300,000 Americans Seeking to Renounce Citizenship

Date: 01 January 2022 - 21:41

News ID: ۹۸۴۱۷

LONDON (The Guardian) – In
recent years, Michael has come to regard the United States, the nation of which he has been a citizen all his life, as an abusive parent.
“I can acknowledge my past association with that person while at the same time wanting to keep future association to a minimum,” he said.
Michael – the name is false as he requested anonymity to avoid being inundated with hate mail – found his disaffection with his native country reach crunch point in 2020. The chaotic end of the Donald Trump era combined with the inequities exposed by the Covid pandemic made him despair of being an American.
“Coronavirus made me realize that in the U.S., 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. “The farcical presidential campaign made me realize that I don’t want to be a member of a society in which my vote is made irrelevant by gerrymandering or the electoral college.”
And so Michael decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship. Having moved to Finland 10 years ago, he would break the ties that officially bound him to a country whose values he no longer recognized.
Americans living abroad who wish to renounce their citizenship have found themselves stuck in limbo as most U.S. consular missions around the world have suspended their expatriation services for those seeking to officially sever their ties to the United States.
Delays have led to a growing backlog of renunciation requests. By some estimates, as many as 300,000 Americans seeking to give up their citizenship have faced barriers in getting the process going since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as U.S. embassies are “currently unable to accept appointments for loss of nationality applications.”
The U.S. State Department requires a face-to-face interview before American citizens can renounce their citizenship. But it has put the sessions on hold during the pandemic.
Some Americans may have financial considerations in wanting to give up their citizenship because the U.S. government has made the burden of being an American more onerous for those living abroad.

‘U.S. Moving Towards Fascism’

Renowned American scholar and political activist Noam Chomsky has warned that the United States is moving towards fascism with massive social collapse and class warfare, criticizing the Republican Party for its complicity in the process.
He made the remarks in an interview with Democracy Now, an hour-long American TV, radio and internet news program.
Chomsky said the Republican Party is “marching” the world to destruction by ignoring the climate emergency.
“The Republican Party, under Trump, and his minions — he basically owns the party — they have been in the lead of trying to destroy the prospects for organized human life on Earth, not just unilaterally pulling out of the Paris Agreement, but acting with enthusiasm to maximize fossil fuel use, to dismantle the systems that somewhat mitigated their effects, denial of what’s happening, reaching a huge number of loyal almost worshipers, partly through their media system, in other ways,” he added.
“When the United States is the most powerful, important country in world history, when it races to the precipice, has an impact on others. Other things that are happening are bad enough, but with the United States in the lead and marching to destruction, the future is very dim. And it’s our responsibility here to control it, to terminate it, to turn the country back to sanity — don’t even like to say “back” — turn it to sanity on these issues, before it’s too late.”
He also said that the Republicans are 100% opposed to allowing what their own constituents very much approve of while managing the propaganda system so that their constituents don’t even know about it.
In reality, he noted, neoliberalism translates as bitter class war contrary to what it means in the dictionary.
“Well, we have been through a 40-year, 45-year assault on the general population within the framework of what’s called neoliberalism. And it’s had a very serious impact. There are even some measures of it. So, the RAND Corporation, super respectable, did a study recently of the, what they politely call, transfer of wealth from the lower 90% of the population — that’s working-class and middle-class — the transfer of wealth from them to the very rich during the last 40 years. Their estimate is on the order of $50 trillion. They call it transfer of wealth. We should call it robbery,” Chomsky explained.