IRS Building Walls to Keep Americans In

There has been a tremendous amount of debate about building walls to stop illegal immigration. But the IRS is building walls to keep Americans in.

The US government is cracking down on Americans with outstanding tax bills by revoking passports.

According to the Time report, the IRS has been sending the names of tens of thousands of “violators” to the State Department. You could even find your passport revoked if you’re already overseas, although you may be eligible for a limited passport for a direct return to the US.

If this wasn’t troubling enough, Barr raises the specter of other federal agencies getting similar authority, such as the power to stop a citizen’s ability to “secure a driver’s license, obtain[…] a loan from a federally-insured financial institution, or clear[…] a background check prior to purchasing a firearm?”

Meanwhile, more and more Americans are considering renouncing their citizenship due to onerous taxes. Last year, 5,132 gave up their citizenship. That was just 277 below the all-time record of 5,409 set in 2016.

It’s no mystery why Americans living abroad willingly sacrifice their citizenship. United States tax laws are extremely onerous. The US is one of the few countries that forces its citizens to pay taxes on income earned abroad, no matter where the individual permanently lives. On top of that, the tax paperwork is extremely complex.

Ryan McMakin at the Mises Institute put together an interesting history of US emigration control published at the Mises Wire. It is reprinted in full below.

We don’t hear much about emigration controls anymore, though, thanks to the (partial) success of laissez-faire liberalism:

Fitzgerald’s work specifically focuses on pre-1970s Mexico as a case study in emigration control. Mexican nationalists had long yearned to prevent emigration by a variety of means, fearing both domestic labor shortages and “national humiliation” caused by large outflows of emigrants. In 1904, for example, “Mexican federal and state authorities ordered municipal governments to stop issuing travel documents used by U.S.-bound workers.” Similar measures were used over the years, but Mexico’s liberal constitution, and the realities of a decentralized political system, made it difficult to control emigrants.

Mexico was hardly alone in its nationalism-inspired opposition to emigration, especially during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

In Europe, efforts to refuse emigration outright, and in general, were usually rejected, but efforts were made to prosecute those who facilitated emigration.

Often the agents were accused of human trafficking or of swindling their customers. It is likely that these accusations were true some of the time, but the motivation behind efforts to discredit these travel agents appears to have been more nationalism than consumer protection.

According to Zahra, over time, these attacks on emigration agents were only one part of a wide variety of anti-emigration laws in Europe:

In some cases, as in Russia, an “emigrant” passport was available only after paying a stiff “fee” and the document was a one-way ticket out of the country. Return was forbidden, and ensured an emigrant was cut off from family ties. It also meant the emigrant risked statelessness if unable to enter the destination country.

Often, these laws were selectively enforced. Emigrants with property were often stripped of their property or simply barred from emigrating. Less desire potential emigrants were allowed, or even encouraged to leave. In multi-national Austria-Hungary, for example, local officials often encouraged minority ethnic groups to leave, in order to solidify the majority of the locally dominant ethnic group. The was sometimes then accompanied by efforts by ethnic nationalists to prevent emigration by members of the locally-dominant ethnic group. Then as now, migration policy, whether involving immigrants or emigrants, was employed with the hop of manipulating demographics.

Passport law varied between permissive and restrictive until World War II, after which passport mandates became nearly universal. As is so often the case, the state uses war and foreign policy interests as excuses to crack down on domestic freedoms.

During the Cold War, politicians were often keen on comparing the United States to the Soviet Union and pointing out how many freedoms Americans enjoyed compared to the Soviet. Free emigration was one of the freedoms.

In the United States of 2018, though, you’re only free to leave if the IRS says so — and as long as you keep paying taxes to the US government indefinitely, no matter where you are. Many of the anti-emigration laws of nineteenth-century Europe looks positively enlightened in comparison.

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