Update, 27 August 2014: the State Department has officially confirmed the hike in renunciation fees to US$2,350. This post has been edited to reflect the change.



This list as it stands is heavily weighted towards English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-speaking countries. If you’re familiar with fees & requirements in other countries, please leave a comment with a source link and I’ll add it to the table.

Discussion

The U.S. charges unusually high fees for renouncing citizenship — nearly four times the average fee of US$114 in the ten other unscientifically-selected high-income countries & territories in the table which allow you to retain citizenship after naturalising elsewhere. The U.S. doesn’t quite manage to beat the fees charged by Jamaica or Sierra Leone, but that situation is unlikely to last for long — everyone knows the Homelanders can’t stand not being #1, and several commenters report having being told by U.S. consular officials that the fees will be going up.

If this rumoured fee hike does eventually rear its ugly head, it’s reasonable to assume it will cover relinquishments as well as renunciations: the State Department has more documents to search through in the former case (to try to find a reason to refuse, so they can force back-dated relinquishers to become current renunciants instead), and of course they want to offload that cost to the relinquisher.

Update, 27 August 2014: And, less than a week later, Washington has hiked its fees to US$2,350, nearly 2.5x the level in Jamaica and four times that in Sierra Leone, and more than twenty times the average fee charged by other high income countries. Fortunately for people in some countries, my prediction was incorrect and the recent fee hike does not apply to relinquishments, though obviously consulates now an even higher financial incentive to pressure relinquishers to renounce instead, or to pretend they doesn’t know what relinquishment is.

It’s quite interesting to note that middle-income and lower countries on average charge higher fees for renunciation of citizenship than high-income countries. In contrast with first-world countries like Chile and Taiwan which allow people to exercise their human right to change their nationality for free or a nominal cost, the U.S. appears to be joining third-world countries which regard renunciation of citizenship primarily as a last opportunity to extract fees from people who emigrated long ago. (Apparently OVDI fines of 129x tax owed aren’t enough to pay for all those Great Embassy Services.)

And that’s not even mentioning the additional costs incurred by the U.S.’ refusal to accept renunciations by mail — requiring renunciants to travel inter-provincially or even internationally to find a consulate that isn’t totally swamped with appointments and can take your forms within a reasonable timeframe.

Notes

General

In this post, the term “renunciation” is used in its broad meaning of notifying the government of your “old country” that you are no longer a citizen, rather than its U.S. specific meaning of swearing an oath of renunciation under INA § 349(a)(5) (in contrast to “relinquishment” under other subparagraphs of INA § 349(a), which does not require such an oath).

Like the U.S., some other countries have multiple procedures for loss of citizenship. In the table, these have been classified into two general categories (1) and (2), where (1) refers to the procedure used by someone who is already a dual citizen to give up one citizenship, while (2) refers to the procedure used by a person who is about to or has just naturalised in another country and has to give up his original citizenship as a consequence of one country or the other forbidding dual citizenship.

Explanation of certain columns

“In country” is “yes” if a country of citizenship accepts renunciations from people who are physically present in that country, and “no” if that country only accepts renunciations from people who reside abroad. In some of these (e.g. Hong Kong), former citizens retain some immigration rights and can continue to reside automatically or by application for a former citizen’s visa which is granted without income, employment, family relation, or other qualifications; in other countries, former citizens are generally required to depart from the country unless they have some immigration rights arising from their other citizenship (e.g. EU/EEA citizens). At the moment I have not distinguished these separate cases in the table.

“By mail” is yes if a country accepts renunciation forms by mail rather than by showing up in person at a diplomatic post; some countries require the forms to be signed in the presence of a notary public or similar official, but I have still marked those as “yes” (since finding a notary public is a much simpler matter than trekking halfway across the country to a consulate). Dominica allows its renunciation form to be sent by mail, but it’s not clear whether you can pay the fees and buy the required revenue stamps abroad.

The “average” includes only those countries listed in the table; where one country has different fees (either due to multiple loss-of-nationality procedures, like Hong Kong and South Korea, or additional fees charged to people who aren’t citizens of the country where the renunciation is being performed, like India), the higher fee is used to compute the average.

Country notes

Except for India, all notes on fees and procedures come from embassies, consulates, or other government websites, and links are provided in the table; Indian consulates use outside contractors to process renunciation forms, so the links go to the website of that contractor.

Canada allows people in Canada or the U.S. to mail their renunciation forms to Citizenship and Immigration Canada; the webpage tells renunciants in other countries to “submit” their forms to the nearest embassy or consular post, though I’m not clear whether different posts have different policies on whether submissions should be made by mail or in person.

With regards to the fee for making a “declaration of alienage” in Ireland, Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956 § 30 gives the Minister of Justice the power to make regulations on fees for declarations under the Act (with the consent of the Minister of Finance), but I don’t see any mention of a declaration fee in either the the latest regulations or the declaration form itself (which, quite notably, is not an “application” form).

I was initially considering adding a “timeframe” column to the table, but too few governments commit to a time frame within which to process renunciations. However, among those that do, Vietnam states that their processing period is 65 days, Taiwan says two months, and Hong Kong processed 100% of declarations of change of nationality (though not renunciation) made in person at the Immigration Department in 2012 on the same day.

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