Interesting case was heard in the Supreme Court of Canada today: Vavilov v Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.
Alexander Vavilov and his younger brother Timothy were both born in Canada. Their parents were a Russian couple who had emigrated to Canada and were holding down ordinary jobs.
But wait! It turns out that their parents were Boris and Natasha! Long-term sleeper spies for Russia!
Citizenship Canada says that makes them ineligible for birthright citizenship and deported them.
Now they’re challenging it in the Supreme Court.
Moose and Squirrel have a reportedly intervened in their behalf.
That’s the feds’ argument. But there’s an equity issue here. The sons have lived most of their lives in Canada, thinking they were Canadian. That’s a bit different from diplomats living openly as foreign agents and taking their young child, born while they’re in the foreign country, home at the end of their rotation.
It’s an interesting point, though: If the kids’ parents had been enemy troops in uniform during a declared war, they would have been protected as lawful combatants, subject to no worse than a P.O.W. camp and repatriation once the war’s over. And diplomats notoriously don’t even have to pay parking tickets. As spies, on the other hand, they were subject to arrest and [del]a firing squad[/del] a nice jail cell, followed in fairly short order by being “swapped” for some of our* spies. So, to sort of take the bitter with the sweet, since Russian spies under non-official cover are (to use the American language regarding “natural born citizens”; I don’t know what the Canadian language is) clearly “subject to the jurisdiction” of Canada and/or the United States (unlike lawful enemy combatants or foreign diplomats they can be arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, or under some circumstances theoretically even executed), it does kind of make sense that their kids would enjoy birthright citizenship, the same as children of any other immigrants. (Of course it would also depend more specifically on what the Canadian Constitution and Canadian law actually say about citizenship. Maybe the Canadian Constitution and/or Canadian law has a specific “no spies!” clause when discussing birthright citizens.)
*Well, “our” in the sense of “spies for a fellow NATO ally”, from the Canadian point of view.
So in other words, you think that it okay to punish the kids for crimes that their parents committed?
How is the kids having citizenship even a benefit for the parents? I’m pretty sure that any application by the kids to sponsor the parents for immigration in future would be declined.
Do the parents expect visiting rights? What about when they have grandkids?
And won’t the children, as adults, be deeply resentful of the nation that deported their parents?
Are we expecting the parents to own up to the kids? Or claim they’ve been wrongly accused?
Wouldn’t the kids be ready tools for the spy agency of the parents?
Exactly. It’s not about punishing the kids. It’s about not giving incentives for spies to have kids in the country they’re spying on so that those kids have the benefit of citizenship there and, given the possible (likely?) ongoing influence and bonds of affection to their parents and the parents’ country of origin, reducing the risk of further espionage/treason.
According to the article, the kids were deported to Russia along with their parents (they are now 24 and 28 according to the article).
Regarding the parents coming back to Canada, I don’t have any problem with the government preventing that. If they want to see any grandchildren, the kids will need to fly to Russia.
What they told their children is totally on them. Given that they were 16 and 20 at the time of their parents’ arrests, and that the parents confessed, I’m pretty sure that they know what happened.
If the government suspects that the children are spies, then it can prosecute them like it would any other Canadian citizen it suspected of being a spy for another country.
I take it that Canada does not extend citizenship generally to children born in Canada of parents who are present illegally (as would happen in the US)?
But there are specific statutory exceptions, and one of them is that when agents of foreign governments residing in Canada have children born in Canada, those children are not Canadian citizens. That’s the provision in issue here.
Clearly, that includes diplomatic and military personnel who are openly here, accredited as diplomats, part of military exchanges, and so on.
But does it include the children of spies, who were not here openly and that no-one knew were agents of a foreign government?
On the one hand, as Elendil’s Heir has pointed out, you don’t want to reward the foreign spies.
But on the other hand, when the spies live here on deep cover, and their children are in their late teens or early twenties when it’s discovered, as happened here, and those children have lived all their lives in Canada, knowing that they are Canadian, don’t they have an interest here, separate and apart from their parents?
It’s going to be an interesting SCC decision either way.
My fault for calling them “Spy Kids” for a catchy title.
They’re twenty-four and twenty-six now, I think, and they’re the ones who have brought the court cases to have themselves declared to be Canadian citizens.
Since they’re fighting so hard to stay, when their parents have been deported years ago, I think we can assume that they want to be Canadians.
Why would they be ready tools for a foreign spy agency? They’ve seen what it did to their parents, whose value was that they were not known to be spies. Doubtful that they could fly under the radar in the same way.
Are difficult immigration or nationality problems in Canada ever resolved by Parliament passing a private bill? It wouldn’t necessarily be politically feasible, but if it was, it could resolve this case without making a precedent that could be used by people with less sympathetic cases.
If I found out my parents had been lying to me my whole life at that level, I wouldn’t be too keen on visiting them. “Oh, your country is more important to you than your kids? Well, guess what, MY country is more important to me than my parents and you two can fuck off!”
Outside of pedantic cruelty, there’s no reason for Canada to retroactively strip citizenship and deport these people to their ancestral country. However I’m sure there’s some cruelty loving pedants out there who would defend it.
I think the equitable solution here is to declare these two individuals to not be natural-born citizens, because they were born to parents acting as agents of a foreign power, but then to fast-track their naturalization process, because they lived their entire lives in the only home country they know and behaved as citizens. If Canada has some equivalent to the Dream Act, then start with that, and then I’m sure that there are some cogs which can be appropriately oiled with attention from the Powers that Be.
I don’t think that the kids should be punished for the crimes of their parents. This feels a little like deporting Dreamers who arrived when they were young children with their parents…within the letter of the law, but not fair.
