The Northern Virginia doctor knows at least that much about his situation. He knows he is no longer considered a citizen of the United States — the place where he was born, went to school and has practiced medicine for more than 30 years — and that he also belongs to no other place.
A letter from a State Department official informed him that he should not have been granted citizenship at the time of his birth because his father was a diplomat with the Embassy of Iran. The letter directed Sobhani to a website where he could apply for lawful permanent residence.
How do you grant someone citizenship by mistake? And how can you justify taking it away after over 30 years? This is some real bullshit.
The 14th amendment says:
Sobhani’s father had diplomatic immunity when Sobhani was born, meaning that he and his family were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,so Sobhani did not become a citizen by being born there. Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent of adverse possession for citizenship, so he must be naturalized to be a citizen. There probably should be, but these cases are rare.
Thank you for the actual explanation. That actually makes sense in a very technically correct way. Hopefully they can at least fast track his naturalization.
Your ignorance is showing
Your right wing is naked
You can’t say shit like that without an explanation.
Looking at their comment history, they were probably just mad I didn’t say anything specifically anti US in that specific comment.
Haha. I guess not. I just thought the US’s anti immigrant policies were common knowledge by now but maybe not (or maybe it just wasn’t clear what I was saying from the context).
There’s absolutely no way in hell anyone gets their naturalization fast tracked (that’s nearly insulting levels of ignorance, imo)
You can have your opinion or state true facts. But it’s condescending to call people ignorant or saying that they’re being at an insulting level of ignorance. If you explain your point instead of calling names, you may entice people to learn and understand, and we all win. Otherwise, well… you can guess.
Fair enough though. Again, I thought it was common knowledge by now - what with all the kids in cages and whatnot.
It’s always surprising how much faith people continue to have in our demonstrably horrible institutions.
Edit: I should also clarify, I’ve never seen ignorance as a bad word. It’s literally the default state for all the information we’ve yet to learn.
And yet you use it as one when saying “that’s insulting levels of ignorance.”
Now that makes me wonder if taking the human out of the process made this happen. The passport process has been going online, I wonder if humans overrode the decision before because it was the right thing to do.
More like nobody noticed because they weren’t required to investigate his citizenship each time he applied. Some other process made that happen.
Not that rare, this is a very similar situation to what the DREAM Act was trying to resolve. As of last year, there were more than 500,000 people who qualified.
Most of the people the DREAM act was intended to help are not legally stateless, though I’ll grant the human impact is similar.
That is different. DACA’a are born outside the US and have been brought in illegally (without proper documentation). If you entered legally you are not eligible for DACA - and have to leave when you are a non-immigrant turning 21 years of age.
I know it’s technically different, but in both cases you have a person who has lived in the US for most of their life, and is for all intents and purposes an American, but who is not, due to a technicality, a citizen. It is extremely similar.
His wife that had the kid, wasn’t a diplomat.
Was she American, though?
Don’t get me wrong. I think this whole thing is fucked up. But I’m curious
If an illegal immigrant has a kid on us soil they are a us citizen. I don’t get why someone on US soil legally having a kid in the US should be different.
I think it has to do with how the laws are written or interpreted. Say, U.S. law doesn’t say anything specifically about birthright citizenship related to undocumented immigrants (nothing like “you illegal? Yo kids illegal, yo”), so those babies are otherwise technically American. Whereas the law probably says (I haven’t checked) “you a diplomat? Yo kids ain’t 'merican.”)
I’m actually very curious about this. Say someone’s a diplomat, but marries a citizen of the country they work as a diplomat in. Does their spouse now receive diplomatic immunity in their own country?
So technically he was voting in US elections while not being US citizen, likely multiple times, so, technically he should go to jail. But it would be insane if it happens, and it is insane what they doing to him now.
No, he was a US citizen at the time. They’ve revoked his citizenship now because they said it shouldn’t have been granted, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t ever a citizen. It means he was before, but is not now.
I wonder how that works for his social security number and all of his social security and general retirement funds he’s been paying into.
The article addresses this same issue
The factual elements of crimes usually have an associated mental state, called mens rea (Latin for ‘guilty mind’) in law. For example, intentionally taking something that isn’t yours is theft, but accidentally taking something that isn’t yours (perhaps because the thing looks just like your thing) is not theft. Unintentional acts can still be crimes; recklessly killing someone is manslaughter in most jurisdictions.
The mens rea given in the Federal voter fraud statute is “knowingly and willfully”, which is obviously not the case here.
He can be deported for voting (pretending to be a US citizen).
No, he wasn’t “pretending” to be a citizen, he was a citizen. They’ve just now decided his citizenship was granted in error, and so he now is no longer a citizen.
The article said there were some passport issues going on in the system. The “government” is a group of people doing their jobs, there are always going to be shitty people and shitty decisions. There might be something we don’t know about, but my guess is a shitty person made a shitty decision.
This is the world Republicans want.
61 years*
To be fair, 61yrs is over 30yrs.
Technically correct is the best kind of correct.
They are taking it away after 60 years. The US has no civil registry. You would obtain a birth certificate from the hospital where you were born and with that you could file for a passport.
I hope he is a dual citizen, and he’s not left stateless.
The first sentence of the article is:
And even if they only read the article title this should have been clear.
It’s paygated so you can’t exactly blame them…
Yeah silly me using the summary written by op.
I just did the reload and quickly hit the X to stop loading trick to prevent the paygate from loading in, letting me read the whole article.
Or just use reader mode in firefox
Good thing the US doesn’t recognise international law since actively making people stateless is one of the big “do not do” things in that law
for your reading comprehension issues