The US did for some time have a policy of detaining stateless persons indefinitely if there was nowhere to deport them to. That policy was challenged but I’m not sure what the outcome was.
Nah, Balki would just apply for a refugee status, since the Ocean is “clearly” oppressing his small island nation with about 6 million galons of seawater. 
That sounds like the plight of that guy who’s stuck at Charles DeGaul (sp?) Airport in France. He was an Iranian citizen, but the Iranian government revoked his citizenship (they can do that over there), and since he was also half British, he tried to fly to Britain. Somehow, he got detained at DeGaul Airport. The British government either couldn’t or wouldn’t get involved, and Iran won’t take him back.
So he’s been living at the airport for the last 10 or 20 years :eek: 
As I understand it, they now (officially) allow the city to be called either Bombay or Mumbai. The reason was that they took too big a financial hit by changing the name. Few outside India knew where Mumbai was and it was hurting business.
No, no, no. EVERYONE knows that “Balki” is from the Greek island of “Mepos”…(sigh, someone had to…I’m a bad boy…I’ll go to my room now…)
Sorry…
Actually, I would imagine that an entire country literally being wiped off the map would be more than sufficient cause for an almost instant granting of a request for asylum and/or citizenship. I would pity the poor president that wouldn’t personally, immediately authorize such a request as long as the person wasn’t a dangerous criminal - that would be another question entirely, and I’m not sure what the answer is - I guess it would depend on what domestic laws he’s broken and whether he might be a threat to others, etc.
critter42
Honestly, I don’t think it matters.
I was born in Soviet Union. Moved to the US from Russian Federation. I am a citizen of the Russian Federation, and I think I consistently put down place of birth: Moscow, Russia on all my immigration papers, while my parents consistently put down Blah blah, Soviet Union. I don’t think anybody cared.
- Groman
I think Polycarp’s advice makes the most sense. It’s probably less risky to list only the old name or only the current name if you were born in a major city, like Prague or Moscow, but the person processing your application is more likely to be confused if you are from a tiny town of a few thousand (or even a few hundred) people. You’d be surprised how many people who deal with these issues all the time have no idea where relatively large cities are, like, say, Odessa (to name a city which has been part of four different countries – the Russian Empire, the USSR, Russia, and Ukraine – all in the past 100 years).
As for the question about where to deport people if their country of origin is undetermined or no longer exists, or if, as in the case of the *Marielitos, * it refuses to take them back, or if the person is effectively stateless…that’s a messy one, and has been the subject of a great deal of Federal litigation. I believe the current state of affairs is that the U.S. government can hold them for the length of their criminal sentence plus six months while it attempts to find a place to deport them. After six months, if the person cannot be deported, he/she has to be released (I believe on bond, or perhaps other conditions of release, such as checking in with a parole officer). There have been a couple of high-profile cases like this involving Nazi war criminals; IIRC one of them was born in Lithuania, and as he was ordered deported to the Soviet Union before its dissolution, his argument on appeal was that since the U.S. had never recognized the Soviet occupation of Lithuania during WWII, they couldn’t deport him to the Soviet Union, and that they had to deport him to Lithuania, which at that time apparently consisted of the U.N. Mission in NYC of the interwar Lithuanian government.
I saw a case like this years ago, in a prison in Wisconsin…the man in question was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany to parents who were Soviet citizens, from a town in one of those areas which has had a lot of border switches in the 20th Century (Russia/Ukraine/Lithuania/Belarus/Poland). Germany back then didn’t grant German citizenship to children born to non-German parents on German soil, so he wasn’t a German citizen. The U.S. Government couldn’t produce evidence of his parents’ birthplace(s) in order for him to receive derivative Russian/Polish/Lithuanian/Ukrainian citizenship, and since the guy knew he couldn’t be deported if nobody could figure out of which country he was a citizen, he sure as hell wasn’t talking. The whole deportation case was somewhat of a farce anyway, as IIRC he was serving life without parole.
Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal and former Immigration Court interpreter
Three great-grandparents born in then-Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine, two born in Austria-Hungary, now Poland, one born in the Russian Empire, now Belarus, and one born in the Russian Empire, now Latvia
And as Eva Luna is a professional dealing in immigration law, I think that is probably the last word on the subject – noting in passing that Canada is a separate country and their rules if any on how to do it would be the ultimate authority. Given the additional post from the OP, though, it’s clear that they don’t have any definite policy.
OT but related, Eva, I loved your Lithuania anecdote. I used to have a favorite trivia question, before 1989-91, “What country recognized by the U.S. has a substantial share of its GNP produced, and 1% of its population supported, by the writing and sale of science fiction?” The answer was Lithuania, Algis Budrys being the son of two of the roughly 100 Lithuanian nationals in the U.S. who were collectively the surviving non-occupied population of Lithuania.
Then there’s the alternative problem - not that the country in which you were born no longer exists, but that you were born in a place where there was no *existing * country.
I remember in the mid 1980s being with my feisty great-aunt (then aged 95) as she argued heatedly with a clerk in the local post office about what she should put as her ‘country of birth’ on some official form. She had been born in 1890 in New South Wales, at that time a British colony, and was insistent that she could not put ‘Australia’ as her country of birth since it had not been established as a country until 1901. She thought a more appropriate response was ‘British Empire’. The poor clerk was absolutely bamboozled and didn’t know what had hit him. It created a very amusing spectacle for those of us watching
He’s a nut who now prefers to live in the airport rather than to leave.
Paul Berczeller, who filmed a documentary on Merhan Nasseri’s life in de Gaulle Airport, has just written an update article titled “A Man in Limbo”, which was published on 13 September 2004 in http://theage.com.au/ (registration required).
I used to work with one of those ~100. Somehow I never knew that Budrys was Lithuanian. :o If I had, I’d have asked said coworker about him.
Originally I planned to give his name, but then I had a good second thought, and Googled him first. I was surprised by how many links there were. So I won’t invade his retirement privacy by naming him. 
But now I understand why he and his wife (another member of that tiny group) regularly spent time in NYC. And how it could happen that a totally unrelated elderly (childless) couple he had spent time with when young left him their estate. I guess if they’d left it to family in the Old Country, the USSR would have gotten grabby claws into it? And of course they could trust him to manage to convey whatever they wanted to relatives Back Home, if, as and when he was able to do so.
And now I understand better how one of his children got a hogh-powered job with the (modern) Lithuanian government’s UN delegation.
Amazing the stuff you can learn on SDMB!
If the Balki were in Australia, the High Court of Australia last week ruled that he could be kept in detention indefinitely: