US Passport. Pixabay: Public Domain
This month, the
global community recognizes the anniversary of the United campaign to
eradicate statelessness.
This provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on
recent developments regarding the right to citizenship in the US.
The US
Constitution guarantees citizenship to everyone born in the United States, with
a few limited exceptions.
Nevertheless, as a presidential candidate, Donald
Trump suggested that the country should revise this rule of birthright
nationality, and once in office, he surrounded himself with trusted advisors,
like Michael Anton, who have
publicly advocated for such a revision.
Suggesting
changes to the US Constitution is not inherently dangerous. However,
recent news reports suggest
that the US State Department may be operationalizing this restrictive view of
US citizenship by denying passports to Americans born near the US-Mexico
border.
In the past, midwives have admitted to making false reports of births
in the United States to help people born in Mexico to secure US citizenship,
and this is certainly cause for concern.
The reported increase in passport
denials seems to reach beyond these midwife cases, however, and there is no
question that US citizens of Mexican ancestry suffer disproportionately.
This troubling trend of denying people birthright nationality has been accompanied by an intensified effort top strip people of US citizenship.
This troubling
trend of denying people birthright nationality has been accompanied by an
intensified effort top strip people of US citizenship.
US Citizenship and
Immigration Services (CIS) has stated its intention to refer approximately
1.600 cases to the Justice Department for denaturalization, a judicial process
to strip citizenship acquired though naturalization.
These prosecutions arise
from an investigation known as “Operation Janus,” which identified some 315.000
naturalization cases where fingerprint data was missing and prompted concerns
that some people might have acquired citizenship though fraud.
Earlier this
year, the Justice Department denaturalized a man identified
though Operation Janus who had used two different names to evade immigration
enforcement and secure immigration status.
Nevertheless, the announcement of a
high number of new prosecutions raises concerns about the scope of this
initiative and begs questions about which citizens the Justice Department will
target next.
Notably,
statelessness has been absent thus far from the conversation about the
potential implications of these efforts by the federal government to restrict
access to citizenship on the border and to strip citizenship from others.
A
stateless person has no nationality anywhere in the world, and since at least World
War II, the global community has recognized the inhumanity of this condition.
Thousands of stateless migrants currently reside in the United States,
including former citizens of the Soviet Union as well as expelled Ethiopians of
Eritrean ethnicity.
Human rights observers have expressed concerns that many have been left stateless as a result, without nationality anywhere in the world, prompting international outcry.
In the event that these stateless people do not qualify to
remain lawfully in the United States, they still cannot be removed, because no
country in the world will provide them with travel documents.
Congress has thus
far stalled efforts to provide such persons with immigration status and
protection, but to date, the US statelessness problem has been limited to such
persons who were made stateless by the actions of other countries. Current
efforts to restrict US citizenship risk creating new stateless persons within
US borders.
For a regional
example of how weakened citizenship rights can cascade into statelessness, one
may refer to the events that have unfolded in the Dominican Republic in recent
years.
There, a widely-reported decision
by the Dominican Constitutional Court in 2013 reinterpreted a previously
inclusive citizenship rule to exclude from Dominican nationality children born
in the country to unauthorized migrants.
This change in the law prompted public
authorities in that country to deny passports, refuse to issue national
identity documents, and reject requests for birth certificates of hundreds of
thousands of Dominicans with Haitian parents.
Human rights observers have
expressed concerns that many have been left stateless as a result, without
nationality anywhere in the world, prompting international outcry.
While Americans
may scoff at any suggestion that the United States could go the way of its
Dominican neighbours, a troubling parallel does exist.
Only a few years ago, it
was widely accepted that anyone born in the Dominican Republic was Dominican.
Then, prominent observers began to argue for a restrictive interpretation of
the Dominican Constitution, and this view was advanced though litigation.
Finally, this grew into a law reform effort and led to hundreds of thousands of
denials and deprivations of nationality and widespread statelessness.
The United
States should be aware of how slippery a slope restrictive citizenship measures
can be, and create necessary safeguards to prevent statelessness.