offense (the cost demanded for renouncing citizenship) took place by the US federal government on American soil, which is why they can use through American courts.
The reason why they probably wouldn’t be suing through the court system of the country they immigrated to is because other countries do not have the authority to dictate how much money the US is demanding. But at the same time, there’s technically no reason to pay the US either if you never plan on going back there, given that the US has no power to arrest people in foreign soil…unless the two countries have an extradition treaty in place (and much of the first world does). The US would then have to sue for extradition within the court system of the other country first, and then you’d be facing a lawsuit in the US over unpaid fees.
The threat of the latter is also assuming the fee justifies the court expense spent pursuing it, which I doubt it would. I met a lot of American expats in China who technically owe the US government thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes/fees/etc but aren’t even worried about going back to visit because the government would be spending far more pursuing legal action than they stand to make from the suit. The only time one should be worried is the rare example where the government might want to make an example of someone, or if you’re a mob boss or something and that’s the only concrete offense they can jail you for.
Now ain’t that the tricky scenario. A similar case actually came up recently, with Hernandez v. Mesa and it was ruled at the time by the conservative-stacked Supreme Court that the US government was not responsible for prosecuting a crime where the victim was not in the US and not an American citizen. But the fact that there were dissenting opinions from all of the non-conservative judges, who are themselves legal experts on the constitution, shows that this is a very contentious gray area.
I guess the takeaway from this is that the person in this hypothetical scenario would be better off filing suit from Mexico and pushing for extradition, as the two countries have an extradition treaty.
Wow thank you! Bonus points for citing case law and referencing dissenting opinions. To go back to the original article, one thing I did not consider that even though one man was not on US soil he still would have been a US citizen when he was charged the fee. Only after the fee was paid was his citizenship renounced. For some reason it’s funny to me that if not for that fact, the government may have been able to argue that based (on face value) on Hernandez v. Mesa that he wasn’t in the US nor a citizen at the time!
Thanks for explaining all that so eloquently. I would not have been able to answer their border hypothetical as well as you did.
Court jurisdiction can become a really complicated question, but citizenship of the parties has nothing to do with it. If a court has jurisdiction, doesn’t matter if the plaintiffs reside on Mars.
The law and courts apply to anyone with standing. Have you not read news stories when illegal immigrants are challenging their detention? Or Guantanamo prisoners petitioning the court that they shouldn’t be tortured? This is the same thing.
You say inhabitants but it’s clear from the article that at least some of the litigants were not inhabiting USA territory. And I thought the entire point of setting up Guantanamo Bay was that it “technically” wasn’t US soil therefore they are not afforded the same protections.
You are right; it’s not inhabitants. It’s anyone with standing.
I edited my reply for clarity.
French citizens who are rear ended by an American during their vacation, for example, but must return home the next day, still have screws to the courts.
As one would expect.
The location of a person when they file a lawsuit has no bearing on its validity.
No other system would make sense.
Slow your roll, turbo, do you always get this shitty when someone asks a genuine question about a topic they aren’t familiar with?
Real question.
That wasn’t me being shitty. That was me asking a genuine question in order to understand just how unfamiliar they were to this subject. Once they answered, you’ll find I explained the entire thing to them.
Do you always assume the worst in people? Real question.
I mean, it’s like asking how can you order food in a restaurant of a different country you’re not a citizen of? Like, you might not be familiar with the topic but you’re assuming some limitation that makes no sense and doesn’t exist.
Except you’re comparing LEGAL SYSTEMS with ORDERING FOOD
They aren’t comparable.
I’m almost positive I could navigate ordering food from almost anywhere in the world, as long as I could speak their language.
But I don’t for a second think I could navigate their legal system, and in quite a few cases from my understanding, I wouldn’t be able to do anything at all as a foreigner.
Sure, it MIGHT be similar enough. But I’m not going to risk it, and I would prefer to at least ask someone with more local knowledge than myself. Probably a lawyer but if it’s only passing curiosity, a simple question on a website will do.
Well yeah, i couldn’t make a lawsuit in my hometown or in a different country without a lawyer either. Yes, you get a lawyer and they file a lawsuit in the appropriate court, whether it’s your home country or a foreign country. Yes, the process will be different but it doesn’t matter which country youre a citizen of.
I imagine it starts with hiring a lawyer, the same as if you’re a citizen.
The court has jurisdiction regardless of what country the plaintiffs are from.
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I know that if you are a US citizen in France a lot of bank will refuse to open a bank account for you.
It’s due to the fact that they need to report to the IRS the banking informations of all US citizen and they just don’t want to spend any money on that.
Plus even if you are not taxed you still have to declare to the IRS your revenues every year.
Some people are US citizen without every putting a feet in the US, I totally understand that they would want to renounce their citizenship.
That’s probably most of them- but there’s other situations as well. Some countries require you renounce other citizenships to gain theirs.
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Not true.
The rich have other ways to avoid paying tax. Hell, arguably the US is a tax haven for the rich, compared to many many countries. IRC Trump paid no tax 10/15 years due to reported losses. I suspect this was plain old tax avoidance. People like Bezos, Musk or Buffet pay almost nothing.
For example, when I worked at a European bank, we would often refuse US citizens anything but the basics. The IRS and US government is notoriously over-zealous and the US is one the few countries which applies double taxation. Many banks therefore avoid American passport holders like the plague. There are stories of people having their bank accounts summararily closed or frozen:
https://www.thelocal.de/20210914/why-are-americans-being-turned-away-from-german-banks
Often these were people who hadn’t been in the US since childhood or at all, earned and paid (up to 10x higher) taxes in Europe than they ever would in the US, but still got fucked over by the IRS and a country they would never visit (again). The US is one of the only countries in the world that does double taxation.
These weren’t rich people. Almost all of them were middle-class. Plenty were unemployed or earning less than 20k a year.
For middle-class people, it’s especially problematic come pension time, when time came for the payout of a European pension plan or the sale of the family home. Stuff they’d already paid tax on to the country they’d lived in most of their lives, but are forced to give America ‘its share’ despite getting less than nothing in return.
Plenty of them are also unable to vote in the US, because they never had a last residence, voting is a state matter, and it’s made needlessly complicated for foreign residents. Taxation without representation.
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Thereby handily ignoring the rest of my comment, because you’d prefer to think of anyone who wants to renounce citizenship as a rich tax evader, rather than admit that there are plenty of reasons why someone might not want to have American citizenship, because shock horror not everyone wants to be American, live in the US, or loves the US. Especially if they’ve never lived there or visited.
Imagine having been born in Italy during a long holiday, and for the rest of your life being forced to fill in Italian tax forms, despite working a minimum wage job and having no idea how the Italian system works and barely speaking the language. And when you try to get a loan from a American bank, they say no, because they’d have to file relevant paperwork with the Italian equivalent of the IRS.
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Imagine a scenario where you gained Italian citizenship through an accident of birth. Your parents were on holiday, your mother went into labour a bit earlier than expected.
Is the only reason you wouldn’t want to be Italian that you want to avoid paying tax there?
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The Guardian:
…
…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/31/americans-seeking-renounce-citizenship-stuck
But here’s the fun part, you still have to file a tax return every year! Even if you’re well under the threshold! And trying to find someone living abroad who is versed in American expatriate tax law is expensive! And I can’t afford it!!
I am hiding from the IRS and have been for 16+ years.
I was thinking the same thing.