Reed Amendment (immigration)
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 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:[2] This provision is located at INA 212(a)(10)(E) (8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(10)(E)).
[5] 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.
[3] 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Gibbons and Dan Miller both wrote to the State Department to protest, and by October 1995, the government of Belize had withdrawn its nomination of Dart as consul.
[6] 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.
[8] Among various academics' and practitioners' criticisms of the law, Renee S. Liu describes it as "an inappropriate response" to the problem it sought to address, while Michelle Leigh Carter argues that it may "unconstitutionally infringe on the fundamental right to expatriate".
[11] One issue with the enforcement of the law was that the Attorney General was never authorized to obtain the required information from the Internal Revenue Service in order to be able to make the determination whether a former American's loss of citizenship was motivated by tax reasons.
Additionally, the IRS already had a large workload drafting other guidance for former citizens and green card holders under newly passed tax laws.
[15] In June 2014, Reed used his position on the Senate Committee on Appropriations to insert language into the Senate report on one version of the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015 (S. 2534) directing DHS to report, within 90 days of the act's passage, on the steps it was undertaking to enforce the Reed Amendment, including a schedule for issuing guidance or regulations, if necessary.
[16][17][18] DHS' report, submitted to Congress in November 2015, stated that "there currently are no advisable options for altering enforcement of the inadmissibility ground against persons who do not affirmatively admit to renouncing their U.S. citizenship for the purpose of avoiding U.S. taxation".
DHS considered implementing the Reed Amendment by presuming that a former citizen seeking entry had renounced U.S. citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation if he or she failed to pay the expatriation tax, obtained a windfall shortly after renunciation, or established residence in a tax haven, and placing the burden of proof on the individual to rebut this presumption; however, the department concluded that this procedure would have both many false negatives (failing to identify people who renounced for tax avoidance reasons) as well as many false positives (incorrectly denying entry to people who had other reasons for renouncing U.S.
[1] Joel Paget of Ryan, Swanson & Cleveland states that one such denial (against a person who renounced before the enactment of the Reed Amendment) was reversed after the renunciant's lawyer submitted a legal brief to CBP.
[19] According to the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM), due to the lack of regulations, the Department of State has no procedures in effect to implement the Reed Amendment.
[12] Mark Nestmann similarly states that he knows of occasional cases in which former citizens have been denied U.S. visas, with consuls citing the Reed Amendment as their authority.
In June 2002, Max Baucus (D-MT), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Conrad Burns (R-MT) sponsored an amendment to an appropriations bill to add a provision which would rewrite 8 U.S.C.
[25] In September 2002, Tom Harkin (D-IA) added the same language to the Armed Forces Tax Fairness Act of 2002 during the Joint Committee on Taxation markup of the bill.
§ 2801), but not its inadmissibility or tax information privacy waiver provisions, passed into law as part of a veteran's assistance bill sponsored by Charles B. Rangel (D-NY).
[30] The Securing America's Freedom Through Enforcement Reform Act, an immigration reform bill introduced by Reed Amendment opponent George Gekas (R-PA) in July 2002, and co-sponsored by 44 other Republicans including fellow Reed Amendment opponent Lamar S. Smith (R-TX), would have broadened the entry ban in 8 U.S.C.
