Editor,
The article in the title from the 7 March Pattaya Mail provides just shocking numbers. I laid awake all night wringing my hands in anguish over who would continue paying in to US entitlement programs so I could continue to live here in Pattaya during my senior years. If the fertility rate were neutral (no increase no decrease) then at that rate of 3000 renunciations per year there would be no people left in the US in a 100,000 years.
After a sleepless night I thought maybe there is another side to this story so I consulted the US (Department of Homeland Security) website. As it turns out the number of renunciations is only a fraction of one percent of the new naturalizations each year; not as great a relative number as the author would have us believe. For the period 2008 thru 2012 the INS reports the following numbers of naturalizations.
2008…1,046,539
2009… 743,715
2010… 619,913
2011… 694,193
2012… 757,434
This does not include a large number of illegal immigrants in the US who would willingly become US citizens if the law permitted it.
The article then goes on to describe the requirements for Americans to disclose their non US financial holdings. What the author fails to disclose is that for US citizens living overseas for at least 330 of 365 days in a calendar year the reporting requirement is less onerous.
Following is the link for the immigration statistics.
http://www.dhs.gov/yearbook-immigration-statistics-2012-naturalizations
Table 20 contains the data for annual US naturalizations from 1907 to 2012
Regards,
Bill R.
