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January 31, 2025

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lj -- great stories and I will try to tell some if I get time. But as to proving I'm a citizen? I have a passport and a birth certificate, is the simple-minded answer, though if they do away with birthright citizenship (I was born in Ohio), and since the passport depends on the birthcertificate, maybe I'm not as sure a bet as it would seem.

On my mother's side, I have published genealogies of two lines of ancestry that go back as far as 1637 in Connecticut. But that Josh Marshall piece you mentioned (which I also read but now can't find) includes the observation that since there never was any clear process for asserting or proving "citizenship" at the beginning, my not-quite-Mayflower ancestry may be useless to me. (Will save the DAR story for later. ;-) )

It would be ironic, in light of history and the current animus toward immigrants, if my Italian immigrant grandfather's citizenship papers (of which I do have a copy) ended up being my path to proving my citizenship.

Also ironically, if my dad had been born before my grandpa became a citizen, IIRC I could apply for Italian citizenship. But my dad was born a couple of years later. C'est la vie. Not that I want to move to Italy, but you never know.

me: I have published genealogies of two lines of ancestry

I don't mean I published them, I mean that the genealogies I have are published, hardbound volumes.

Hey, got those Mayflower johnny-come-lately dudes beat, because OF COURSE there was an ancestor stirring up trouble in Roanoke colony.

...and then there was the side-chain of the genealogy that fought on BOTH sides of the Revolutionary War.

Troublemaker I, but come by it honestly, whatever that means.

It's possible that this is the Josh Marshall piece you were referring to:

Once you open this box, things get very complicated. The entire edifice of U.S. citizenship is based on birthright citizenship, not simply in the sense of rights but also in terms of record keeping, verification and bureaucracy.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/day-two/sharetoken/44c9a525-3edf-414f-ac1e-1027316143df

The part of the post about stateless persons made me think of some stuff that's been happening here with e.g. minor girls who were radicalised online and ran away to become "ISIS brides". The particularly newsworthy one, which some of you who read the Grauniad may know about, is called Shamima Begum. She was a UK citizen, with no other nationality but with rights to Bangladeshi citizenship if she were to apply for it. Her UK citizenship was stripped from her, two governments have fought to deny her right to return here (very controversial), and she is, last I heard, stateless, which again is higly controversial. I don't have time to search more, but this (although a bit simple minded) gives a general idea of her case and the legal aspects.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53428191

In other words, the ordinary way in which everybody understands “subject to the jurisdiction” is you’re subject to the law and legal authority.

Basically, the only people who are in the US, but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof" are those with diplomatic immunity. You can tell because they can, for example, simply ignore parking tickets without consequences.

The other problem with the "you're only a citizen if your parents** were citizens" approach is that logically you'd also have to prove your parents were citizens, too. Without reference to the "born in the USA" principle. Good luck with that. Especially for those, like JanieM, whose family in this country goes back before the Revolution. Because they would never have been naturalized. Oops!

** And it obviously does have to be both parents, else Obama's citizenship would never have been in question.

Yeah. To be without doubt, you’d have to trace your lineage back to someone who became a citizen, presumably because they were born somewhere else. And the line would have to be unbroken - citizens in every generation in between.

If it truly does have to be both parents, every line in your pedigree would have to meet the same criteria. Ironically, the simplest case for a US-born person would be having 2 immigrant parents who became citizens.

If it's only one parent, I can rely on my Puerto Rican great grandfather’s naturalization under the Jones-Shafroth Act (1917).

Gee, isn’t this fun?

It strikes me that the Trump solution to stateless people is Gitmo.

The general thrust of the regime so far seems to be breaking everything in the name of bigotry. "Think this through and consider the consequences" is not part of the agenda.

Four more years of this to go.

At the risk of annoying everyone, two more LLM links(My $10 monthly fee gives me 10.000 points a day. Unused points don't roll over into the next day. If some of the innovations used with DeepSeek prove out, the cost of LLM prompts may drop to less than a Google search.)


Which countries have the least complicated determinations for who is a citizen by right?

"Countries with the least complicated determinations for citizenship by right typically base it on jus soli (right of soil) or jus sanguinis (right of blood) without requiring additional conditions, such as residency, cultural integration, or bureaucratic processes. Here's an overview of countries with straightforward systems:"
Citizenship Laws


Which countries have the most complicated determinations for who is a citizen by right?

"Countries vary widely in how they define citizenship, and some have particularly complex or restrictive criteria for determining who qualifies as a citizen by right. These complexities can arise from historical, social, or political factors, including colonial legacies, ethnic considerations, or attempts to control migration. Below are some examples of countries with complicated systems for determining citizenship by right:"
Citizenship Laws


LLM grammar is getting better. My grammar checker didn't throw any flags on the above text.

Snarki @12:38: Per my 11:39 and hsh's 3:05, none of that does you a whole lot of good if you need paperwork. It may facilitate a different kind of response to the demand for paperwork....

Why not be consequent and return to the ancient custom* of citizen commissions that all newborns have to be presented to and which decide whether it will be accepted as citizen? Since obligatory pregnancy registries are just a matter of time (in conjunction with the state run menstruation databases), no spawn should escape this patriotic profiling. Any kid lacking the indelible seal of approved citizenship is to considered ipso facto not a citizen and can at best be granted metic status (no rights but all duties) or disposed of by deportation or other means (after marking them permanently as rejected).

*e.g. Athens and/or Sparta

I have a fancy certificate that says I am a US citizen, just like Elon and Melania, and unlike Donald and most MAGAts. It would not surprise me if He, Trump claimed the power to revoke my certificate (and not Elon's or Melania's) by "executive order", and I would not be surprised if his lackeys on the SCOTUS ruled He can do that. Note that none of them has such a certificate, being maternity-ward immigrants themselves. You'd think they would therefore stop short of abolishing the 14th Amendment, but of course they know doing so would never inconvenience them personally as long as they keep serving their Orange Jesus. Any inconvenience for run-of-the-mill MAGAts would not trouble their tenured "originalist" asses.

--TP

IIRC, for the discussion around the citizenship issue, the US 'inherited' England's birthright common-law tradition.

That is, until US slavers wanted to break it, because of racism. Same as now.

Of course "citizenship" wasn't really a thing until the late 19th Century, when passports got their start. No surprise that the European countries with Napoleonic Code law went with the "citizenship by blood", since they already had those intrusive registries of people and residences.

I've experienced people in Italy being surprised that the police in the US don't have a "current register of where everyone lives", closest being "the phone book" (back when we had those).

Napoleon casts a loooong shadow.

Napoleon casts a loooong shadow.

About 70 countries have some form of Napoleonic Code. British Common Law is limited to English-speaking and British colonization countries.

It strikes me that the Trump solution to stateless people is Gitmo.

So look for a surprise (as in abrupt, unplanned, disorganized) invasion of Cuba. So we can expand Gitmo to hold all those people Trump wants to deport, don't ya know.

GftNC thanks, that is it, Also I had forgotten about Shamima Begum and the other similar cases, and the parliamentary debate that emerged from it has a lot of threads to pull on.

https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-53428191

Well now, it appears Musk's goons are taking over federal offices and snooping through files, etc., where they have no fucking business.

Has the coup started?

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/01/a-coup-by-any-other-name

the cost of LLM prompts may drop to less than a Google search

Which is... not nothing.

A friend hipped me to the fact that you can avoid the AI response in a Google search by appending -ai to your search text.

AI is freaking expensive in terms of both electric power and water. If you really, really need the AI response, go for it. If a plain old Google search (which consumes less than AI but is still not negligible) maybe try the -ai thing.

And hey, you can always read a book. Libraries are still open, operators are standing by!

Convenience is nice, but it ain't free.

Side note, but Richard Rubenstein was on the religion department faculty at Florida State for many years, along with my father, who was chairman from 1974-80 (I believe those are the correct dates). So I’m sure I met him some times during my childhood, as given my dad’s position there were a number of faculty and faculty-grad student gatherings hosted at our house, which we moved to in 1968, and where my mother still resides.

Didn't William the Conqueror (iirc preceding Napoleon by a few years) do a complete survey and census of the population of his newly acquired realm of Britain (Domesday Book)?

Prussia also had mandatory conscription already in the 18th century and kept an up-to-date registry of its population.

Of course those registries were of subjects not citizens.

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