I applied and received my passport in 13 days by paying an extra fee to expedite it.
Obviously I am missing the point, because if you were an American Citizen born in the US, your mother’s birth certificate, citizenship, and any other facts about her are completely and totally irrelevant to the passport process. As I said, my mother was neither born in the US nor a US citizen, and there wasn’t even an occasion for that fact to come up.
And yet HE DID have problems. So, yes, you are missing the point. Just because you didn’t have problems doesn’t mean somebody else won’t or didn’t.
But the problems he says he had are inconsistent with reality. The State Department information linked in post #2 quite clearly shows that your mother’s birthplace is irrelevant, backed up anecdotally by grude’s and my experiences. Either his memory is incorrect—impossible!—or his unfortunate experience is outdated with regard to the current process.
The same authoritative link suggests why his US citizen-mother might well have had problems obtaining her own passport, as her parents (his grandparents) had apparently never filled out a consular report of birth abroad.
You’ve never worked with gubment before have you?
Anything a bit off or unsual on a form can send up a flag. Usually it doesn’t. But once in a while it does. It does not matter WHY or if its official policy or not. All it take is a worker bee going hmmm (and it may even be a worker bee actually trying to do their job RIGHT rather than being just lazy or mean).
I once cause a PITA paperwork snafu because I put our lab office phone number in a blank space on a form once.
If your mother’s birthplace is irrelevant, why do they want it to be listed on the application?
That’s a good point, as is billfish’s about the overzealous worker. Neither of those had occurred to me.
To clarify, my mother has had innumerable problems because of her foreign birth so much so she still has the original(in German) and a copy of the registration of birth in the US. When I started having trouble with my passport she sent me copies, because she suspected that this was the problem. To the State Department’s credit 1 They actually did their job, I possibly was not a citizen 2 They did issue me a passport, as soon as I gave them the info they needed.
My entire point was, apply early, the State Department isn’t waiting for your application, you are waiting for them and the burden is on you to prove that you are eligible for a passport. My experience was not typical, I get that, but it happens.
Capt
This all happened in 2008
Heck, in most states the county doesn’t keep birth certificates: the town or city does. It is on an official form for that particular state, however.
Wait you were born outside the US as well? I’d bet that is the cause of the hold up then(if you were born in the US you would be a citizen no doubt.)
Sorry if it felt like we were attacking you dude.
I was just curious about why they would hold you up for six months.
Whenever you do get your passport, get one of those cool nifty RFID blocking passport wallets to keep it in. I don’t know if ne’er-do-wells scanning peoples’ passports and making copies of the data on the chips is particularly common, but hey, nifty passport wallet!
Here is the one I got. I can’t confess to knowing if it’s any good at the whole RFID blocking thing or not, but it at least does a good job of protecting my passport from getting dog-eared whenever I pull it from my bag or shove it back inside at the airport.
Nope Born in Houston TX(to US citizens), I was in my thirties when I got my Passport. Like I said before I have no idea why they held up my passport. I only suspect that it had to do with my Mothers birthplace, because when I explained to the supervisor why my Grandfather was in Germany(serving his country 1938 to 53 in CBI and Post war Germany), no more questions and a week or so later I got it in the mail. Applied late Feb. 2008 issued late July 2008.
I know my experience was not typical, but I had no reason to believe there would be a problem. Guess what I was wrong, it almost cost me $2000 from loss of work, fortunately I was able to enter Canada with my BC still(Does not work now). We went in June
I am glad that almost everyone here did not have to deal with the problems I did, but I IMHO would not delay my application because others have not had problems. Good Luck and safe travels
Capt