Born in the USA

I admit it, I’m obsessed with Donald Trump, a man I detest so much that I’ve been known to switch channels the instant he appears on TV. Sadly this summer, avoiding him hasn’t been that easy. This does not bode well for the rest of the 2016 presidential campaign.

To say that Trump is breaking new ground in American politics would be stating the obvious – which, unfortunately, has never deterred me before. He seems to possess some kind of weird animal magnetism borne from his giving voice, a brash and loud voice, to what is apparently a gigantic level of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US. Folks say he’s “tapping into” the anger some Americans, and I'm mostly thinking Tea Party types here, have over the approximately 11 million illegal aliens (or undocumented immigrants, pick your terminology) living in the US. I think it’s more like he’s exploiting that anger.

Anyway, with a substantial lead in the polls, this seems to be working for Trump. In the process, he is also forcing the other Republican candidates to ante up and match his more extreme opinions on immigration. Again, this does not bode well.

One of the Trump talking points now on everyone’s lips is “birthright citizenship”. This is a natural fixation for Trump, since it combines his interest in scapegoating illegal immigrants with his hobby of ferreting out who is and isn’t a citizen, at least when it comes to Barack Obama. Trump is, after all, a bona fide Birther, somehow convinced that Obama is not really an American because (in the alternate world of Birtherism) he was "born in Kenya". It would be sad if it weren't so idiotic. 

Birthright citizenship, currently the target of Trump's voluminous ire, is the legal right, enshrined in the Constitution no less, that grants US citizenship to anyone born on US soil. This means anyone, even if their parents are not US citizens and had barely set foot in America before going into labor.

Such jus soli ("right of the soil") basis for citizenship is typical in countries of the New World, no doubt due to the fact that they are all nations made up entirely of migrants, except for that minuscule slice of Americans, both North and South, able to trace their birthright back to the closing of the Bering Land Bridge some 11,000 years ago.

Jus soli is how I got my US citizenship. Or, at least, that’s my layman's legal interpretation of it.

The entire basis of me being an American is my birth certificate, a piece of paper that says I was born in a little town in Georgia. This was my only evidence of citizenship until 26 years later when I got my US passport – which was issued solely based on, wait for it, my birth certificate.

It was immaterial whether my parents were Americans. I assume no one at the hospital, or later at the county courthouse, demanded to see my parents’ proof of citizenship. I doubt my parents had any such proof anyway, other than, again, their own birth certificates. In any case, it didn’t matter what nationality my parents were. The fact that I was born within the borders of the US was enough.

It’s different back here in the Old World – the source, over the last five centuries, of the migrants “swarming” (to use David Cameron's term) to the Americas in hope of a better life. Citizenship in Europe has traditionally been based mostly on the jus sanguinis principle, that is, the “right of blood”. You were a German or a Finn at birth because your parents were Germans or Finns, irrespective of your birthplace. My children are Finns, not because they were born in Helsinki, but because their mother is Finnish. It’s all about the blood ties.

Sometimes, those ties can be surprisingly wide ranging. Finland recognizes a “right of return” for ethnic Finns, which means Finnish-speakers in Russia who for generations have never lived anywhere else can be fast-tracked for citizenship here simply thanks to their bloodline, while a child born in Helsinki to two Russian citizens will be a foreigner.

Of course, countries are free to define citizenship any way they want. In addition to birthright citizenship, the US also recognizes a form of jus sanguinis citizenship by allowing Americans to claim US citizenship for their children born abroad. That’s how my kids became American.

A few European countries even practice a form of birthright citizenship. France, for example, grants automatic citizenship to second-generation immigrants. Germany has since 2000 granted Staatsbürgerschaft to the children of foreign residents who meet certain conditions (one of which, I presume, would be the ability to actually spell "Staatsbürgerschaft").

And, some countries do make the kind of radical changes to citizenship criteria that Donald Trump is now envisioning.

The Dominican Republic ended birthright citizenship in 2004, which, as I say, it is free to do. However, the Caribbean country went a major step further by recently making the change retroactive. Suddenly, upwards of 200,000 Dominican citizens of Haitian descent became stateless, instantly being turned into undocumented foreigners in the only country they’ve ever known.  

I doubt (or at least fervently hope) that even if Donald Trump gets his wish and the US revokes birthright citizenship, it doesn’t go as far as the Dominican Republic. Interestingly though, such a retroactive move could strip one prominent Republican presidential hopeful of his citizenship. Marco Rubio was born on American soil, but to Cuban immigrants. While it has to be said that Rubio's parents were in the US legally, I still have to wonder whether he falls into the category of "anchor baby" that conservatives rail against so much.

I’m not sure what affect Trump’s proposal would have on another GOP presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, who came by his US citizenship in the same way as my children did.

Cruz was born in Canada, and he’s a US citizen solely thanks to his American mother. His father, a Cuban, wasn’t a citizen at the time, but that doesn’t matter, since you need only one American parent to become an American yourself. Ironically, Cruz also had Canadian citizenship until recently, since birthright citizenship is also a thing north of the border. Apparently, Cruz wasn’t even aware of his dual citizenship status until someone pointed it out a couple years ago after he became a rising star of the Tea Party. I have no idea whether Cruz could also claim Cuban citizenship through his father, but obviously that's not something he's eager to do.

And even more ironic, the circumstances of Cruz’s birth (born in a foreign land to a foreign father and an American mother) is exactly the same as Barack Obama’s back story would have been if he had, in fact, been born in Kenya, and not Hawaii. It’s that mythical Kenyan birth that many “Birthers” believe disqualifies Obama to be president. Tellingly, none of them is making the same claim about Cruz, not even the most famous Birther of them all, Donald J. Trump.

Trump is, after all, pretty heavily invested in the Birther Myth. In 2011, the last time he threatened to run for president, Trump dispatched, to great fanfare, a crack team of private investigators to Hawaii to dig up evidence that Obama was NOT born there.

Those super sleuths must still be there four years on, still searching for clues, since Trump has never revealed the outcome of that investigation, though he did claim at some point that his investigators “couldn’t believe” what they had uncovered so far.

In fact, “unbelievable” is just the word that comes to mind when I think of anything to do with Donald Trump, and his take on American citizenship. Just unbelievable.

Citizenship

Last week we applied for a new passport for my daughter, which required a visit to the US Consulate here in Helsinki. Though her current passport expired last summer, we decided to hold off on applying for a new one until she turned 16, a few months ago.

There were some concrete benefits to waiting. As a 16-year-old, she now gets a passport valid for 10 years, like the rest of us grownups, rather than the five-year passports issued to kids.

Less crucial, but still an advantage, is the fact that since my daughter is now “of age”, we parents are not needed for application purposes. Prior to this, both my wife (who is not a US citizen) and I needed to make an appearance at the US Consulate in five years intervals to renew each of our children’s passports.

The sad rationale (as I believe) for the policy of both parents showing up is to ensure one who is a US citizen and facing the breakup of his or her marriage can’t impulsively arrange travel documents for the kids and sneak them out of the country without the other parent’s knowledge. This is an extremely heartbreaking risk of transnational marriages, and it does happen.

Some ten years ago, there were a couple of widely publicized cases of such parental child abductions in the opposite direction, with Finnish mothers refusing to return their American-Finnish children to the US. Fighting over who gets to keep the kids in a divorce is bad enough, but it can be made even uglier because of dual citizenship, which is otherwise usually a win-win arrangement for those who have it. 

All my children are dual US and Finnish citizens. Though they were born here in Helsinki, they were also born American thanks to US law, which grants citizenship to the children of native-born Americans who live abroad. (Donald Trump, take note: Barack Obama would be a US citizen, even if he had been born – against all evidence – in Kenya, and not Hawaii.)

To certify the citizenship of their children, expat Americans need to obtain a “Consular Report of Birth” from the US State Department. Soon after each of our children were born, we schlepped down to the US Embassy, taking with us various documentation (Finnish birth certificate, marriage license, etc.), and of course the actual baby in question, in order to apply for the report of birth and a passport.

When I first came to Finland, a visit to the US Consulate was a simple affair. The American diplomatic mission to Finland occupies a small campus of mostly Georgian-style buildings on the edge of Kaivopuisto, a scenic park overlooking the sea and islands off Helsinki’s southern shore. I distinctly remember on my first visits there driving into the complex and parking right outside the front door of the gray, gabled Consulate building.

Those were more innocent times. Things started to change after the 1983 suicide bombing that killed 241 US servicemen in Lebanon. Security at the Helsinki embassy, as I’m sure with all US missions, became tighter over the years following that, and after 9/11 became extremely rigorous. Sadly, a visit to the Consulate nowadays is a grim reminder of the potential threats oversea Americans face, though such worries are not something that ordinarily intrudes on our lives.

Photo credit: Noble

Today, while the Embassy complex in Kaivopuisto is undergoing extensive renovation, the Consulate is operating out of a temporarily location in downtown, which means security is even tighter than normal, if that’s possible.

Still, it’s a relatively busy place. Once my daughter and I found it and got through the security check, we shared the waiting room with three people seeking US visas:  a Helsinki-based African scholar and two 16-year-old Finnish girls off to spend a year as high school exchange students in Idaho and Massachusetts.

After a relatively short wait (I can remember some interminable waits on previous visits), the whole thing went smoothly and we were done. The Consulate staff was, as you would expect, business-like, but also really pretty friendly. Interacting with the other Americans there was a bit like briefly being back home in the States – which, in a sense, it was.

Still, I’m not unhappy about not having to return there any time soon. My daughter will get her new passport by mail, hopefully before our upcoming trip to North America in a few weeks. Otherwise, she would have to travel on her Finnish passport and apply for a “visa waiver”.

Most Finns don’t need a visa to visit the US, because in effect they are granted a waiver. Before 1991, this was automatically granted upon arrival, on the basis of a form visitors could fill out on the plane. Simple. And free. Nowadays, they must obtain the waiver online before departing, at a cost of $14. That’s simpler than visiting the Consulate for an actual visa, and cheaper, but still a bit of a hassle for Finns traveling to the US.

It’s a small hassle my children can avoid, not to mention the longer lines and probing questions at immigration that non-citizens have to endure. That's one of the perks they, as dual citizens, enjoy along with all the other rights of Americans, though they’ve spent their entire lives in Finland. 

When my boys were young, however, I worried they might lose those rights when they turned 18. Finnish men of that age must register for military or civilian service, and according to the law at the time dual citizens joining the Finnish army had to give up their other citizenship. Thankfully, the law was changed before my sons had to choose between being Finnish or American. 

I would never give up my US citizenship myself, and have never much felt the need to take on Finnish citizenship. I have permanent residency here. I can come and go and work as I please. The only complication is that whenever I renew my passport, I need to have a new stamp added.

Lately I have been thinking that after being a resident for 25 or so odd years, maybe it’s time to apply for become a kansalainen as well. And maybe, just maybe, after a few months of cramming I could even pass the very daunting language exam required to apply. If not, it’s no big deal, since I’m perfectly happy with the citizenship I have.