The overseas American community has lost a great friend and champion, the kind of man we encounter only rarely in our lives.
Andy Sundberg, founder of the Children’s Citizens Rights League in 1977 and American Citizens Abroad in 1978, Secretary of the Overseas Americans Academy, indefatigable researcher and prolific writer, died on Thursday, August 30. He is being referred to with reason as an icon of the overseas American community, having moved to Switzerland in 1968 and quickly become passionately involved in advocating for the citizenship and voting rights of Americans living and working abroad.
He also fought for years against what he called the injustice of worldwide taxation of US citizens and more recently, the unintended and sometimes disastrous consequences on them of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
As the editor of the English-language online community newspaper Geneva Lunch put it, “His work, including thousands of letters sent to people in positions of influence, put him on a first-name basis with politicians, government leaders and celebrities, whether they agreed with him or were targeted by him as someone to be convinced of the need for change.”
Andy was many things to many people. For great numbers of overseas Americans, the absence of one or more emails informing them daily of new legislation, an impending regulatory threat, information about how other countries handle their expatriate community, an important date in American history or a geopolitical landmark, will be perceived as a palpable loss. The breadth of his knowledge and the scope of his inquisitive mind were, for want of a more appropriate word, unique.
He was pragmatic, and had worked for a number of years on micro-finance and development projects in Africa. He was quixotic, and ran for the American presidency in 1988 as a favorite-son candidate for Democrats Abroad (coming in third in the overseas primary, where he won the vote in five countries). He was passionate, about the right of children born to Americans abroad to acquire US nationality regardless of the “strings” of parental residence or even parental marital status; about “leveling the playing field” for Americans abroad and eliminating citizenship-based taxation; about representation in Congress for overseas Americans by means of non-voting delegates in the House and even the Senate. Andy Sundberg never gave up, and never stopped dreaming of real recognition of the importance of the overseas American community.
No one can take his place but it is to be hoped that many will follow in his footsteps.
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From the posting immediately after his death on the online English-language paper Geneva Lunch, by editor Ellen Wallace:
“Sundberg was born in New Jersey in 1941, finished grammar school in Japan, high school in Germany and he graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1962. The following year he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England, taking a degree in Politics, philosophy and Economics. From there he went on to serve on combat ships near Cuba during the Cuban Quarantine and in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam war.
He moved to Geneva in 1968, a time when he began to work as a consultant for major corporations, international organizations and governments, helping them evaluate investments and other key business areas.
He was a life member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, a member of the board of the Millennium Institute in Washington and the Key Largo, Florida-based Marine Resources Development Foundation.”