The Right of Exit: Emigration, Secession and the Structure of International Taxation

Abstract

This Dissertation critiques the prevailing law and dominant scholarly treatment of the right to emigrate, which I understand to mean the conjunction of the rights (i) to physically leave one’s nation of membership and (ii) to renounce one’s citizenship therein. Contrary to this status quo, which holds that this legal right is and ought to be near-unconditional, it defends the revisionary view that legitimate nations, which are in good standing with the international community and respect human rights, should be permitted to recover great losses unjustly sustained as a result of unrestricted emigration by taxing their emigrants on their worldwide income on an ongoing basis where necessary, or iff such attempts at taxation prove infeasible, inadequate, or otherwise inappropriate, by employing as a backup measure the least severe restrictions on emigration required to forestall such injustices. In general, tax and economically motivated emigrants, as well as more well-off emigrants, should be taxed and regulated prior to doing so for emigrants who relocate for other reasons, such as for political or cultural reasons. In practice, however, one would expect that nations would seldom have to rely upon actual physical restrictions. This is because a home nation’s mere threat to restrict the relocation of its desirable emigrants would often provide potential destination nations with an incentive to cooperate with the home nation in the administration of a tax on its emigrants—which, under the regime I defend, the home nation would be required to avail itself of before resorting to physical restrictions.