I was going through some of my family’s documents where I came upon a document of my grandfather’s. He was born in the US, but left for Mexico for a few years and then came back. The document concerned his re-entry, stating who he knew here and his intentions. Most of it was typed, but written at the top of the document was “Debarred.” Does anyone know what this means in terms of immigration law?
I’m not familiar with the term, but tried a simple Google search for “debarred immigration.” This turned up several hits, of which this 1971 Supreme Court decision seems to answer your question. In sum, it seems your grandfather was deemed not eligible to be a citizen. Why this would be the case isn’t obvious (and not addressed at all in the decision I’ve linked), but at a guess he had taken Mexican citizenship which, as I recall, entailed relinquishment of his U.S. one.
Thank you. I asked some of my family and apparently he had voted in an election down there, which requires Mexican citizenship. Dual citizenship is a recent development.
It’s not quite true that dual citizenship itself is new, but if you were a dual citizen you had to be careful not to engage in any activity (such as voting in another country) that the US could interpret as relinquishing your citizenship. What happened is that over the years, a series of court rulings converged on a doctrine that essentially said that the only way to lose US citizenship was to renounce it.
Now I believe that some countries (maybe the US is one; I don’t know) naturalization involves renouncing all previous citizenships and you could lose your US citizenship in that way. Some countries do not recognize renunciations, however. Canada does not require renunciation.