Some countries do not allow dual citizenship, so when being naturalized in the US, a person from such a country must renounce their native citizenship.
For naturalized US citizens, the US can revoke their citizenship under certain circumstances, e.g. when such a person is found guilty of certain crimes. Such a person is then “stateless.” What happens to such a person?
Is there anything in US law that requires the native state to accept the renunciation of citizenship?
The U.S. does not force would-be citizens to renounce other citizenships. But once you become a U.S. citizen, the U.S. does not recognize other citizenships you might have. However, some countries will disclaim your citizenship if you become a citizen of another country.
Sovereign powers choose who are and aren’t their citizens. No U.S. law can change that.
For countries which do not allow dual citizenship, the renunciation is essentially a formality. If you are Dutch, for example, and naturalize as an American, your Dutch citizenship is revoked. US law has nothing to do with it.
The US doesn’t care if you retain your native citizenship to some other country. It’s that other country that requires you to renounce your citizenship to that country (when you become a naturalized US citizen).
That was what I was trying to point to. There’s nothing stopping the Netherlands from changing that law and saying ‘Once Dutch, always Dutch!’
That’s kind of the situation with Iran, actually, specific to the US. When my Tehran-born wife naturalized as an American, she was officially informed that the Iranian government did not recognize it, and she would be expected to keep her Iranian documents in order if she ever wanted to travel to her country of origin.
The US didn’t give a shit either way. They gave her the new American passport and sent her off to live her life. (Though they will insist that she represent herself as American on entering the US, not as Iranian, same as any other dual national.)
To try to answer the real question: the stateless person is dependent on the whims of their host country. I think there might be some international convention against expelling refugees. Nothing generally enforceable.
To expel a person from the US requires having somewhere to expel that person to. If no other country will accept the immigration of a US resident who has had their US citizenship revoked, then presumably it’s not logistically possible to expel that person from the US.
That’s a special situations as the US and Iran have no formal diplomatic relationships. It’s sort of a game of let’s pretend the other does not exist. Currency is not convertible, there are no airline flights from one to the other. They take that as far as they reasonable can.
Googling, if your naturalized citizenship is revoked, you revert to your previous status. I suspect that for most naturalized citizens, that’s permanent residency, though probably that’s going to be revoked as well. At that point, I think you’re an undocumented immigrant and subject to deportation. So probably the US government is planning to ship you to your home country, or any willing to accept you.
Sort of a “heaven doesn’t want me and hell is afraid I’ll take over” situation. Or vice versa.
More seriously, this is a bit of an irresistible force vs immovable object scenario.
The two countries play chicken over the poor bastard caught in the middle. IMO it’s impossible to state a reliable outcome for these kinds of highly individual situations. There isn’t a reliable rule for everything.
It’s usually very difficult to deport a stateless person, since no other country is likely to accept them. But if they leave the country voluntarily, it is usually possible to refuse them re-entry. But even if they are willing to leave the country that too can be difficult, since they don’t have, and can’t get, a valid passport.
Tl;dr: Stateless people generally remain in the country they are in when they are determined to be stateless.
(There’s an international treaty — the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness — which tries to reduce the incidence of statelessness arising in the first place, and which in particular constrains a state’s ability to denaturalise someone if that would leave them stateless. But the US is not a party to the Convention.)
(Italics mine)
It seems likely this person will find itself in the indefinite care of ICE.
Beyond that, there are several countries willing to accept deportees in exchange for payment - see the deal between the UK and Rwanda for an example.
The US is also in the habit of pressuring countries into accepting deportations - see “recalcitrant countries”. This usually concerns people who have arrived from said countries.
So if they really want you gone, you’ll quickly find yourself leaving on a jet plane.
The US will also not revoke your duty to pay taxes - see form 8854.
In the case of a denaturalisation, it’s hard to see how the US could pressure the country from which the person most recently travelled to let them back in. They person entered the US legitimately, and the reason for trying to expel them now is that the US has stripped them of citizenship. The sending country is in no way responsible for the US’s decision to do that and has no obvious duty to assist the US in dealing with the consequences of its decision.
(Be different if the person had arrived irregularly in the US, and there was some argument that the sending country had a duty to prevent them from travelling.)
It happens elsewhere too. Time was, there’d be cases of young men with inherited dual nationality surprised to discover their other country calling them up for military service, irrespective of their life in Britain.
And more recently there’s this:
I am Spanish and I have a friend in Spain that was born to Spanish parents in France. The family came back to Spain when he was like, 9 years old, and spent his whole life growing up in Spain with Spanish papers. He never bothered (neither did his parents) to do any paperwork in France regarding his citizenship (if you are born in France, you are French).
He was very surprised when he became 18 years old and got a letter from the French embassy in Spain telling him that he was expected to show up at the recruitment center in Paris for his French military service.
Fortunately for him, he had very bad eyesight and he was able to present the relevant medical certificates that allowed him to avoid military service in France.
(As you can imagine, this was quite a few years ago).
A friend was born in Malaysia to parents who had moved there from China. Her parents were refugees and were in a legal state where she was not granted Malaysian citizenship at birth. And she didn’t have Chinese citizenship either due to her status. When her parents moved to the US she was stateless, and had papers that confirmed her status. She was able to attend US schools, and after she graduated college she got her US citizenship. But before that, any international travel was a bit of an ordeal. But I don’t imaging the US could have deported her to anywhere before or after she was naturalized. Neither China nor Malaysia would have accepted her.
This news story purports to be about a stateless Marine Corps veteran in the US:
I say “purports” because although I understand all too well the process by which he has been denied US citizenship (I work almost exclusively on behalf of noncitizen US military veterans, some of whom have been deported), I am not sure I understand how he is supposed to have lost his Australian citizenship (mostly because IANA Australian L, and nothing on Wikipedia suggests Australia rescinds citizenship for foreign military service with a non-hostile nation).
Anyway, if the US determines someone is deportable, but no other country will take them, they could in theory be kept in detention indefinitely, although in practice they may be paroled (perhaps in one-year increments, every year for the rest of their life—and I seem to recall that there is an expectation, based on a another SCOTUS precedent, that, after about 6 months, and more so after a year, the government may be required to explain why parole is inappropriate if it does try to detain someone indefinitely).
There’s actually a fairly (terrible) Supreme Court case on the issue of what happens when an apparently stateless individual tries to re-enter the US but (1) is denied and (2) isn’t allowed anywhere else:
This line, from the dissent (which was actually arguing in the individual’s favor, that he shouldn’t be subject to lifelong detention) is a doozy:
This man, who seems to have led a life of unrelieved insignificance, must have been astonished to find himself suddenly putting the Government of the United States in such fear that it was afraid to tell him why it was afraid of him. He was shipped and reshipped to France, which twice refused him landing. Great Britain declined, and no other European country has been found willing to open its doors to him. Twelve countries of the American Hemisphere refused his applications. Since we proclaimed him a Samson who might pull down the pillars of our temple, we should not be surprised if peoples less prosperous, less strongly established, and less stable feared to take him off our timorous hands. With something of a record as an unwanted man, neither his efforts nor those of the United States Government any longer promise to find him an abiding place. For nearly two years, he was held in custody of the immigration authorities of the United States at Ellis Island, and, if the Government has its way, he seems likely to be detained indefinitely, perhaps for life, for a cause known only to the Attorney General.
A “life of unrelieved insignificance.” Gee, thanks for the kind words, Mr. Justice.
I had a student who was stateless. After graduating from Wayne State, he was drafted for VietNam and simply crossed the bridge and asked for asylum, came to Montreal and renounced his citizenship. Until he could become a Canadian citizen, he could travel abroad only with a fair amount of complication. He got a document called, IIRC, a Nansen passport and needed a visa to visit or travel through any other country. Then he became a citizen and Jimmy Carter (may he live 100 years) pardoned all draft dodgers so he could even travel to the US without a US passport.