It may be true that, in a practical sense, the US “controls the territory in perpetuity”, but that’s not enough to make it “US soil” as a matter of international or, for that matter, US law. And that’s what matters for the purposes of this thread. If Guantanamo is not treated as “US soil” for the purposes of US citizenship law, then in a very important sense it is not US soil.
Isn’t Guantanamo Naval Base specifically leased, as in not owned? The Cuban government would argue that it’s illegally occupied but then they aren’t given much choice. The argument is similar to an embassy then; not US soil.
Plus I doubt the government would want a pregnant detainee (or is it all men?) claiming jus soli, although I’m sure there would be ways to void that.
A US Army base is German soil…
It’s leased, but indefinitely. Under the terms of the treaty, the lease can only be terminated by the agreement of both governments. to that extent, the US can’t be evicted.
However the treaty also affirms the continuing sovereignty of Cuba over the base area. Guantanamo is not US soil for citizenship or other legal purposes, and in the unlikely event of a non-US citizen giving birth within the base, the child would not have a claim to US citizenship on the basis of having been born within the base.
And of course the OP relates to birth on a US base in Germany, not Cuba. As has been pointed out several times, US bases in German are certainly not “US soil”.
It’s not US territory. It’s land leased from Cuba by the US. The fact that the Cuban government refuses to accept the annual payments does not negate the fact that it’s Cuban territory. It’s not a legal fiction. It’s simply not US territory.
Note the special privileges given to those with German ancestors. I recall reading about this, that like many European (and other countries) that identify with their own local ethnic extraction, they make it easy for “their people” to come home, and difficult for outsiders to stay. This seems prejudicial and racist to those of us from nations of immigrants, like North America, New Zealand and Australia.
The article also mentioned that it was easier for Germans whose ancestors moved to Russia in the 1800’s to get citizenship, than for Turkish children born in Germany to long time resident “guest workers”.
I recall growing up hearing about the Canadians born in the USA who would have to decide at age 21, but I don’t recall hearing it recently. It may have been a relic of the 1960’s, or simply a popular misconception. (IIRC a recent thread said that the fastidiousness of the US position on dual citizenship had shifted over the decades).
Well, this tension isn’t uncommon. Most countries’ nationality laws depend on some blend of two principles; the just sanguinis, in which nationality is inherited from parents (or more remote ancestors) and the jus soli, in which nationality is acquired by virtue of the place in which one is born.
Exactly how each nation will balance these two principles in its concept of nationality depends, at least to some extent, on national history. If you take a nation like Ireland or Germany, the nation existed (as a group of people with shared language, culture, history, etc) long before the state. So when the Irish state, or the German state, was established, when it came to developing a concept of citizenship of that state, it wasn’t so much a question of inventing a concept of citizenship, as of putting legal terminology on an already-existing concept of nationality. Nationality isn’t unconnected with territory, but a lot of other factors go into it. And if you have a nation whose history is characterised by significant rates of emigration, well, they tend not to think that you lose your nationality when you are in another country, even if you are settled there; you still have family, cultural, historic, etc, ties to your nation of origin. And this can be true of your children as well. Hence the just sanguinis tends to play a large role in your citizenship laws; nationality (like all culture) is to a large extent an inherited matter, and citizenshiip laws tend to follow sui…
By contrast, in a “new” nation, particularly one founded on enlightment principles and characterised by immigration like the US, the just sanguinis tends to play a lesser role. At the outset, obviously, nobody is descended from a US citizen, because US citizenship has just been invented. Participation in the new state is marked by civic engagement, and the extent of your engagement with the new state depends on your own allegiance, not that of your parents. So the law tends to be quite open to the notion of someone engaging with the new state by giving in their allegiance, and participating in it by living under its laws and institutions, which you primarily do by settling and living there. Hence being reared in the US is a strong pointer towards the kind of engagement and participation on which citizenship is founded, and (along with naturalisation) the jus soli tends to play a significant role in citizenship law. Inherited culture and history play a lesser role.
It has to be acknowledged that, until comparatively recently, Germany was very much at one end of the scale, with just soli playing next to no role in German citizenship law, but a significant reform in the late 1990s changed that. I suspect the perceptions reflected in the article you mention may have been influence to some extent by the pre-2000 position. Nowadays, birth in Germany confers German citizenship if at least one parent is a legal permanent resident, and has been in Germany for at least eight years. And persons of German ethnicity do have a fast-track to naturalisation, but only if they are expelled from their country of birth (which happened quite a lot in the post-war years, but is rare now). If they are not expellees they are subject to the same naturalisation requirements as anyone else.
There actually exists a right of return in quite a number of countries, not just in Germany.
Exactly, which is what you find in countries that identify themselves by a given ethnic group. “If you’re one of us, you’re a citizen. If you’re not, you’re not.”
The most interesting story about this I heard was David Suzuki’s visit to Japan. He’d been interred in Canada during WWII for being Japanese as a boy. But he spoke almost no Japanese, yet the single race=single culture paradigm was so ingrained in the country, he said even his interpreters would forget and start talking to him in Japanese.
(Note also that Korean “guest workers” would have trouble getting Japanese citizenship even after generations living there…)
This is incorrect in several respects. A person born of a Saudi father will not be a Saudi “through international law”. International law does not say anything about nationality; it is left solely to the national law of the state concerned if a person has that state’s citizenship or not. International law does not interfere with that; the granting or denying of citizenship is solely a matter of national law. There was one famous case before the International Court of Justice, Nottebohm, where it was ruled that states must recognise a person as a national of another state only if that person has a genuine link to that other state. This case concerns only the recognition of a foreign nationality for matters of diplomatic protection, however; it does not restrict the right of states to grant or deny nationality based on criteria chosen by the state. So the child born to a Saudi father may or may not be a Saudi citizen based on what Saudi law has t say about the question, but the nationality will never derive from international law.
Secondly, and related to what I just said, Germany will never “grant dual citizenship” to a person. It is not for German authorities to grant the citizenship of another country. German law may decide who is, or is not, a German citizen, but German law has nothing to say about who is or is not a Saudi citizen (and indeed does not purport to say anything about it). Of course German law may force a person to choose between Saudi or German nationality, revoking German nationality when the Saudi nationality is not given up; but there is no process by which the laws of state A will determine the citizenshp of state B.
I had not heard of this case before. It may be technically, legally correct but the case truly sucks. Nottebohm had lived in Guatemala for decades and owned property there. In 1939, seeing the turn things were taking he renounced German nationality and took that of Liechtenstein which granted their nationality.
When he returned to Guatemala, the authorities there said, “no, that’s cheating, to us you are still German and therefore enemy alien” and they confiscated all his property and handed him to the USA where he was interned for the rest of the war. After the war he was denied his property in Guatemala.
It might be technically correct but I cannot see how it is just or fair in any way. Just because the man had German nationality, which he was trying to get rid of, he was punished.
Of course, laws and treaties are observed while convenient and breached when convenient. Smaller countries are more interested in respecting the established order while more powerful countries can breach treaties with impunity when it suits them. America has quite a history of this. No matter what a treaty may say, if they want to screw someone they will. And they will even find that it is legally correct.
Investigating the Nottebohm case I came across another case related to this discussion, the Canevaro case. Some Peruvian man by the name of Canevaro, son of Italian immigrants in Peru and with Italian nationality as well as Peruvian, at the turn of the 20th century had an economic dispute with the Peruvian government. In the dispute he claimed the protection of his Italian citizenship and got Italy involved. The dispute between Peru and Italy was submitted for adjudication to a tribunal elected by both parties. Finally in 1913 the tribunal ruled on the various points submitted, mostly in favor of Canevaro, but ruled that Canevaro could not claim Italian protection in Peru because he was, to all intents and purposes, a Peruvian citizen. He could have Italian nationality as well but he could not claim Italian protection in Peru.
Personally, I agree that the outcome of the case in question was highly unfair to Nottebohm, but that’s a result of the fact that international law is still (and certainly was to a larger extent back then) mostly concerned about states, not individuals. The perspective of international law taken in the case was not so much about how Nottebohm as an individual was treated; it was about how states treated other states, and Nottebohm was not regarded as an individual but as an intermediary representing “his” state. So the question was: Is Nottebohm a national of Germany, in which case confiscating his property was perfectly legal since it was an enemy country, or a national of Liechtenstein, in which case the confiscation would not have been legal since Liechtenstein was neutral? The perspective of looking at Nottebohm as an individual, rather than as an outpost of his state, was never taken.
That said, it is also noteworthy that hardly anybody remembers the case for the specific result in this particular incident. The case is remembered almost solely for establishing the principle that Guatemala had to recognise Nottebohm’s Liechtenstein nationality only if there was a genuine link between Nottebohm and the state of Liechtenstein. Hardly anybody cares if the court found this genuine link to be existent in the actual case.
The case might be decided differently today, since international law now pays more attention to human beings as individuals rather than as appendices to their states.
Yeah, I guess the bsis of the unfairness is that Guatemala and the USA would confiscate and imprison the man, who had lived for decades in Guatemala, just because he had German nationality. They should have not done that unless there was a better reason than just his nationality. And I guess the man was just naive to return to Guatemala thinking he would be treated fairly. The confiscation of his property is just theft pure and simple and his internment is inexcusable.
I may be mistaken but I believe even the UK did not imprison Germans and confiscate their property.
The point I’m making is that in the case of Guantanamo Bay it’s strictly de jure not U.S. soil, while under all ordinary definitions of “territory” dating back thousands of years no one would consider it anything but U.S. territory. Most places like embassies in a foreign country are both de jure and de facto the land of the host country–in law because that is the actual legal status and in fact because host nations can always evict an entire embassy if they are cutting off relations (and this has happened.) But in Guantanamo it is only a matter of law that says the land is not American, as a matter of fact it actually is.
A legal fiction is when a legal status or law does not reflect reality. That perfectly captures the situation at Guantanamo Bay.
The statement “no one would consider Guantanamo Bay anything but U.S. territory” is simply an apodictical statement, and it is untrue - the Cuban government considers Guantanamo Bay part of Cuban territory, the U.S. government does not disagree (in fact, the U.S. never claimed to have any title other than a lease to the area), and the vast majority of international law scholars take the same position. This is all in accordance with the provisions of the treaty from which the lease derives, which did not cede the territory to the U.S. but only lease it. All these people and entities who regard Guantanamo Bay as Cuban, not American, territory hardly count as “nobody”. Your statement that Guantanamo Bay is only legally not U.S. territory is not helpful since the question whose territory it is is a legal question; you can’t simply discard the legal answer to a legal question as immaterial.
This page says that internments of Germans in Britain did occur during WWI and WWII, but apparently not on a scale even remotely comparable to the internment of Japanese Americans in the U.S. during WWII - looks like the highest number of internees reached in Britain was 8,000. I guess, however, that the objective of this internment was different from the Nottebohm case - for Britain, it was about preventing espionage and sabotage activities of Germans within the country, whereas for Guatamala - which, despite its declaration of war on Germany, never saw any action - it is fair to assume that the reason for joining the allied side was partly to simply have a pretext for the confiscation of property.
I had to look up “apodictical” and it seems you are using it wrongly, in the opposite sense of what you mean… Or I am misunderstanding the whole thing.
At any rate, yes, “legally” Guantanamo is Cuban territory but in fact it is just a convenient fiction for America who can then do things there which it could not legally do on US soil. In practice it is controlled by the USA in perpetuity so the sovereignty question is pure fiction.
The UK was in a much tighter hole and I would give them more leeway. I can understand they had real concerns about spying. But Guatemala sent that man to be interned in the USA so it seems they just wanted to confiscate his property and be on the good side of the USA.
Seems like I made the mistake that non-native speakers often do in English: Messing up the instances when adjectives should end in -ic versus -ical (compare “historic” and “historical” - I know the difference, but I can never memorise which one is which). The meaning I intended is the second meaning on this Wiktionary definition of “apodictic”.
As for Guantanamo: I wonder if Cuba pulls its position of it being Cuban soil through consistently. Cuban law also follows the ius soli principle; consequently, if you take the position that Guantanamo is legally Cuban territory seriously (and as I said, this is the position of both the US and the Cuban governments), then the regime in Havana ought to regard the children of US military personnel born in Guantanamo as Cuban citizens. Of course, these children will hardly be interested in this citizenship, and there’s little chance of them ever in their life coming into contact with Cuban authorities where this would matter. But maybe some incident has taken place somewhere where the question did come up.