Spiro on Citizenship Overreach

The always excellent Peter Spiro has recently posted this new article on SSRN, of interest. Abstract:

This Article examines international law limitations on the ascription of citizenship in the context of U.S. taxation of non-resident citizens. U.S. citizenship practice is exceptionally generous, extending citizenship to almost all persons in its territory at the moment of birth. At the same time that it is generous at the front end, U.S. citizenship is sticky at the back. Termination of citizenship on the individual’s part involves substantial fees and tax compliance. It is difficult to shed a citizenship one may never have wanted in the first place. 

This stickiness would be inconsequential if few costs were associated with the status. But the United States taxes its citizens on a worldwide basis. The 2010 enactment of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act has ramped up historically lax enforcement and imposes substantial administrative burdens on even middle-earner citizens abroad. 

In this frame, U.S. birthright citizenship and expatriation regimes may violate international norms, especially with respect to those "accidental Americans" who departed the United States as children. Even in the context of extremely relaxed historical constraints on state nationality practice, there were acknowledged nineteenth century limitations on the extension of citizenship to individuals with insufficient connection to a state -- citizenship over-claiming, as it were. The article also describes the historical requirement that naturalization be volitional, a norm now appropriately applied in some cases in the context of birthright citizenship.  

To the extent the ascription of U.S. citizenship compromises individual rights, there are tax fixes and there are citizenship fixes. Citizenship fixes include opt-in and opt-out mechanisms for birthright citizenship. The better solution may lie in frictionless exit for those with nominal ties to the national community. Though reform is more likely to be accomplished through the tax regime, the moment highlights the over-inclusiveness of U.S. citizenship and the growing salience of international law to citizenship practices.

I'm less confident than Peter that reform will ever be delivered through the tax regime, but I am very glad to see this important contribution to the growing literature focusing on the citizenship/taxation link.

Update: The Price of Entry: Latest Research plus Infographic

* September update: I've found some more information on Russia's program, which brings it closer to the global averages instead of being a glaring outlier. I've also now uploaded my working paper, Buying in: Residence and Citizenship by Investment, and would welcome comments. Here is the abstract:

States have complex and often conflicted attitudes toward migration and citizenship. These attitudes are not always directly expressed by lawmakers, but they may be reflected quite explicitly in tax regimes: for the world’s most prosperous individuals and their families, multiple states extend a warm welcome. Sometimes prospective migrants are offered fast track to physical residence which can lead to citizenship if the migrant desires it. Others are offered a mere commercial transaction, with citizenship granted to applicants with the right credentials and a willingness to pay. Migrants might seek to obtain residency or citizenship for personal, family, economic, or tax reasons, or some combination of them. For the granting country, the tax significance of obtaining new residents or citizens will vary depending on domestic policy goals. However, the consequences of residence and citizenship by investment programs could be severe for the international tax regime: the jurisdiction to tax and the allocation of taxing rights among countries are commonly based on residence and citizenship factors. This article accordingly surveys contemporary residence and citizenship by investment programs on offer around the world and analyzes their potential impact on international tax policy.

* update: I've found a couple of additional programs (e.g. France has a lower cost program, making it less of an outlier)--thank you twitterverse) and I've corrected a few currency conversion errors. This is still a work in progress as previously noted, and I expect to be revising again in the coming weeks.

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I've been working on residence and citizenship by investment programs, and thanks to some stellar research assistance by Jake Heyka, have developed a set of data comprising what I believe is a fairly thorough look at the residence and citizenship by investment programs currently on offer around the world. I made the above infographic to show the lowest cost program per country for all countries that offer either residence or citizenship by investment.

The lowest cost residence by investment programs are offered by Panama and Paraguay, each coming in at about USD$5,000, while the most expensive is Russia, at over USD$5 million now Austria, at about $3.3M. The average price for all residence and citizenship by investment programs that we found is about $1 million, but this number isn't perfect because some programs are based on job creation rather than investment (e.g., Portugal, Turkey, UK), some involve having entrepreneur/angel investment support rather than a direct investment (e.g. Australia, Canada), and some involve annual amounts (Italy and Switzerland).

One of the things I wondered about in looking over the programs is the inequality factor at play--that is, how much can richer/larger countries demand in terms of higher prices and more stringent requirements (such as actual residence) for entry, and how much must poorer/smaller countries be satisfied with smaller investments and fewer commitments by the applicant? The answer seems to be that there appears definitely a "rich get richer" quality to the distinctions among programs, but there are lots of details in the programs that require further thought.

The paper itself is still in progress but here is an explanation of what I am looking at:

International law and political theory scholars have long wrestled with the normative implications of commodifying citizenship and access to immigration with pay-to-play visa programs, but the analysis does not typically consider the role the tax system plays or could play in these schemes, nor how such schemes might impact the tax regime in terms of gross revenue or distributional effect.  Yet governments increasingly view their tax systems as a means of potentially increasing the value of residence and citizenship in their countries, whether intrinsically or in relation to the treatment of those who gain such status by other means.  Given the cost involved in reducing revenue from those arguably most able to pay, whether the programs actually produce the predicted outcomes is one obvious question to be asked.  Even if the programs in fact achieve their goals, a second question surely arises regarding the normative justification for using the tax system to lure the wealthy away from other countries in this manner. Does the normative case differ when applied to humans as opposed to companies? Does it differ when the luring state is richer or poorer relative to the countries of origin of prospective immigrants? To sketch out a framework for analyzing these questions requires a sense of the various competing programs on offer. This essay takes the first step by comparing national programs that use their taxing power in some manner in order to attract immigration, and highlights some of the factors that raise normative questions about the appropriate design and uses of a tax system. 

Comments welcome.