I'm not someone who claims to care a lot. As a university student, a friend of mine once said that if I wrote a book it would be called 'I don't give a rat's ass'. I'm the guy who, as soon as I pick up a telemarketing call, say 'I'm not interested in what you're trying to sell me' then hangs up if they attempt to continue with their spiel.
The one thing I do care about, to the extreme, is my family. So, the passport situation we went through with our kid over the past several months really bothered me.
I should say, if you 'don't give a rat's ass' about citizenship adoption law, stop wasting your time, and stop reading this - you're not interested in what I'm trying to sell, so hang up now.
What I've taken away from the passport situation is just how interesting and weird citizenship is.
Almost exactly 5 years ago, I wrote a blog about being a global citizen and how through my experience in life and family, I had a more global experience than most. How, if my parents had wanted to, I probably could have had tri-citizenship. This was just about the opposite experience we thought our kid would have, when people - including an immigration lawyer - said there was a good chance our kid was stateless.
Stateless. Nationless. A person who is not a citizen - in the legal sense - of any country. Yes, the child of the 'global citizen' might be a citizen of nowhere. I don't know what the opposite of a global citizen would be, but our kid would be that. A stateless person can't get a passport, can't leave the country they're in, and depending on where they live, receives no benefits of being a citizen of a country, because they have no country they can call their own. Stateless.
Citizenship is weird. What I'm about to write is what I think I know about citizenship, but I'm no lawyer, so I could be wrong.
The United States of America:
The U.S. has birth right citizenship. This means, if you're born in the U.S., you have the right to be a U.S. citizen. It doesn't matter where your parents are from, you can be a U.S. citizen. To be honest (and this is not the most liberal thing to say) I don't agree with birth right citizenship. I just think there should be more than being born in a country to be a citizen of that country - live there for a year, or something. I'm imagining a case where a child with parents from Jeffersonia is born in the US then moves back to Jeffersonia at one week old and never sets foot in the US again - I don't think that person should be a US citizen, but I digress.
A tie-on - sort of - to U.S. birth right citizenship is this: if, when you are born, at least one of your parents is from the U.S., you can claim U.S. citizenship anywhere in the world you're born. I actually fall into this category. I was born in Nigeria, but my father is from the U.S - I have been a U.S. citizen since birth. I'm not completely on board with this either. If I were to never live in the U.S., and lived out my life in Nigeria, should I really be a U.S. citizen forever? I don't think so. If I had only lived in Nigeria and never set foot in the U.S., and if I had a child, also born in Nigeria, that child could, technically, claim U.S. citizenship. That doesn’t seem right to me. At some point, I think the link needs to be broken. The question is where/when.
It gets complicated with adoption.
When a kid is born in the U.S. and then adopted, they are American, by the birth right rule. When a kid born outside the U.S. and is adopted by Americans, the kid can get U.S. citizenship only after the kid comes into the U.S. and goes through some process I still am not sure about. We happen to fall into this situation. We are Americans, who adopted a kid born outside the U.S. This is where the problems start to arise. To get our kid U.S. citizenship, we have to get our kid into the U.S. To get our kid into the U.S. our kid needs a passport of some kind.
No problem, we thought, while going through the adoption process. Our kid will, of course, be a British citizen and will be able to get a British passport….
The United Kingdom:
The U.K. does not have birth right citizenship; at least not anymore. Prior to 1983 it did, but since then, to get British citizenship, one has to show that at least one of their parents is/was also British. This is where our problems started.
We aren't British, so when I started the online passport application form for our kid, it took me on this wild goose chase, asking where Lauren's and my parents were born, when and where our parents were married, and I thought 'Why is all this needed?'. That's when I learned about the 1983 birth right rule. The online form doesn't know our kid was adopted, so by the letter of the law (which the online system follows, because it has no heart), our kid can't be British. We aren't British, our kid was born after 1983; therefore our kid can't be British.
You would think an immigration lawyer would have a heart - or at least a brain - to realize that we were in an odd circumstance that the law was not designed to handle strictly as written. The lawyer said that once the kid was adopted, everything was transferred to us 'not just the good'. I didn't think much of that comment when she said it, but 'not just the good'?!? Seriously? Who says that? She then said, that our kid could not be British, because our kid's legal parents (us) aren't British. The lawyer said even she thought it was weird, but that was the case. So, according to her, by being adopted, our kid LOST her British citizenship, which, any rational person would think, sounds insane!
Before I called the lawyer, I had spoken to someone who works at the passport office who I was passed on from 3 different people. He had given me basically the same information, saying we had to apply for her to be a British citizen before we could get her a passport. He then wanted to talk about how crazy the Super Bowl was, which had happened the night before. Thanks passport worker guy – good to see you care about people’s actual problems!
Needless to say, at this point, we didn't know what to do. We had a stateless child. Every non-lawyer/non-passport worker we told this to thought it was crazy that she would stateless - everyone thought she should be British.
After a several weeks of sitting on this, I said we should just apply. We should show she was British at birth. Our social worker got in touch with a legal expert at the British Association for Adoption and Fostering - this person agreed with every non-lawyer/non-passport person we had talked to about this. We decided to apply. Now, we just needed to show our kid was born British.
This was tougher than I thought it would be.
If we could show our kid's birth mother was British, we would be done. The obvious way to do this would be to produce the birth mother's passport, but that's not the sort of thing we had access to. Being that there was a delay in the adoption because the birth mother was contesting it, I don't think trying to contact her to get her passport info, so we could get a passport for the kid whose adoption she was trying to prevent, would be the best thing to do. So, we got her birth certificate.
Our kid's birth mother was born after 1983, so having her birth certificate was not enough to prove that she (the birth mother) was British. We had to show that one of her parents were British, to prove that she is British, which in turn would prove that our kid is British. We were able to track down the birth certificate of our kid's birth mother's father. We applied for a passport for our kid.
About a week later, we got a letter from the passport office. The birth mother's father's birth certificate was not good enough to show that the birth mother was British. Why is still a bit unclear to me, but to show the birth mother is British, we would need to produce either the birth mother's mother's birth certificate or the birth mother's father's birth certificate accompanied with the marriage certificate of the birth mother's parents. Lauren called the passport office and asked why this additional thing was needed for the father of the birth mother but not the mother of the birth mother. They gave some hand wavy answer which clearly showed that they had no idea why - it was just the way it was. Because someone said so, I guess.
We were able to get the marriage certificate of the birth mother's parents, which, with the birth certificate of the birth mother's father, showed the birth mother is British. By having the birth mother's birth certificate, along with her birth child’s original birth certificate, we could show that the child of that birth mother is British. By having our kid's post-adoption birth certificate, along with her pre-adoption certificate, we showed that that child is now our kid, with a different name.
After rereading the last two paragraphs, I'm a bit lost myself.
In proof-ish language:
We need to show our kid is British
- Birth mother’s father’s birth certificate + Birth mother’s parent’s marriage certificate ⇒ Birth mother is British.
- Birth mother’s birth certificate + Kid’s original birth certificate ⇒ Kid is British
- Kid’s original birth certificate + Kid’s post-adoption birth certificate ⇒ Kid is now our kid, with a different name.
∴ Our kid is British
Three days later, our kid’s passport arrived. So, the immigration lawyer was wrong. The Super Bowl guy who worked for the passport office was wrong. Our kid was never stateless. Our kid was British, and now had the passport to prove it.
 |
| The documentation to show that our British kid, is indeed British (and her passport) |
The hour from 1:30-2:30 on 5 June 2015 is one of the happiest hours of my life. I got home with our kid and saw the envelope, not knowing what it was, then saw it was her passport. I said 'Hey, it's your passport!!!!' and gave it to her. Thinking it looked like a book, her response was 'Read it, daddy!'
I know I’ll never write a book called 'I don't give a rat's ass', but I'll gladly read an empty passport that belongs to my kid.
So in the end, our kid, who we thought was stateless, may be, one day, a dual citizen, and like her parents, a global one.
