I know it’s legally possible to renounce American citizenship. My question is, therefore, twofold:
[ul]
[li]Do the American officials force you to pick up another citizenship when you renounce your existing one?[/li][li]Is there any country where you can purely renounce and not have to have another?[/li][/ul]
Further, if it is possible to be stateless, what happens if you get into legal trouble? (Well, I think I know: You’re treated as a citizen of wherever you get nabbed, legal niceties being forgotten.)
Wikipedia has a long (and somewhat rambling) article on statelessness. In particular, note that the signatories to the U.N. Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (all 34 of 'em) are required to make renunciation of their citizenships conditional on obtaining another country’s citizenship. The U.S., however, is not a signatory to this convention.
I know that many Russians settled in the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) after these countries were annexed by the Soviet Union during World War II. When they became independent in 1990 or so, they asserted this independence by restricting citizenship to residents who could claim a pre-war citizen as ancestor, or at least to people able to communicate in the national language. This had the effect of leaving them with a relatively large number of resident aliens inside their borders, many of whom also did not claim Russian citizenship and therefore became stateless. Some of the Baltic countries actually even issue passports for resident aliens who cannot claim any citizenship. Here is Wikipedia on Latvian stateless aliens.
A similar thing happened in Slovenia on its independence from Yugoslavia. Slovenia got out of the federation pretty easily, because it didn’t have a large ethnic Serb or Croat population to draw the interest of Milosevic or Tudjman, but its relative homogeneity made it easy for the new state to adopt extremely restrictive citizenship laws which excluded groups it considered undesirable. Some of those groups have parent nation-states to whom they could appeal for citizenship, but the Roma don’t and to this day there are thousands of stateless Slovenian Roma.
Although it’s not the same as being “stateless” it’s my understanding that sovereigns do not carry passports. (It wouldn’t make sense for Elizabeth Regina to pose as a subject of Her (own) Majesty!)
This might sometimes be inconvenient. Here’s a story I read on the 'Net:
During the soviet era, there was a number of famous stateless people (dissident who had been stripped of their russian citizenship and had no other).
Two days ago, in an article about the problems people wanting to get german citizenship have, two example mentioned were people who were stateless for much more mundane reasons. They didn’t have german citizenship and their countries of origin (Lebanon and Pakistan IIRC) didn’t have any record of their existence, (WAG : lack of proper and/or complete birth records? Missing documents due to the previous war in Lebanon?) hence didn’t want them, either. One of them was a “second generation” stateless person, his father being in the same situation (Germany doesn’t grant citizenship to people born on his soil, contrarily to the USA).
Reading this made me think that being stateless might be, even nowadays, a situation much more common than I used to believe, resulting from some administrative nightmare or another.
“Born in the U.S.A.” makes one American but this isn’t true of all countries. Many people in Thailand lack legal documents even though they were born here, either because they were born as refugees or even as “hill tribesmen.” We’re far from any border, but the wife of a guy in the next village who fixes our car has no papers.
One young hill-tribe woman (who spoke excellent Thai) told me what an identity card would cost her. I forget now, but it was something like $1500 for a good fake, $4000 for a “legitimate” one.
Can’t speak for Thailand, but about Pakistan is nonsensical. Due to the legacy of Partition violence, Pakistan has always had law citizenship laws and even laxer procedures, you just need to show some link with the Country and you are deemed to be a citizen by birth or decent.
I know at least two instances of statelessness. One was a PhD student of mine who renounced his US citizenship on arriving in Montreal in 1969 (he had already received a draft notice). Until he could become a Canadian citizen five years later, he had something called, IIRC, a Nansen passport. He could use it to travel in Europe at least, but had to get a visa for every country he traveled in. They of course required that he have a re-entry permit for Canada (although he was a landed immigrant). Obviously, he didn’t want to go to the US, although he was eventually pardoned by Carter and now does travel there. I should emphasize that borders were a lot more informal in those days. Border guards tended to believe you. Now they all insist on documentary proof.
The other person I know (well I’ve met him twice and had one hour-long conversation with him) is a world-famous mathematician (reputedly the #1 mathematician in the world in the mid-20th century) who was born around 1930 of a German mother and a Russian-Jewish father. The rest of the story is a bit murky, but essentially he ended up with no citizenship. He was later in a concentration camp in France, but was allowed to attend school. For his own reasons he never tried to become a citizen of France (where he has lived all his life since the war) but he does (or did; he has become a complete hermit) travel all over the world. I have no idea what papers he uses. He spent a year in the US around the mid 50s and was in Montreal giving a talk at least once.
So, it is possible, but there are difficulties. Incidentally, Canada treats permanent residents (landed immigrants) exactly the way they treat citizens (with a few obvious exceptions, such as voting).
According to the U.N. Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which was linked to by MikeS, above, and to which Germany apparently signed, one of the rules is that someone born in the country who would otherwise be stateless must obtain citizenship of the country of birth.
It’s still happening among former Soviets for various reasons. My firm has a client right now who was born in one former Soviet republic, but spent the bulk of her life in another former Soviet republic (neither one is Russia). The republic where she was born only awarded citizenship to those who were present either on the day it declared independence, or the day its citizenship law was passed (our client left there as a small child and never returned). The republic where she spent most of her life only awarded citizenship automatically to those who could trace their ancestry to those who lived there before its forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union. All others must naturalize, and our client doesn’t meet the naturalization criteria (and isn’t likely to).
So she has no citizenship, and for a variety of complicated reasons that I won’t discuss for confidentiality reasons, isn’t likely ever to acquire any.
Come to think of it, the same may apply to my grandfather. He was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1904. We have been completely unable to find any immigration or citizenship document relating to him at all, though he arrived in the U.S. as an infant. Luckily, he’s dead, so nobody can deport him.
(I do suspect he was a U.S. citizen for the simple reason that it was easy to immigrate legally when he came, and the vast majority of people who immigrated to the U.S. at the time he did naturalized as soon as they were legally able to do so. Of course, one never knows, as in the case of my late grandmother, but that’s another story, and a long one, too.)
Kuwait awards nationality only to those people whose ancestors became citizens in 1920; there’s a substantial population of people who’ve been living there for generations, who have no claim on nationality anywhere else, but who also do not have Kuwaiti citizenship:
(Kind of a sloppily-written article but seems factually sound.)