Source: http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2015/07/10/2nd-circuit-retroactively-extends-jus-sanguinis-citizenship-to-us-emigrant-fathers-out-of-wedlock-kid/comment-page-1/
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 21:15:30+00:00

Document:
Petitioner Luis Ramon Morales‐Santana seeks review of a Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) decision denying his motion to reopen his removal proceedings to evaluate his claim of derivative citizenship. Under the statute in effect when Morales‐Santana was born, Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, §§ 301(a)(7), 309(a), (c) (codified at 8 U.S.C.§§ 1401(a)(7), 1409(a), (c) (1952)), Morales‐Santana’s father satisfied the physical presence requirements for transmitting citizenship applicable to unwed citizen mothers but not the more stringent requirements applicable to unwed citizen fathers. On appeal, Morales‐Santana argues principally that this statutory scheme violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, and that the proper remedy is to extend to unwed fathers the benefits unwed mothers receive under the statute. We agree and hold that Morales‐Santana derived citizenship at birth through his father.
It seems this ruling (if upheld on appeal) could retroactively extend U.S. citizenship to a large number of people who previously believed — and may even have confirmed with lawyers & consular officers — that they were non-citizens and would remain so for life unless they took the voluntary steps of immigrating to the U.S. and naturalising there. This includes people who do not live in the United States, and who would thus be caught in the net of FATCA and citizenship-based taxation. Who exactly will be affected? Detailed attempt at an answer after the jump.
Morales-Santana was born in the Dominican Republic in 1962 to a Puerto Rican father and local mother. The couple married in 1970, which legitimated their pre-wedlock children. At the time of Morales-Santana’s birth, 8 USC § 1401(a)(7) required the U.S. citizen parent in a mixed-nationality couple to have spent ten years in the United States, including five years after the age of 14, in order to transmit citizenship to children (1401(a)(7) is now 1401(g), but with a shorter period of required residence than at the time of Morales-Santana’s birth). However, Morales-Santana’s father had moved to the Dominican Republic less than three weeks before fulfilling that requirement. Morales-Santana later moved to the U.S. on a green card sponsored by his father, never naturalised as a U.S. citizen, and was convicted of various crimes; his attempt to claim U.S. citizenship was part of a last-ditch effort to avoid deportation to the Dominican Republic.
sever the ten‐year requirement in §§ 1409(a) and 1401(a)(7) and requir[e] every unwed citizen parent to satisfy the less onerous one‐year continuous presence requirement if the other parent lacks citizenship.
What I am struggling to understand here is the effect of the non-severed requirements of 1409(a), i.e. those which are unrelated to the gender-and-marital-status-specific five/ten-year vs. one-year residence requirement distinction which the court struck down.
The most important other 1409(a) requirement here is legitimation. This requirement survived Nguyen v. INS, 533 U.S. 53 (2001), and went unchallenged by Morales-Santana. As I interpret it, under the Second Circuit’s ruling Morales-Santana is deemed a U.S. citizen because he both meets 1409(c) as modified to be gender-neutral and was legitimated in his minority by his parents’ subsequent marriage (since at the time, 1409(a) required nothing beyond such legitimation — and the relevant period of paternal residence — in order for the out-of-wedlock child to derive U.S. citizenship from his father).
So it also appears to me that Morales-Santana has no automatic effect on children of mixed-nationality couples born or legitimated after 1986. Some children of unmarried U.S. citizen fathers who previously would have been disqualified from citizenship due to their father’s short residence in the U.S. may now get U.S. citizenship, but only after having their father sign the affidavit of support.
Well, if they are almost 18, why don’t you just let them decide for themselves? Explain the pros and cons, they should be old enough to understand. If you think they lack the maturity to make the decision, then they’ll probably be better off without the complexity of filing American tax reports for the rest of their lives. Basically, don’t do it unless they understand the consequences and want you to.
This is much better advice than you get from most Internet Q&A sites, even sites whose participants are licensed professionals.
One other odd note: sometimes the one-year “continuous” residence requirement imposed on unmarried parents by 1409(c) is actually harder to prove than the “periods totaling” five/ten years requirement in 1401. As a story by Amelia Shaw in the Foreign Service Journal earlier this year describes, the State Department interprets 1409(c) to require uninterrupted presence in the United States during a year; any trips across the border reset the clock to zero, and for a parent born in a border state and with relatives in the neighbouring country, such trips might have been quite frequent.
[U]ltimately what tips the balance for us is the binding precedent that cautions us to extend rather than contract benefits in the face of ambiguous congressional intent. See, e.g., Westcott, 443 U.S. at 89 (“In previous cases involving equal protection challenges to underinclusive federal benefits statutes, this Court has suggested that extension, rather than nullification, is the proper course.” (citing Jimenez v. Weinberger, 417 U.S. 628, 637‐38 (1974), and Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 691 n.25 (1973) (plurality opinion))); Heckler, 465 U.S. at 738, 739 n.5; Weinberger, 420 U.S. at 641‐42, 653; Soto‐Lopez v. N.Y.C. Civil Serv. Comm’n, 755 F.2d 266, 280‐81 (2d Cir. 1985). Indeed, we are unaware of a single case in which the Supreme Court has contracted, rather than extended, benefits when curing an equal protection violation through severance.
For it is safe to assert that nowhere in the world today is the right of citizenship of greater worth to an individual than it is in this country. It would be difficult to exaggerate its value and importance. By many it is regarded as the highest hope of civilized men.
In the specific circumstances of Morales-Santana, this view is correct. But even other Homelanders with criminal convictions have sometimes found that they’d rather be non-Americans — for example Alan Horowitz of New York, who apparently hoped that without U.S. citizenship he might be able to achieve early release from custody in exchange for deportation to his country of other citizenship.
In other words, you face all the “duties of citizenship” with nearly none of the benefits (please don’t tell me any tall tales about how much the Homelanders are paying for all those black helicopters come to save us — just ask the folks in Yemen). Someone who is already a citizen of another country and has a perfectly happy life there will naturally have misgivings about receiving U.S. citizenship and all its burdens, especially when the primary associated right — the right to work in the United States — is one they have no intention of ever exercising.
This line of argument misconceives the nature of both the governmental interest at issue and the manner in which we examine statutes alleged to violate equal protection. As to the former, Congress would of course be entitled to advance the interest of ensuring an actual, meaningful relationship in every case before citizenship is conferred. Or Congress could excuse compliance with the formal requirements when an actual father-child relationship is proved. It did neither here, perhaps because of the subjectivity, intrusiveness, and difficulties of proof that might attend an inquiry into any particular bond or tie. Instead, Congress enacted an easily administered scheme to promote the different but still substantial interest of ensuring at least an opportunity for a parent-child relationship to develop. Petitioners’ argument confuses the means and ends of the equal protection inquiry; § 1409(a)(4) should not be invalidated because Congress elected to advance an interest that is less demanding to satisfy than some other alternative.
533 U.S. at 69, 121 S.Ct. 2053. The residence differential is directly related to statelessness; the one-year period applicable to unwed citizen mothers seeks to insure that the child will have a nationality at birth. Likewise, it furthers the objective of developing a tie between the child, his or her father, and this country. Accordingly, we conclude that even if intermediate scrutiny applies, §§ 1401(a)(7) and 1409 survive.
Update: Professor Ruthann Robson of the City University of New York School of Law, writing over at Constitutional Law Prof Blog, mentions a possibility I hadn’t considered — that the Obama administration won’t appeal — though she doesn’t state how likely she considers that.
If Morales-Santana really results in the State Department approving jus sanguinis citizenship for any unmarried emigrant’s previously-unqualified child who makes himself known to the government, it’s quite likely that many will choose not to make themselves known.
There is a significant number of instances of doubtful nationality where, because the requisite physical presence of a U.S. national parent has not been documented nor a foreign-born infant’s nationality claimed, an individual has not been regarded as a U.S. national for any purpose, including taxes … As far as can be determined and notwithstanding the text of the Revenue Rulings cited above, the United States seems not, after the Supreme Court decisions in Afroyim v. Rusk and Vance v. Terrazas, to have asserted with any force a claim to the allegiance of persons earlier divested of nationality under laws later abrogated with retroactive effect. Much less has it sought to claim as citizens their otherwise qualifying offspring born abroad or taken affirmative steps to subject either category of persons to tax on their worldwide income if they remained abroad.
However, under the FATCA régime, some banks have become rather more aggressive in their enquiries not just into their customers’ birthplaces but their parentage as well. Such enquiries are made quite simple if the parents are customers of the same bank as their children.
As ever, court cases by people who live in the U.S. and want U.S. citizenship drive the retroactive extension of citizenship to large populations who live elsewhere and are citizens of other countries. Some of those citizens of other countries may want U.S. citizenship. The remainder are perfectly happy being citizens of their own countries and have no desire for a citizenship they thought they lost or never had in the first place (and which even their own U.S. citizen father may have later given up). However, the voices of the latter group have never been heard in U.S. courts, with only one only one pending exception of which I’m aware.
Homelanders view the ruling in Morales Santana v. Lynch as a victory for human rights at home and “a step closer to equal citizenship”. But a real victory, which respects everyone’s rights and not just those of Homelanders, would be to let those emigrants’ kids who want U.S. citizenship get it upon application and fair warning of the potential impact to their ability to live overseas and enjoy equality with their non-U.S. citizen neighbours. Forcing everyone into citizenship whether they want it or not, making them pay twenty times more than in any civilised country to get out of it, and trapping them in it if they do not have the legal capacity to relinquish or renounce it, is no kind of moral victory at all either for the people thus trapped or the country doing the trapping.
Fascinating that they can retroactively change laws that are no longer on the books.
By the way, as a side note, DS-5507 is not only used for unmarried parents. In Japan, birth certificates only show the mother’s name, not the father’s. (The logic being that the attending physician is in a position to determine whose body the baby came out of, but not to determine who helped put it in there in the first place.) If only the father is a US citizen, then even if the parents are married the quickest and easiest way to get the kid documented as a US citizen is to use Form DS-5507, which the US embassy will recommend.
Millions of people who never dreamed they were citizens of the U.S. will be affected by this court ruling, if it is upheld or if not appealed. i am sure they won’t go after the King of Thailand, or the prime Minister of Israel, or the sons of Ex Egyptian Morsi or Morsi himself who was naturalized, or many other famous or infamous.
In many ways the problem with this decision is almost solely due to CBT. IF the US followed RBT, the effect would be muted. US citizenship for some born/living overseas would be a ‘nice to have’ with no other real practical negative effects.
… your realization with such a ruling that could retroactively extend U.S. citizenship to a large number of people who “previously believed — and may even have confirmed with lawyers & consular officers — that they were non-citizens and would remain so for life unless they took the voluntary steps of immigrating to the U.S. and naturalising there” that your passed-on US citizenship is the same as that of the birth mother.
After all, this decision would go a long way in further broadening the U.S. tax base.
All he’s done is lumped them with a $2350 exit fee.
It’s a crazy situation. The court may well have thought that, in the end, US citizenship is desirable and that deciding as he did it was a net positive. The CBT/tax implications were likely not considered at all. There are two faces to the USA on this…the tax face (i.e. the negative face) and the face of having US citizenship by virtue of a blood/family tie to a US citizen (i.e. the positive face). Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t think the 2nd Circuit realized or otherwise considered the CBT/tax issue at all. Like I said in my earlier post – if the US was RBT, one could easily take the view that having US citizenship by blood/family is a ‘nice to have’. Kind of like friends of mine in the US who obtained their Irish and Italian passports via family – it is a nice to have – no tax implication, no negative at all in holding the extra passport. A bizarre situation CBT creates in so many many ways.
What’s next, all children, regardless of legitimacy need only one US parent resident in the US for a year in order to receive US citizenship through descent? Seems only fair, doesn’t it?
As paranoid as I am, I cannot imagine the US government tracking somebody born abroad, documenting physical presence of parents, and then going to court to slap US citizenship on that person, in order to tax them.
@Fred: yeah, that’s what Andrew Grossman thinks too, and for the most part I agree with him: Washington will not chase these kids. But as we saw in OVDP, Washington will have zero qualms about picking these kids’ pockets if they wrap themselves up in shiny paper with a bow on top and set themselves down on the IRS’ doorstep. And undoubtedly there are compliance condors out there who see the latest ruling as another opportunity to scare people into doing precisely that.
1. Some overseas-born kids of US emigrant dads probably have been asked already by their banks (e.g. if dad & kid have an account at the same bank and the dad is still a USC) if they’re US persons and answered “no, father did not meet physical presence requirements” and maybe even provided documentation to that effect.
2. Somewhere out there, there will be compliance condors trying to tell the banks they need to review those kids’ accounts again to make sure they’re not affected by this new ruling, and telling the kids they need to go get a SSN and file taxes immediately, so that both groups pay the condor a bunch of money to clean up their mess.
@Brockers, this is a perfect situation that can be used as a tool to get CHANGE!!!
@Eric is correct in his comments……..”the law is the law” and some bank or compliance jackal is going to fleece a lot of money.
US Citizenship IS a human rights violation!!!!!
Bestowing and/or enforcing retention of US Citizenship which is not wanted is a Human Rights Violation!!
IF Russia did this there would be an uproar.
This ruling shows what I have been banging cans about for years. There is NOTHING to stop the US Courts or Congress from making USC a perpetual motion machine going down generation after generation with zero residence requirement. I have little doubt that the US Coursts would find some “Constitutional Right” to that process!!
People, USC is like a STD. If you got it stop spreading it and do something about it.
The cancer of US citizenship continues to spread.
Another reason to sign up to be a poll worker. By accepting employment with a foreign (non-U.S.A.) government, you relinquish U.S.A. citizenship…and you don’t say you ever were a U.S.A. citizen. However, you can document this (which acknowledges possible U.S.A. citizenship) by signing and getting notarised a declaration to that effect, and keeping it in your safe deposit box. Now, your son can claim U.S.A. citizenship and dare the feds to prove you intended to relinquish by performing the expatriating act…or access the document as proof that you did intend, depending on whether your son wants U.S.A. citizenship later.
Of course, there is no such thing as citizenship. It is a faction described on documents. There is no such thing as a government, either, but a lot of bureaucrats think or pretend there is, and that makes all the difference.
Just wait until Kenya retroactively extends citizenship to President Obama and then imposes income taxes and FBAR penalties on him.
I agree, Fred, but they will be happy to process the low-hanging fruit that the banks or compliance industry shake out.
The Soviet Union did it and there was no uproar.
An emigrant from the Soviet Union lived in the US and took US citizenship. She got married in the US. She gave birth in the US. Her daughter was a US citizen.
She wanted to visit the Soviet Union with her daughter. She persuaded the Soviet Union that she was no longer a Soviet citizen, so the Soviet Union agreed that she could visit the Soviet Union and return to the US. When she was about to board the plane back to the US, the Soviet Union was allowing her to go. But they grabbed the daughter. The daughter was born to a parent who was originally a Soviet citizen, so the daughter was a Soviet citizen, and the daughter didn’t have an exit visa.
A lawyer told me that story, so there’s a random chance that it might be true.
Meanwhile, if Russia were to impose Russian citizenship on someone who was not born in Russia and never went to Russia, it wouldn’t be as bad as what the US does. Russia doesn’t have CBT.
Even Mikhail Khodorkovsky, after being abused so badly by the Russian government, doesn’t have to renounce his Russian citizenship while he lives in Switzerland.
Only if you prove that you took that action with intention to lose US citizenship.
By the way, a US State Department official suggested that the renunciation fee could be avoided by declaring that I took Canadian citizenship with the intention of relinquishing US citizenship. Unfortunately I did not have the intention of relinquishing US citizenship at the time of taking Canadian citizenship, so I told him I would pay the fee (US$450 then).
At the second meeting a US consular official gave me forms that had not been corrected after the first meeting, so I told her the forms needed corrections. She looked and said “Of course, because of the passport renewals.” I was stunned. It was amazing to see that the US government had an employee who understood what was going on, to some extent. If the US government had more employees like her, maybe I wouldn’t have needed to renounce (at that time, before FATCA).
But the consular official had her turn to be stunned after that. I mentioned to her that on US tax returns I used to describe known problems and sign honest statements under penalty of perjury instead of committing perjury, she interrupted me to say “good”, I continued “I get penalized for it”, and she was speechless. I think that was the moment she understood why I was renouncing.
@USCitizenAbroad: thanks. I got pretty nervous at some points where I saw Lohier writing about “every unwed father” rather than “Morales-Santana’s father”. True he was speaking of “the statutory right to confer citizenship on their children”, however he also emphasizes that the court is not “conferring citizenship” but “confirming pre-existing citizenship” and that severing 1409(c) entirely would be to “strip citizenship”. I guess my main concern is how the banks will react to this new group of “potential citizens”, rather than how the U.S. government itself will react.
@Norman Diamond and george: IF Russia did this there would be an uproar vs The Soviet Union did it and there was no uproar — Congresscritters were condemning Iran last month for “refusing to recognize the U.S. nationality for Jason Rezaian” (U.S.-born kid of Iranian immigrants). Not quite an “uproar” but it’s something.
USCitizenAbroad, I beg to differ in your analysis.
US Citizenship is not something that is passed on. You have it at birth or you are naturalised.
IMO this does create retroactive citizens.
I told her she should prepare herself to have to travel to the US without her daughter, should the US see it differently.
Although a consular officer may not issue a visa to an individual who has been determined to be a U.S. citizen, if a nonimmigrant visa applicant has a possible claim to U.S. citizenship but is unable or unwilling to obtain documents to establish that status, as determined by the post’s citizenship and passport officer, the visa officer may presume that the applicant is an “alien” pursuing a nonimmigrant visa application. If the presumed alien is found eligible to receive the visa for which application was made, the visa may be issued prior to the final determination of citizenship status.
I’d bet that, in the event the daughter does face any problems, it’ll be with the airline. (Recall that it was an airline employee who first told Boris Johnson that he needed to get a US passport, setting off that absurd chain of events which left him with a six-figure US tax bill on a UK house paid for by UK wages.) Which goes back to the same problem we see with the banks & FATCA: individuals of ambiguous status getting screwed by private-sector over-enforcement of the law because the private-sector enforcers are scared of getting fined.

References: § 1401
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