I was reflecting on citizenship and how it is one of the fundamental ways the world defines you. I got to wondering if it is possible today to be born somewhere and not be a citizen of any country.
My first thought was that you could be born at sea, but obviously that wouldn’t work – you would be a citizen of your parents’ country, unless there is some nation out there whose laws do not work that way. But perhaps it could be possible if the father is deceased or unknown at the time of birth and the mother has lost her citizenship in whatever nation she had once claimed. Then if you you were born at sea …
And perhaps it would not even have to be at sea. I recently realized that U.S. law is unusual in saying that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen – even if the parents are not citizens and even, for example, if they are in the country illegally. This came up during the detention of a terrorism suspect who claimed U.S. citizenship. His parents were citizens of another country (Yemen, perhaps?) and had stayed briefly in the U.S., during which time he was born. They left soon after, either never having had applied for citizenship or never getting it. The law, it’s my understanding, dates from the Civil War, when the Union wanted to underscore that freed slaves had citizenship – hence our born-here rule.
So could you be born and not be a citizen of some country, and if so, under what conditions?
Do you mean people fleeing Haiti? I’m assuming they would have had citizenship at one time, regardless of whether they lost it at a later point. I was wondering if it is possible to be born these days without some country claiming you.
All right, here is some info on the Haiti situation. Apparently, according to the Haitian Constitution , in order to be a Haitian citizen, you have to have to have to be native born. Additionally, citizenship can be lost by living abroad without government permission. This leaves the children of illegal immigrants without a country.
Oops, the living abroad thing is only for naturalized Haitians. In any case, if your not native born, and you end up being born in a country where you do not gain citizenship by virtue of being born there, you may well end up without any citizenship.
IIRC, there was a period during which abandoned babies of obviously non-Japanese ancestry were not granted Japanese citizenship when found. This was eventually overturned by the Japanese courts.
A child born to stateless parents in a country that has ius sanguinis (citizenship by descent - as opposed to ius soli, i.e. citizenship by country of birth, e.g. the US), as is the case in many European countries, would be born stateless. This would also be the case if it was born in a ius sanguinis country to parents from a country that refused to grant their child a citizenship, as might be the case with political refugees from some countries.
Right on. I used to work in Immigration Court, and we saw this all the time. For some reason, it was most frequent with people who had been born in Germany, and as there were a number of displaced persons camps there after WWII, there were quite a number of people in that situation. I ran into one in my work capacity a few years back; he was born in a DP camp in Germany to ethnic Ukrainian parents, came to the U.S. as a baby, never bothered to naturalize (many people don’t), and then was convicted of a double murder. No itizenship, so nowhere to deport him to. The then-INS was trying to prove the facts of his birth and parents’ citizenship, but hadn’t had any luck so far.
Also, people who emigrated from the Soviet Union lost their citizenship until the very end of the Soviet Union. They were stateless until they acquired some other citizenship, which takes several years most places (generally 5 minimum even to be eligible to apply in the U.S.) And of course, there’s the Palestinian issue.
As a practical matter, it’s impossible for the U.S. to deport someone unless another country will accept his/her repatriation. Many Cubans and Indochinese are in this situation, and at the time I worked at Immigration Court, many Palestinians as well. And if people enter the U.S. without identity documents, the Feds have to document where they are from before deporting them. It’s a big pain the neck.
Theres a guy living in a Paris airport who has no official citizenship anywhere and is forced to stay in a legal limbo. Cecil yakked about it here. Rumour has it that hes not the only one and theres a small but sizaeble contingent of similarly dispossesed in airports around the world.
While I was living in Japan, the Japanese Supreme Court upheld the citizenship law which provided that if a child is born in Japan and the nationality of neither parent is know, then the child is a citizen of Japan. This was not a hypothetical case and the government was ordered to issue the child (he was born to a prostitute who had used a stolen Philippine passport to “prove” her identity and had subsequently been abandoned by his mother) a passport. It didn’t matter what the child’s “obvious nationality” (no such thing, IMHO) was.
A good friend of mine was born in Malaysia of Chinese parents. They (the parents) hadn’t gotten Malaysian citizenship yet (or legal status, not sure which) when she was born, so she didn’t have Malaysian citizenship. Her brothers and sisters (born later) did have Malaysian citizenship.
She had identitiy papers but they identified her as someone without citizenship. She got her first passport when she got her US citizenship. She could travel on her other papers, but it was a bit of a pain.
Not sure if China would have recognized her as a citizen if she applied.
There are many ways a person can be born stateless. If a man is a US citizen living in Switzerland (and any number of other countries) and has not lived a certain number of years in the US after reaching a certain age (I forget the details, but they are easy to find), then his children will be born stateless (unless they acquire citizenship through the mother, but they don’t if she is Swiss). I assume they would get Swiss permanent residency papers, but I am not even certain of that. The sexual bias in the law may have changed since my son was born there, but the principle hasn’t.
Some friend who were born in a refugee camp in SE Asia are ethnic chinese. They had to get passports from China to emigrate to the US. So I guess that’s a case of citizenship by decent that was mentioned earlier.