Taxing Away Citizenship: Do American-Canadian Dual Citizens Consider Their Status to be an Inconvenience?

Despite growing tolerance of dual citizenship in an era of globalization, this status continues to be problematized by the governments of both the United States and Canada. This is evident in recent changes to Canadian Bill C-24, in which new grounds have been established to revoke the Canadian citizenship of ‘dual citizens,’ and by recent political discourse, which depicts dual citizens as Canadians of ‘convenience’ with ‘thin’ attachments to the nation. This thesis explores how dual citizenship may instead be ‘inconvenient’ for particular citizen subjects, namely ‘American-Canadians.’ To demonstrate this, twenty-three narratives of current and former ‘American-Canadian’ dual citizens were analyzed. It would seem paradoxical to suggest that an individual with a robust citizenship on each end of the hyphen could experience inconveniences. Nonetheless, I will demonstrate how the citizenship-based tax laws of the United States create insecurities for this population and lead to impulses to renounce this ‘robust’ citizenship.