cambion

Actually, the most recent example that I can think of is Mike Gogulski, who did this in Dec 2008 (so almost 2009). But he married a Slovak and obtained permanent residence in Slovakia before he did that, and has a travel document issued by them afterwards (though he mostly travels throughout Schengen, which doesn't require a passport or similar travel document like a Document/Certificate of Identity to move around). Obviously, if you have permanent residence in a country, then you probably are not in violation of its immigration law. Or, perhaps you meant folks who renounced without getting permanent residence somewhere else first - i.e. folks who renounce in the most insecure way possible. That leads me to the below. This is an interesting point. I only know of two examples of this, where renouncement of U.S. citizenship occurred without residence being secured in another country first: Garry Davis (see below) and Davis's inspiration, Henry Martyn Noel. And I'm not sure that Noel counts: from his Wikipedia page it seems like he was able to legally work in Germany at the time he renounced, so maybe he stayed on a work permit (already had residence secured) and was able to maintain that somehow. (Noel eventually married a EU citizen which would allow him to make his residency status in Europe more permanent.) In any case, both renounced in the late 1940s, shortly after the end of WWII. That's not quite a full century away yet - but it certainly feels that way. No question that the international environment and understanding of borders was very different back then. In fact we know exactly what might happen in this case because of two, maybe three, famous examples: Garry Davis of the World Service Authority, Joel Laverne Slater (b. April 30, 1960), and maybe Thomas Glenn Jolley (b. January 26, 1944). Jolley is a maybe because he actually had permanent residence in Canada when he renounced, but later left Canada long enough to lost it. Canada refused to accept Jolley back because of this, and stayed in the US for the rest of his life. Slater is similar - he thought he had locked in permanent residence in Australia via a marriage but ended up either not formally getting it (or else he had it briefly before losing it). Australia deported him back to the US, which accepted him. Garry Davis tried to travel all over the world without the citizenship of any nation, and even wrote a book about it (My Country is the World). Spoilers; most of the time he ended up back in the US in the end, either being granted an immigrant visa or being accepted under humanitarian parole. It's worth noting that in all these cases, the person was born in the US and never had any other citizenship, so if this doesn't apply then one might speculate that the US might try to shove responsibility to some other country (the other one you were a former citizen of, or the one you were born in, whichever applies). If you somehow ended up stateless in the USA but on an immigrant visa (as Garry Davis wrote in his book, this happened to him multiple times), you qualify for a U.S. re-entry permit. This will allow you to apply for visas to travel. The main thing here is that the country you travel to wants to know that the country you came in from originally will take you back, and pay your way back if you refuse to go. Stateless refugees (and in fact probably almost all refugees) don't have this, but if you are a stateless person who has permanent residence in a country, you can usually obtain an Alien's Passport or Certificate/Document of Identity which will allow you to try to apply for visas and travel. Even if you were a stateless person who didn't have permanent residence in the country that you lived in, most countries - specifically those who signed onto the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons - would obey Article 27 and issue you the above kind of travel document. So getting the travel document might not be the hard part - getting visas to travel elsewhere would be. That said, it's worth nothing that the USA never signed onto this convention. On the other hand, in the most recent case I can find of a stateless former US citizen getting deported back to the US - Slater - US citizenship was restored. (Garry Davis actually got this offer multiple times as well - which he wrote about - but unlike Slater he always declined.) Honourable mention also goes to Vincent Cate (b. 1963) who renounced US citizenship in 1998. Obviously though he thinking along the same lines as you - that he'd need some other passport to travel around. Supposedly he got a passport from Mozambique for $5,000 USD. It's hard to research this because Mozambique had a new constitution promulgated in 2004, which basically changed up all the rules, but it's hard for me to understand how Cate's new passport would have been legitimate. So I figure that it wasn't, and he was in fact actually stateless, but able to pretend otherwise and use that passport for travel and things (as long no one took too close of a good look at his situation). Also worth nothing that I don't see that he ever tried to renew that passport, instead arranging to naturalize in Anguilla about 10 years later - which is the validity of most adult passports.)