After this he went and filed some paperwork claiming to be a stateless person/refugee and received a special stateless person passport which only allows him to move inside the European Union and maybe not even that.
He was filing for residency in Slovakia but never said if he got it, he mentioned in one post he was being supported by a girl and in his latest post begs for cash I’m assuming since he cannot work. :smack:
Apparently the USA will allow you to renounce your citizenship as long as you’re outside the USA, even if you have no other citizenship or even permanent residency status in the country you’re in. This leaves you pretty much stuck with no good options, your only hope being trying to use the stateless person/refugee angle.
So what happens to this guy now if Slovakia decides they don’t want him? Deport him back to the USA, but he is no longer a citizen so how would that work? Are countires really going to put up with this for long, having USA citizens come there renounce and basically stranding themselves somewhere they cannot even work and support themselves? Can they complain to the USA government?
I was surprised, but it appears you can renounce US citizenship even if it would make you stateless. I’m British - the British government does not allow this. But from the State Department:
The state department page says that renouncing citizenship is “irrevocable” but it doesn’t say anything about re-applying. Unless he got married it seems that he is still eligible for a green card as the child of a US citizen. Then presumably after your 5 years permanent resident you can become a citizen again.
My money is on him quietly applying for a green card to come home when he gets tired of making his point and being penniless in Slovakia.
International law forbids a state from revoking citizenship (and creating a stateless person), though I’m not sure how multi-citizens are treated. I’ve never heard of someone doing it the other way around… Even ships have to have a home port, at least on paper, don’t they? Interesting case, though.
Do you have a cite for this? I’m not saying I think you’re wrong, but I’d be interested to know more. The UK will not allow a citizen to renounce citizenship if it would make them stateless, but apparently the US does allow this.
Interestingly enough The Master’s article contains these portions:
It would seem to me applying for permanent residency after renunciation is pretty clearly behavior inconsistent with renouncing citizenship, so I wonder if he could go to court over it. It is interesting that the state department can at a whim reverse a renunciation.
Info found at the US state departments website is even more confusing 404 - Page Not Found
So Slovakia could deport him to the USA, where he would not be a citizen. What would happen at that point? Just rot in a immigration holding cell?
I wonder how he got around that requirement? And it says he will be ineligible for a passport in the future, does that mean you’re not allowed to reacquire citizenship through naturalization?
Just for reference -
In a recent case in Singapore the govt refused to allow a citizen to renounce his citizenship, even though he had legal and proper citizenship in another state. And he wasn’t a criminal either.
Note what Cecil says about US Embassy employees trying hard to discourage you from doing this. Like making you come back multiple times, etc. They really don’t want to do this.
A rather famous example is Lee Harvey Oswald.
He tried to renounce his American citizenship when he was living & working in the USSR, had married a Russian wife, etc. In the end, the embassy prevented this by basically letting his paperwork sit on someones desk, and never sending it back to the US State Department to be processed, and he didn’t persist in following up on this. (That eventually worked to his benefit, when he bacame tired of Russia and he and wanted to return to the US with his wife. (Whether our country would have been better off if the embassy workers had efficiently processed his renunciation is a different question.)
This webpage claims: http://renunciationguide.com/Rights-After-Expatriation.html
“There are no temporary renunciations or options to re-acquire U.S. citizenship. In contrast, a British citizen is allowed to renounce his citizenship in order to acquire another nationality, and then later reapply for and “resume” his British citizenship at a future date. In the U.S., there is no such provision. Once you renounce, you can never resume your citizenship.”
I would have thought there would be examples of individuals that have tried to reacquire US citizenship and we could get a definite answer but my google fu is not finding examples.
Maybe the US gets around it by instead allowing people to invalidate their own renunciation? Eg get an immigration Lawyer to claim that you didn’t understand the consequences of being stateless so you didn’t really mean to renounce US citizenship. The US can then let you back in and still maintain the fiction that it’s impossible to reacquire US citizenship once renounced.
I know someone–a former PhD student of mine–who crossed the Canadian border to avoid the draft in 1969. He received immigrant status at the border (as was common in those days–I think it was payback for the time Trudeau had been declared “undesirable” and refused entry to the US), got on the first train to Montreal and renounced his citizenship when he got here. With his Canadian immigration card he was able to get a document called a Nansen passport (for a very fragmentary description, see Nansen passport - Wikipedia) that did allow him to travel, although he had to get visas from every country he went to and prove that he could return to Canada. Five years later he became a citizen and got a real passport. A few years after that, the charges were dropped and he was able to cross the border to the US. There was no particular difficulty in his renouncing the citizenship. He couldn’t get a US passport and it was the only way he could travel.
Actually some things I was reading mention the Canadian loophole where since at the time border crossing between the US and Canada was very lax and did not require a passport people were renouncing their US citizenship in Canada and then crossing back over with their birth cert or driver’s license or whatever.