by ben_w | 2025-11-18 15:42:34+00:00
> How do you lose citizenship of the place you're born without explicitly giving it up?

The UK explicitly gave up EU membership, so you can't play that card.

That said, other than wars, and other than the e.g. UK home secretary determining you're not allowed to have a UK citizenship any more because they recon you're entitled to another one so they're not bound by obligations to leave someone stateless, there's the specific example I gave:

Secession.

> But we're talking about moving abroad here. Of that 48%, 15% were primarily motivated by the false claims made about economic armageddon.

1. You're literally telling people who did the moving that our lived experiences don't matter. I'm reminded of US politicians who were against gay marriage responding to gay men who said they wanted the right to get married with "But you can get married, nobody's stopping you marrying any woman!"

2. I can also suggest a number of the 52% were primarily motivated by the false claims made about economic costs, c.f. that bus.

3. "False claims"? The GDP loss as per the linked article this entire thread is about, is 12-16 times higher than the UK's net contribution to the EU, which was about 0.5% GDP:

*The article under discussion itself that shows 6-8% GDP loss*: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34459/w344...

> Citizenship is a status, not a right.

Why do you insist that all the rights that in law depend on citizenship are not rights?

> Moving to the EU was never a right in the sense citizenship rights are, because the "right" to move to other EU countries was always contingent on massive monetary payments, and something you have to purchase isn't normally described as a right. A better analogy than Texas seceding is if someone walked into a shop and declared "I have the right to own this expensive watch". It would just confuse people to talk like that and they'd disagree with you, because you'd have to pay for it first. If you bought it and then said, "Now I have the right to this watch" you'd again be talking very unidiomatic English (at best).

Oh, now you care about "massive monetary payments"? Do you know how much it costs to become a UK or US citizen, all-in? Bearing in mind that you count the EU's net budget contributions (0.5% GDP) as "massive", you must surely agree to count the taxes these migrants have to pay, and in the UK's case the immigration health surcharge as part of that cost, not the ceremony, not even just that and visa fees, if you're counting the UK's net contribution to the EU budget, you have to count everything tax-like.

I wouldn't do this. So far as I'm concerned, the UK telling itself that EU citizen rights were not "rights" because they were "contingent on massive monetary payments" is like being someone who just became homeless because they voluntarily left home as a young adult on the grounds they didn't like their parents (i.e. you're allowed to, you did, what happens next is all your own responsibility) who is telling themselves that nobody had any right to a house anyway because to live in a house in the UK is "contingent on massive monetary payments" of "council tax" — council tax on A-band properties in the UK back then being approximately 3 times higher than the UK's net payments to the EU.