O.K., I’m asking. For some unknown reason, I’m fascinated by bigamy stories (particularly the amusing ones, not the ones where the guy marries multiple women in order to steal their money.)
Yes, share the bigamist story!
This got me thinking… In the U.S., are the children of foreign ambassadors born here considered to be citizens of the U.S.?
No, they aren’t. IIRC the specific language is that they are not born “subject to U.S. jurisdiction.”
Here’s a kicker: you can be a citizen not of an officially recognized country, but of a virtual nation! Cyber Yugoslavia has been around since 1999, and they are seeking recognition from the UN. From their website, they say:
Believe it or not, they actually have an anthem (downloadable in .mp3 format), a constitution, and you can even apply for citizenship online!
Well, since y’all asked…
I’m sitting at my desk back in Japan when a young Sailor, Petty Officer 2nd Class, comes in with his Nevada marriage certificate. Part of my job at the time was preparing the “page two” (that’s the part of the service record that tells who all the dependents are and who gets what cash in the event of the servicemember’s untimely demise). Being the good calimari I am (remember I hail from Monterey), I look over the rest of the service record while the PO2 is signing his name on the page two. I then take the newly-signed page two, along with the rest of the service record, into my Master Chief’s office. So we both go back for me to ask him where he came up with the date of the divorce on the application for enlistment when the marriage license/certificate said he was never married. He told us, straight up, that he didn’t get divorced.
The fallout on that was his commanding officer (same worthless commanding officer as for the other maroon) decided that so long as the PO2 stayed out of Nevada there’s no problem. And my Master Chief and I ensured the “wife” got no Navy bennies since the marriage was invalid.
Can’t believe y’all asked about that one instead of the “typed at home in the wrong language” marriage certificate.
OK then, I’ll ask.
What about the “typed at home in the wrong language” marriage certificate.
Oh, and what was your rank/rating when all this stuff happened?
PO1 entered with an obviously typewritten document, no seal, no embossing, just an 8 1/2" x 11" (yes, US standard-sized letter paper–NOT A4 or whatever the metric letter size is). The thing was typed in English. I showed it to my boss, the aforementioned Master Chief, who told me to advise the PO1 to get the original certificate with the appropriate info on it (license number, seal, etc.). The PO1 went to a translation agency in Tokyo and paid to have the thing translated from English into the language of the country where the marriage purportedly happened. He then went to another translation agency to have that one translated into English. We sent that one up the chain as a dubious claim. The Navy went ahead and said the documents were valid and the guy and gal got all the bennies. That is, until he attempted to get an immigrant visa for her at the end of his overseas assignment. The US embassy denied this one because the documents were “obviously fictitious.” God, that made my day. The PO1 was a real piece of work, and not a good one either.
In short: If you’re going to commit fraud, do at least a tad of research first.
My rate/rating? Personnelman Second Class when it originally happened. Personnelman First Class when the Embassy busted the fool.
A few years ago, the local newspaper did a story about a man who lives in a cardboard box near the dry river bottom and eats out of dumpsters.
Before he lived in a cardboard box, he decided that he didn’t want to be a U.S. citizen anymore. America, he said was corrupt and evil and all that. He was convinced of this even though he’d never lived anywhere else. Our idealistic young protagonist decided that, as a form of protest, he would renounce his U.S. citizenship BEFORE applying for asylum in a new homeland.
This decision, as it later turned out, proved to be an Error in Judgment.
He went to the authorities and said he wanted to renounce his citizenship. They advised against it unless he was SURE that he had somewhere else to go. He got all snippy and told them that he knew what he was doing. He was allowed to renounce his citizenship, and was given a document stating that he was now officially a citizen of no country. Before he left the office, he delivered a rehearsed speech in which he told the authorities, and the nation of his birth, to stuff it.
This, too, later turned out to be an Error in Judgment.
Off he went to the Embassy of Country X, and applied for citizenship. “Of what country,” they asked, “are you now a citizen?” “Of none!” he said proudly, and showed them his walking papers. “Oh dear,” they responded. “For purposes of immigration to our land, you do not exist.”
He tried another embassy. Same response.
And he went from embassy to embassy, always with the same response. And, yes, he even went meekly back to the U.S. authorities and asked to be TEMPORARILY reinstalled as a citizen until he could find a place that would take him (Chutzpah? Stupidity? You got me).
They told him politely but firmly, No.
And when he protested that he was now a man without a country, they replied politely but firmly, Tough titty.
And that’s why he lives in a box near the dry river bottom and eats out of dumpsters. He is trapped in the nation of his birth, which has ironically but legally become a foreign land to him, and is unhouseable and unemployable.
Moral? Don’t burn your house down today before you know where you’ll be living tomorrow.
So they took his birth certificate away?
Well, I know LaurAnge has a friend who had to deal with non-citizenship. I’ll drop her a line, maybe she’ll share the story again.
Yes, my friend is indeed having some problems.
She was born here, in Montreal, to two people with diplomatic status in South American countries. She has an older brother. She was granted citizenship at birth, had a passport, medicare card etc.
At the age of 16, when she tried to renew her medicare card she was informed that, in Canada, children of diplomats are NOT automatically citizens of Canada, even if they are born here. Apparently the law was on the books but hadn’t been enforced. Now, in most cases, children of diplomats are granted automatic citizenship of the country of their parents. It just so happens that the two countries her parents were from didn’t have this policy.
Her mom tried for a couple of years to fight it. She had been living as a citizen for her whole life. Canada has refused to do anything about it. Finally, her mom gave up fighting and my friend has applied for citizenship.
Meanwhile, she’s a citizen of nowhere. She came with me to Florida a while ago, and got a “Certificate of Identity” (which looks like a passport) which lists her nationality in one place as “XXX” and in another as the UN company her mother works for.
Her travels in Europe and the visa problems we had there are an entirely different story.
Anyway, she applied for Quebec residency, the first step in becoming Canadian. She didn’t have enough points (one’s fitness to be a resident is calculated on a point scale), but they finally decided to let her be a resident anyway.
So, she’s a Quebec permanent resident, and in three years she’ll be allowed to apply for citizenship, 5 years after this whole crazy thing began.
Therefore: Yes it is possible to have no citizenship. Yes it is possible to have it revoked. International travel can be hard, but with advance planning and a good story, you can still get visas.
We tell her that if she gets in trouble, she’ll get deported to international waters 
Bumping this thread for a pretty good article on statelessness today:
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/20/no-country-for-15-million-legal-ghosts/?hpt=hp_bn2