The Reed Amendment, also known as the Expatriate Exclusion Clause, created a provision of United States federal law () attempting to impose an entry ban on certain former U.S. citizens based on their reasons for renouncing U.S. citizenship. Notably, entry can be denied to persons who renounced their U.S. citizenship to avoid paying income taxes. The United States is one of two countries in the world that taxes its citizens' income earned abroad for citizens whose primary residence is abroad. The other country to do so is Eritrea.
The Amendment was named for its author Jack Reed, and passed into law as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.
Though the Reed Amendment received strong bipartisan support during the committee stage, Democratic lawmakers including Daniel Patrick Moynihan later criticised it as inappropriate, embarrassing, and badly-drafted. Efforts at establishing procedures to enforce the amendment ran into early difficulties, and the executive branch never promulgated the implementing regulations. The Department of Homeland Security has stated that they cannot obtain the information required to enforce the amendment unless the former U.S. citizen "affirmatively admit[s]" his or her reasons for renouncing citizenship, and so from 2002 to 2015, only two people were denied entry to the United States on the grounds of the amendment.
Various Democratic and Republican politicians including Reed himself, Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Lamar S. Smith, and others have made many unsuccessful efforts to enact clearer definitions of the classes of former citizens to be banned from re-entry, and to enable executive agencies to share information with each other in order to enforce the ban.
Overview and legislative history
The Reed Amendment added the following text to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952's list of "Classes of aliens ineligible for visas or admissions", under the "Miscellaneous grounds" category:
(E) Former citizens who renounced citizenship to avoid taxation
Any alien who is a former citizen of the United States who officially renounces United States citizenship and who is determined by the Attorney General to have renounced United States citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation by the United States is inadmissible.
This provision is located at INA 212(a)(10)(E) (). It was introduced by then-Representative Jack Reed (D-RI).
Reed first introduced his eponymous amendment during the debate on the Immigration in the National Interest Act of 1995 (). He stated that "there's no attempt by this legislation to prevent someone from renouncing their citizenship", but that people who did so for purposes of tax avoidance should "not be able to return to the United States". At the time, the issue of giving up U.S. citizenship for tax purposes was receiving a large amount of media attention, which also resulted in Congress adding provisions to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to broaden the "expatriation tax" () and to make public the names of people giving up U.S. citizenship. Reed's amendment ostensibly intended to address the issue of wealthy individuals who had renounced U.S. citizenship but then later attempted to obtain residency visas to return to the United States. One example discussed was Kenneth Dart of Dart Container, who had become a citizen of Belize and then attempted to obtain a diplomatic visa to serve as Belize's new consul in Sarasota, Florida. Florida Congressmen Sam Gibbons and Dan Miller both wrote to the State Department to protest, and by October 1995, the government of Belize had withdrawn its nomination of Dart as consul. Wealthy people who renounced U.S. citizenship for tax reasons were estimated to comprise about a dozen of the roughly one thousand people per year who became ex-Americans.
The House Committee on the Judiciary approved Reed's amendment by a vote of 25 to 5, over objections from opponents of the law arguing that it was punitive, difficult to enforce, and gave too much discretion to the Attorney General. All 12 Democratic members of the committee, as well as 13 of the 18 Republican members, voted in support; the five opposers were Howard Coble (R-NC), George Gekas (R-PA), Carlos J. Moorhead (R-CA), Bill McCollum (R-FL), and Lamar S. Smith (R-TX). Another similar bill, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, contained the Reed Amendment in its originally-introduced version, and went on to be enacted on September 30, 1996.