The State Department has slashed by about 80% the fee for Americans to formally renounce their U.S. citizenship.
After years of legal battles with several groups representing Americans wanting to give up their citizenship, the department on Friday published a final rule in the Federal Register that reduces the cost from $2,350 to $450.
The new fee, which took effect on Friday, had been promised in 2023 but had never been implemented. The cost is now the same as it was when the State Department first started charging Americans to formally renounce their citizenship in 2010.
The USSR is definitely the nearest analog. That was, what, 35 years ago. That’s very recent, in civilizational terms. A little over 100 years ago, in the early 20th century, several large, powerful empires collapsed. That’s relatively recent, all things considered.
Maybe it doesn’t seem to happen as much today because in the aftermath of all of those empires collapsing, new, more resilient nation states were formed, with more sustainable social, cultural and political systems. But the US is much older than all of them. The oldest democracy still going. Also by far the oldest federated, presidential republic. It’s hard to really compare the resiliency of a country like ours to, say, a much more recently formed parliamentary democracy, especially when most of those nations are much smaller than us by population, and are usually significantly less geographically and ethically diverse.
It’s not an old country and not the first democracy. It’s claim to fame is the constitution, an advanced document for its time.