When Margot went to renounce her US citizenship earlier this year, she wasn’t able to do it in the UK, her home of 30 years. The waiting list to renounce US citizenship at the London consulate is more than 14 months. It’s a similar story in Sydney and most major Canadian cities. Many European cities currently have six-month waiting lists.

So Margot found herself in the lobby of the consulate in Ghent, Belgium. One wall was covered by a picture of Boston Harbour, where she was born. The other had three portraits: Donald Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, their faces glistening – to her mind, with sadistic triumph (the lighting may have been a factor). Momentarily, she felt caught in a vice: everything she loved about her nation; everything she hated. Then she went in, swore under oath that she knew what she was doing, wasn’t being coerced, and wasn’t renouncing her citizenship for the purposes of tax avoidance. The official’s tone was neutral, slightly bored.

The questions are read from a laminated card, the oath is perfunctory, your passport is retained – you can ask for it back, with holes punched in it to represent its cancellation, after your request is approved.

In the 00s, the numbers of US citizens renouncing were in the hundreds annually; since 2014, they’ve been in the thousands. This is expected to be a bumper year (matching 2020’s 6,000-plus) because the US government’s charges, after a protracted group legal battle, have been reduced from $2,350 to $450. Neither figure comes close to the true cost of renouncing if you get a lawyer, which, with no complications at all, will cost $7,000 to $10,000, says Alexander Marino, who heads Moody’s, the largest renunciation law practice in the world.

But why would anyone want or need to renounce their US citizenship in the first place? Americans have long joked about pretending to be Canadians when they’re abroad, just out of embarrassment at hailing from a country that’s notably arrogant or exceptionalist. But recent developments in the US – its atmospherics, its internal divisions as well as its foreign policy – are of a different order of magnitude. Mary, 73, moved to Canada in 1987 and became a dual citizen in 2006, without ever thinking she wanted to renounce. The turning point, she says, “was literally the night of the 2016 election. I was at my son’s house. By midnight it was looking like, ‘Oh my God, the man’s going to win.’ I finally fell asleep – vodka can only do so much – then I woke at 2am, the house next door had a huge screen, and all it said was: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump.’”

Paul, 55, lives in Helsinki but had to travel to Milan for a consulate appointment – on his 51st birthday. “My present to myself was divorcing Uncle Sam,” he says. “It was the end of 2020, when Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court. There’s a picture of the swearing-in ceremony, where you can see her with this zealous smile on her face. That was half of it. The other half was that filthy, narcissistic smirk on Trump’s face. His eyes are barely open – it’s not a smile of joy, it’s not a smile of, ‘Hey, cool, this happened.’ It was, ‘I have you right where I want you.’ I saw that picture and five minutes later, I was Googling ‘find a renunciation lawyer’, and five minutes after that, I had sent an email to them.”

Joseph, 36, living in Norway, is just as blunt: “I don’t want to be a citizen of a dictatorship. I feel like a lot of people think that the test of the American system is going to come at the next presidential election and I think they’re wrong. We’re going to find out whether or not this government is willing to give up power democratically this November [at the midterm elections]. I have strong doubts as to whether they’re going to give up power.”

Ella, 66, left the US for Germany 34 years ago. She had wanted to renounce her citizenship for a decade before she finally exited in 2021, but “my husband stopped me. He was born to German parents in Romania, and wanted to return to Germany but for many years wasn’t able to – he’d experienced what it’s like to be stuck in a country where you weren’t allowed out. He said: ‘If there’s a war in Europe, we want be able to live in America.’” Now it looks pretty unlikely that the US would offer some stable haven to her, and more likely that it would have started the war.

Almost everyone I spoke to for this piece wanted their names changed, and that’s with good reason. In very limited circumstances, the US government can reject your renunciation of citizenship altogether, but a much more common outcome is that you become a “covered expatriate”, which is a tax classification and a disaster financially – it lasts for ever, your children will be liable for US inheritance tax – but it also means you may be denied re-entry to the US or questioned at the border. If there’s anyone you love in the country who’s too ill to travel, it’s possible you’ll never see them again. And while, once you’re through the process – which most of these interviewees are – the US is not permitted to persecute you by law, few trust that this would stop it. Every quarter, a federal register of renunciations is published online; serving no practical purpose, thek register feels vindictive. “Some have dubbed it the name-and-shame game, it doesn’t have any legal purpose,” says Marino. In short, everyone just wants to keep their heads down, a long way away.

Maybe because everyone’s keeping their heads down, maybe because only lawyers think ahead, Marino alone mentions the legislation that comes into effect this December that makes registration of US citizens for the military draft automatic. The Selective Service System doesn’t mandate service, rather, it creates a database of eligible citizens (18- to 25-year-olds) who could be called upon in the event of conscription. It didn’t cause a huge furore in the US when it passed, but if you had an 18-year-old child you had raised in Europe, say, and were reading about the US war in Iran, you might be freaking out about it. Sinclair, 54, who has lived in Australia since he was 22 and recently renounced his citizenship, has a daughter who has just turned 17. “You can’t renounce citizenship on behalf of your child,” he says.

One key driver of renunciations, and why you need a lawyer for them, is the US’s tax policies, explains Marino (Moody’s handles a quarter of all cases where legal advice is sought, worldwide). The US is the only country in the world, except for Eritrea, that taxes on citizenship not residency.

This creates some wild little details, such as if a US citizen living abroad divorces a non-US citizen and they split their assets, the US citizen pays tax on their ex’s portion. Under Obama’s Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, foreign banks must find out who their US clients are and surrender their information. “No other country in the world would have the power to make other countries sign that,” Marino says.

This is not just about millionaires and billionaires hanging on to their riches, it hits people across the income spectrum. Ella says, “I had a job offer in Switzerland, with really good pay,” – she’s a research scientist – “and I couldn’t accept it because no Swiss bank would give me an account.” An exit tax was introduced in 2008, which – anecdotally (no one would formally admit to preemptive tax avoidance) – spurred some Americans to renounce their citizenship before they hit the net worth threshold of $2m.

The renunciation experience varies. Sinclair said the US vice consul was “maybe a little snippy … there was an air of contempt. Like, ‘Oh you idiot, why are you doing this? Why would anyone renounce their US citizenship?’” Mary couldn’t get an appointment in her home city of Toronto so booked Halifax, Nova Scotia, and “did what they call a ‘vacation renunciation’”. She describes it as the purest anticlimax: “I was all set, I had my cute outfit on and all my lines memorised. I walked into this consulate that looks like the third floor of a department store, it didn’t look governmental at all.” Michael, 57, was similarly struck by the shabbiness of the consulate in Amsterdam – the noise, the chaos, the fact that nothing worked, “the feeling of instantly being back in America”.

Renouncing is not always simple, though. Joseph works in data science for a company that contracts for the Norwegian government. “If you are Iranian, you cannot work with sensitive data because you’re perceived as a security risk. So when things like [Trump’s threat to invade] Greenland pop up, I worry – ‘OK, if he does this, do I lose my job?’” Had the US actually invaded Greenland, Norway’s allegiance would doubtless be with Denmark, potentially making Joseph an enemy of the Norwegian state.

Joseph has a dilemma: if he remains a US citizen, his job is at risk, and everything the US government does he deplores. He has served in the US military, joining in 2011 to pay for his college tuition, a three-year contract that became a decade, because “the US military has a great way of making you feel as if everything you’re doing, even if you’re just sweeping the floor, is of global importance. You really feel like your life has meaning.” He believed, in Afghanistan, that “while we might not always do the right thing, we at least had the right intentions.” He does not think that about Iran. Or Greenland, for that matter.

At the same time, he hasn’t had the conversation with his parents: “My father, I think, won’t mind too much. My mother is a hardcore far-right Maga Christian nationalist. She would see it as a political statement, and she would want to argue.” Also, he’s politically active: “As an American citizen right now, I can criticise my government, I can go to protests, I can put up a resistance to the things that I’m seeing, I have a political and social weight. As soon as I give up my citizenship, it is me saying, ‘I don’t think I have the capability to make a change any more.’” (Others feel this, but only in trace amounts. Mary says: “My sister is the only one who said: ‘You could have stayed here and fought.’ But nobody else says that.”)

Maybe it’s the famous human optimism bias, that once you have made a decision, you always come to feel that it was the right one, but nobody who has actually renounced misses their citizenship. Michael says: “I have an existential regret. I would have loved to grow up and live in a country that I believed in. There are certain things I miss – the way your brain changes after you’ve been driving through nothingness for six hours. Certain foods. I miss Steak ’n Shake, a chain in the midwest. But if I never see America again, I am absolutely fine with that.”

Names have been changed