A total of 460 Americans renounced their citizenship in the second quarter of 2015, according to the Internal Revenue Service, bringing the total number of citizens who have hightailed it out of the country to 1,795 for the first half of the year.
That’s the second highest half-year total since the IRS began publishing the figure in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) passed in 1996.
The number of Americans renouncing their citizenship in the first two quarters falls 14 short of the record, set in 2013, when 1,809 departed the country.
At the same time, the government has raised a record amount in renunciation fees. The federal government increased the “administrative processing” fee involved with renunciation from $450 to $2,350 in 2014, making the ability to leave a luxury reserved for those with cash to spare.
At $2,350 per head, those who renounced citizenship between Jan. 1 and June 30 this year forked over a total $4.2 million to the feds, more than five times the $814,050 raised from those who departed during the same period in 2013.
Nonetheless, the number of those renouncing their citizenship remains insignificant compared to the number immigrants coming into the country. A new analysis of Census Bureau data by the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that between the second quarter of 2014 and the same period in 2015, a total of 1.7 million new immigrants had entered the country, bringing the immigrant population to a total of 42.1 million.
Breaking the numbers down, CIS estimated that 12.1 million Mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal, were in the country during the second quarter of 2015, constituting what it says is “the highest quarterly total ever.”
