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not my monkeys
Dec. 11th, 2023 07:00 am I have never identified as an American. Sure, I was born in the states, as were both of my parents, but not all of my grandparents, and the remaining grandparents had siblings born in either Finland or Poland (depending on which grandparents we are talking about. My earliest memories are living in Japan, where my full time babysitter spoke only Japanese to me. While we left when I was only 3.5 years old, the depth of my connection to Japan was underscored during my highschool history class, when we worked our way up to WWII, and the atomic bomb, and I blurted out during the discussion "they should never had dropped the bomb on us", and all of my classmates LOOKED at me, confused, and tried to explain that I am American, but really, even though I had been living in the US since we moved back there in 1971, I didn't *feel* American, and I really wanted to move overseas again.
I heard about foreign exchange student programs during my senior year at high school, so, of course I applied. Alas, the fact that I truly don't identify as American showed during my interview, and they decided that I would not make a good ambassador, and I was not accepted.
Many times in the next few years, when I complained about the problems with the US and why I was embarrassed to be counted among its people, I would get responses from patriotic Americans "if you don't love it, leave it", and I always wanted to, but on a student budget I couldn't afford to move so far, and I had heard that it was hard and expensive to get permission to live in another country.
Then, as I was wrapping up my undergrad degree I heard that the easiest way to get a visa to move somewhere else was as a student, and it was time to start preparing grad school applications. So I wrote to a handful of universities (on paper, sent with a stamp as it was the early 1990's, and it wasn't yet easy to do things electronically) and asked about it. I got a reply from one of them, which said something along the lines of "in my experience a US Master's degree is the equivalent to what we do here for our Bachelor's degree, so I advise you to do the Master's and then apply".
I did the Master's, but doing that thesis convinced me that I shouldn't apply for a PhD program until I knew what I wanted my research project to be, so I waited a bit. Then, in 2003 I finally got my chance to leave the country, but for a sad reason. My step dad's health was poor, and he was in the queue awaiting a lung transplant. In the meantime he couldn't do much, as even walking a short distance made him short of breath, and my mother was having back issues, so getting the trash cans up the driveway to the side of the road on trash collection day was more than she could manage. So I dropped everything and flew to Australia so they would have a young person in the house to take care of them and do the physical tasks around the house that were needed. This turned out to be a good thing, as when he got the call to get the transplant and flew to Melbourne and they opened him up, it was discovered that his insides were covered in cancer, and the pain in the shoulders that the doc had dismissed as "arthritis" was much more serious than had previously been suspected, so they gave the lung to the other recipient (normally with a lung transplant they split them between two people, to increase the odds that one of them accepts the transplant and survives, but this time they gave one person both, as there wasn't time to bring in a third recipient. I really hope they thrived with their new lungs). A week later pneumonia gave my stepdad the relief from the pain he'd been wishing for, and I was able to extend my visa to help mom clean out the house and get ready to sell and move in with my sister, who was ready to start a family, and thought that having grandma in the house with the kids sounded like a wonderful plan.
In the 20 years since then I have moved a number of times, but have never returned to the states save for short visits to see friends and family and attend an SCA event, and have not missed it. The glimpses one sees of US politics from afar just make me shake my head and say "not my country", and I have considered many times officially divorcing the country and getting rid of that passport. I mean, yah, it is kind of cool to have three passports, but as I tell people "I have three passports. One Swedish, one Australian, and we don't talk about the third". I wouldn't miss it.
Why am I thinking about all this again? My current US passport expires in January. It was last renewed just before I became a Swedish citizen, because it is a requirement for that paperwork that one send in all of one's current pre-existing passports with the application, and they must all be under the same name as the one used in applying for Swedish citizenship. Since I had changed the spelling of my name after moving to Sweden to bring the spelling in line with the way Swedes pronounce letters, this mean that I had to send in my change of name proof to both the US and Australia and apply for new passports under the same name. I knew then that I would need to decide when the passport next expired if I would renew or renounce, and suspected that the answer would be renounce (I would have done so long ago, if not for the huge fee (more than $2000 USD) involved.
Yesterday, while hanging out a the craft afternoon for the Shire of Reengarda (which was lovely), they spent a little time discussing US politics, and speculated if they were going to have a convicted felon running for office, and I was mostly disinterested in the conversation, and even my normal embarrassment of holding a US passport barely raised its head, I only felt "Meh; not my circus, not my monkeys". I did point out that there isn't really anything I can do about it--I am registered to vote in Alaska, which has a small enough population that often the decision is announced for the US presidential election results before the polls in Alaska are even closed. As a mail in ballot they don't finish counting my vote till a week or so later, long after the victory parties have finished. Their political machine will never miss me nor notice I am gone if I divorce that country.
This morning I woke up thinking about all this, and had a quick glance on line, wondering if there is any sort of financial assistance available for people who are unemployed and want to renounce US citizenship. I didn't find anything right away, but one US tax web page has an article from January 2023 saying that the fee may be reduced to only $400-something due to a lawsuit about the fee being too high. Given my looming thesis deadline, now is not the time to start any such paperwork anyway, and it sounds like it could be worth giving it a little longer, to see if they actually do reduce the fees.
At least when it happens I can prove that I am in compliance with taxes--my income when I was a PhD student in Australia was tax-exempt, so I had no taxable income, and I filed US taxes for all of my years in Sweden up till the pandemic, which was the year my job at LTU ended. Since then I have worked a variety of short term, part time job contracts while studying, so I have not earned over the threshold to need to file taxes in the US. So I guess the best time to do it is before I find a job...
I heard about foreign exchange student programs during my senior year at high school, so, of course I applied. Alas, the fact that I truly don't identify as American showed during my interview, and they decided that I would not make a good ambassador, and I was not accepted.
Many times in the next few years, when I complained about the problems with the US and why I was embarrassed to be counted among its people, I would get responses from patriotic Americans "if you don't love it, leave it", and I always wanted to, but on a student budget I couldn't afford to move so far, and I had heard that it was hard and expensive to get permission to live in another country.
Then, as I was wrapping up my undergrad degree I heard that the easiest way to get a visa to move somewhere else was as a student, and it was time to start preparing grad school applications. So I wrote to a handful of universities (on paper, sent with a stamp as it was the early 1990's, and it wasn't yet easy to do things electronically) and asked about it. I got a reply from one of them, which said something along the lines of "in my experience a US Master's degree is the equivalent to what we do here for our Bachelor's degree, so I advise you to do the Master's and then apply".
I did the Master's, but doing that thesis convinced me that I shouldn't apply for a PhD program until I knew what I wanted my research project to be, so I waited a bit. Then, in 2003 I finally got my chance to leave the country, but for a sad reason. My step dad's health was poor, and he was in the queue awaiting a lung transplant. In the meantime he couldn't do much, as even walking a short distance made him short of breath, and my mother was having back issues, so getting the trash cans up the driveway to the side of the road on trash collection day was more than she could manage. So I dropped everything and flew to Australia so they would have a young person in the house to take care of them and do the physical tasks around the house that were needed. This turned out to be a good thing, as when he got the call to get the transplant and flew to Melbourne and they opened him up, it was discovered that his insides were covered in cancer, and the pain in the shoulders that the doc had dismissed as "arthritis" was much more serious than had previously been suspected, so they gave the lung to the other recipient (normally with a lung transplant they split them between two people, to increase the odds that one of them accepts the transplant and survives, but this time they gave one person both, as there wasn't time to bring in a third recipient. I really hope they thrived with their new lungs). A week later pneumonia gave my stepdad the relief from the pain he'd been wishing for, and I was able to extend my visa to help mom clean out the house and get ready to sell and move in with my sister, who was ready to start a family, and thought that having grandma in the house with the kids sounded like a wonderful plan.
In the 20 years since then I have moved a number of times, but have never returned to the states save for short visits to see friends and family and attend an SCA event, and have not missed it. The glimpses one sees of US politics from afar just make me shake my head and say "not my country", and I have considered many times officially divorcing the country and getting rid of that passport. I mean, yah, it is kind of cool to have three passports, but as I tell people "I have three passports. One Swedish, one Australian, and we don't talk about the third". I wouldn't miss it.
Why am I thinking about all this again? My current US passport expires in January. It was last renewed just before I became a Swedish citizen, because it is a requirement for that paperwork that one send in all of one's current pre-existing passports with the application, and they must all be under the same name as the one used in applying for Swedish citizenship. Since I had changed the spelling of my name after moving to Sweden to bring the spelling in line with the way Swedes pronounce letters, this mean that I had to send in my change of name proof to both the US and Australia and apply for new passports under the same name. I knew then that I would need to decide when the passport next expired if I would renew or renounce, and suspected that the answer would be renounce (I would have done so long ago, if not for the huge fee (more than $2000 USD) involved.
Yesterday, while hanging out a the craft afternoon for the Shire of Reengarda (which was lovely), they spent a little time discussing US politics, and speculated if they were going to have a convicted felon running for office, and I was mostly disinterested in the conversation, and even my normal embarrassment of holding a US passport barely raised its head, I only felt "Meh; not my circus, not my monkeys". I did point out that there isn't really anything I can do about it--I am registered to vote in Alaska, which has a small enough population that often the decision is announced for the US presidential election results before the polls in Alaska are even closed. As a mail in ballot they don't finish counting my vote till a week or so later, long after the victory parties have finished. Their political machine will never miss me nor notice I am gone if I divorce that country.
This morning I woke up thinking about all this, and had a quick glance on line, wondering if there is any sort of financial assistance available for people who are unemployed and want to renounce US citizenship. I didn't find anything right away, but one US tax web page has an article from January 2023 saying that the fee may be reduced to only $400-something due to a lawsuit about the fee being too high. Given my looming thesis deadline, now is not the time to start any such paperwork anyway, and it sounds like it could be worth giving it a little longer, to see if they actually do reduce the fees.
At least when it happens I can prove that I am in compliance with taxes--my income when I was a PhD student in Australia was tax-exempt, so I had no taxable income, and I filed US taxes for all of my years in Sweden up till the pandemic, which was the year my job at LTU ended. Since then I have worked a variety of short term, part time job contracts while studying, so I have not earned over the threshold to need to file taxes in the US. So I guess the best time to do it is before I find a job...