Numbers of applications may be up. That would also affect numbers of those denied.
Americans don’t lose citizenship when they commit crimes. The child of an American soldier is American.
I shudder when I think of my grandfather, who arrived here so long ago he didn’t need a visa. The inspector declared him fit but with a name no man could pronounce, and promptly cut off half of it. What were his papers? What trace would we have for him if he were still alive?
When those things happen, there’s always an attempt to make it look ‘fair’ - as in, targeting some people in particular but making it easier for their spindoctors to pretend they don’t, by doing it to random others, too.
Think of the third iteration of the travel ban v. the first.
Btw it wouldn’t be unprecedented:
Such a thing was done in France by President Sarkozy’s nakedly racist minister (look up Bryce Hortefeux)) and soon old people ended up having to prove they were French, including former “hidden children” who could prove nothing since fake papers was how they’d escaped Nazi round ups.
Watch, as this is likely to happen here too.
I imagine many Vietnamese birth certificates were lost during the war, or simply were never filled out.
Children should be able to take a DNA test to confirm parentage, if there are any other relatives to test. If law enforcement can use DNA, why couldn’t other government agencies accept it?
The accusations made by immigrants rights advocates are twofold.
(1) More people are having their citizenship challenged under this administration than under past administrations, and
(2) a higher percentage of people who are challenged turn out to be American citizens.
In attempting to refute these, the State Department (according to the Fox article) fails utterly. The State Department tells us nothing to confirm or refute the first accusation: it gives percentages, but we want to know the raw number of people being challenged. Is it up? We don’t know.
As to the second accusation, it’s true; the State Department’s own graph proves it. In the last two years of the last administration, about two thirds of people who were challenged turned out to be able to prove they were Americans. Now it’s almost up to three quarters. Higher is worse here. The government should not be in the business of demanding that Americans with American birth certificates prove they’re American.
That’s shocking that so many people can’t prove they are American.
They can’t prove they’re American because the authorities aren’t accepting the normal things you or I would use to prove we’re American.
Under what law? Children born overseas have to be registered, and as ucbalum pointed out in #38, citizenship didn’t pass to these children in the 1970-80s. If their fathers claimed them, they could be registered at the consulate, but very few did before Saigon fell.
We now have the Child’s Citizenship Act of 2000 where if a child enters the US and all steps have been taken to make the child eligible as a citizen (adoption, recognition of birth to a citizen), he becomes one upon entering the US. Not all adoptions are final when the child enters the US, and those children will become citizens when their process is completed as long as they are under 18 when the adoption is completed.
One problem is that the act only applied to children who were under 18 when the law went into effect (Feb 27,2001) so the VN orphans weren’t included. There are many Koreans whose parents never finalized their citizenship, and some have been deported after committing crimes. There are a lot of people in the US who never became citizens, remain permanent residents, and if they commit a crime they are not protected from deportation.
@tpike12 - do you have your mother’s prenatal records? And your parents’ rental agreements from the time she was pregnant with you? If not, you might be out of luck.
^Most of us have parents who were born here, so we would not need things like our mother’s prenatal records or rental agreements.
But that wouldn’t confer automatic citizenship on us if we were born outside the country. Our parents would have had to do the right paperwork.
Is the State of Texas issuing these birth certificates? Do they have a process for recording home births? If the state issues the birth certificate, the department of state should accept it and issue the passport.
In the Foxnews article above, the man whose passport was revoked when he traveled to Mexico wouldn’t answer the question of whether he was born in the US. The state department is entitle to ask where you were born and require proof before a passport is issued. The application says you HAVE to provide that information, and sign that all information is true.
“In the Foxnews article above, the man whose passport was revoked when he traveled to Mexico wouldn’t answer the question of whether he was born in the US.” How would he know? Nobody remembers their birth. And how do you know he wouldn’t answer the question of whether he was born in the US? That claim is nowhere reported in the Times article.
In WA State, you need quite a bit more.
- Citizenship proof: birth cert (original) or passport
- SS proof: SS card (original) or W-2 form or similar
- ID verification: some current form of identification
- Proof of residency in the state: like vehicle registration or utility bill under your name
If you are under 25, the last one can be your parents proof if you have a birth certificate (that shows them). But you can also use a school transcript. So might be good to get it before you leave HS if you are going to school out of state and you can’t go the ‘parent proof of residency route’ (don’t have your birth cert or living with relatives or whatever).
P.S. If your name if different than what is on your birth documents (marriage or name change) or your birth docs and your identification docs names don’t match, you need the supporting documentation for that change. A friend in Hawaii has struggled to get her new enhanced ID because she changed her name when she married and does not have documentation to show she is the name on her birth certificate. I also changed my name at 18 (over 30 years ago arg) and have no documentation for that; nothing that connects me to the name on my birth certificate or the name on my SS card. Fortunately, I have a passport and W-2 forms w SS in my (current) name. I got the passport when I was 19 and still had the documentation on my name change. But I have since lost that.
Yes, the requirements are similar in my state but if you already have a “regular” state driver’s license, they waive the SS proof because it would have already been provided.
The stickler is the utility bill. Only gas, electric, and water are considered utilities, and gas and electric are on the same bill. Thank goodness H and I split the difference and his name is on the gas/electric bill and mine is on the water bill. Our D1 is out of luck because her apartment includes utilities. MVA said she could bring a pay stub with her employers address and her own on it, but we’re not sure it will work. She’s resigned to flying with her passport.
When my daughter needed to change the address on her Florida license, she had nothing with her new address on it. Like most kids, she does everything online so had no bills with her address on it, and the utilities were not in her name. She didn’t even have a current lease because they’d just rolled over from the prior year. There was a form to fill out that she had no proof of address. Took 3 seconds and said something like “I live at this address.” It is the type of form a homeless person could fill out for a state ID card, but the state provided it. She already had a license with a gold star on it so they didn’t need anything else. She also has a current passport but they didn’t ask for it.
How would anyone know where he was born? Just like I know, from being told and having a birth certificate. He had to say “yes, I was born in the US.”
Deleted.
The initial Washington Post article said that some midwives had admitted to providing false birth certificates to some Mexican babies. But those same midwives were working midwives who attended many births. So, chances are very high that if a person has a birth certificate signed by one of these midwives, that person was born in Brownsville, where the midwives practiced. I don’t know if some of the midwives did home births, but I do know that there are (or at least were) free-standing birth centers in Brownsville staffed by midwives, because my former sister-in-law got her midwifery training there. And every baby born at a Brownsville birth center is an American citizen.
The state of Texas should have been recording those births and issuing birth certificates. There are procedures now for recording home births and I’m sure there was some process then. Everyone has to prove they are a citizen when getting a passport. The burden is on the applicant.
When my daughter was born in a US hospital, I still had to go down the department of records and get a birth certificate from the state for my insurance company. The hospital did record births, but if they didn’t I would have had to go record it.
When my father went to get a passport, he had no birth certificate, and the hospital records had all been destroyed in a fire. The best they could do was 'Baby Boy born to Father and Mother on 2.10.34". He took that along with a statement from his father (his mother had died) that the Baby Boy was indeed him. I think he also had a baptism record or some other records (vaccination, school) that made sense that he was born at the hospital on that t. If you don’t have an official state birth certificate to prove citizenship, you still have to prove it
The people profiled in the article did have Texas birth certificates but they were being reevaluated after many years, even decades. Some of the people had passports but couldn’t get them renewed.
What a frustrating, Kafka-esque world they now find themselves in.