This is why I think the US needs to have a rolling immigration registry where you get automatic permanent resident status once you've lived XX+ years in the country (voters can decide the conditions, if it should only apply to people here legally or not)
There are many cases where people come over on non-immigrant visas and their kids have to leave the country when they turn 21, even if they've spent all their lives here legally, because US immigration law doesn't provide any time-based path to permanent residency.
I'm generally supportive of anything that helps eliminate second class people in the US. We shouldn't have a permanently exploitable group of people. "All men are created equal" should be what we live up to, nothing less is acceptable.
Just being here long enough should be enough proof to get you into the citizenship pipeline.
Given that he previously renewed his passport without issue, one wonders what procedures have changed in the State Department. Have they recently started doing deeper background checks? Could this be related to the alluded recent rise in "many passport-renewal nightmare stories, with processing delays forcing people to beg, lose sleep and miss once-in-a-lifetime trips"?
This past June when I went to renew my Virginia driver's license, which I initially obtained in 1983 after moving from California with my California license, I was told I needed to bring my birth certificate. But I previously renewed it in 1988/93/98/03/08/13/18 — 7 times! — without any paperwork being required.
Pretty fucking crazy that the state department feels it has the authority to unilaterally revoke his citizenship despite him having been granted it at birth and been treated as a citizen his entire life. You don't get to say "oops didn't mean to" 60 years after your fuck up. Not to mention how idiotic it is to do that to someone like the subject of the article, the type of people every country wants as citizens.
Not only that, the State Department revoked his only citizenship and made him stateless. This is a huge deal and it's crazy this is possible (legally and bureaucratically) in the United States.
The article makes it sound like an anonymous member of the bureaucracy checked a box in a form and now this man is a ghost. No legal proceedings, no transparency, no accountability.
While US has ratified the Universal Declaration of Human rights[1], I am not sure how binding it is. There are also two Conventions about statelessness that US has not signed, and maybe that’s why similar revocations of citizenship has happened in the past[2] Even though link discusses a case where a terrorist lost the citizenship, not a law-abiding doctor, the grounds for revocation were the same - diplomatic immunity at the time).
Under Iranian law, any child of an Iranian man is an Iranian citizen unless they've explicitly renounced their citizenship after the age of 25 and the Iranian government has accepted their renunciation, and the US State Department would lean on that to insist he is technically not stateless.
To be clear, I think this is a cruel act, and shouldn't be legal, and he may well be right that he practically can't risk to try to claim his Iranian citizenship even if he wanted to, but purely technically he's probably not legally stateless.
I mean it’s in the Constitution. This guy isn’t stateless, and his citizenship wasn’t revoked.
As far as the article goes, I suspect there’s more to the story.
You don’t study at Fort Leavenworth and then casually pop over to your embassy for a few months as an accredited diplomat. His brother was a professor at Georgetown, and both are politically active.
1961 was during the rule of the Shah, which was a US ally, so I don't see why it'd be unsurprising if an Iranian military officer was able to study in the US and was subsequently able to obtain a temporary position at the embassy.
The US does not require you to be an accredited diplomat to get immunity - members of technical and administrative staff can also get it.
As for being stateless, he may well technically not be, but if he can not safely move to Iran that is a cruel technicality to lean on when someone has lived the vast majority of their life somewhere else.
>The US does not require you to be an accredited diplomat to get immunity - members of technical and administrative staff can also get it.
Having had diplomatic "immunity" as a technical staff member, there are nuances.
Technical staff do not enjoy "full" immunity, but only immunity for acts committed as part of their official duties - this is called "functional immunity". That status does not protect "functionaries" against civil liabilities for activities outside specific duties.
In contrast, members of the diplomatic staff who deal directly with host country officials such as ambassadors or registered diplomats (political officer, econ officer etc) enjoy full immunity and that immunity devolves to their dependents.
This gets tricky for several reasons: The current law on the matter is largely dictated by the Vienna Convention on Diplimatic Relations, 1961. He was born in 1961. While the US and Iran both signed the Vienna Convention in 1961, the US ratified in 1972, and Iran in 1965.
Current US law on the matter (22 USC § 254) is pretty much entirely defined in terms of the Vienna convention. As such, current US law on the matter is pretty irrelevant.
I have no idea what the legal situation was when he was born. Likely there was still a distinction, but even today the Vienna Convention, to the extent one can use it to guess whether it's believable that he might be affected (and it's perfectly possible the US State Department official who caused this is just wrong), in article 37 grants "members of the administrative and technical staff of the mission, together with members of their families forming part of their respective households" who "are not nationals of or permanently resident in the receiving State" limited immunity.
So you're right they would not have full immunity under the terms of the Vienna Convention, but some immunity does extend to family, and the question then becomes how much immunity did they have under pre-Vienna Convention US law, and how much immunity is sufficient to justify legally withholding citizenship.
My best guess is that this guy will get his citizenship back, and that it will turn out some overzealous bureaucrat saw that the dad was embassy staff, saw the word immunity, saw the word immunity on some checklist and didn't check the details - whether or not there'd be some technical possible justification for withholding it or not. Hopefully for this guy someone decides it's a stupid waste of both money and political capital to pursue this before he ends up spending even more on lawyers...
Iranian law makes every child of an Iranian man an Iranian citizen irrespective of where he was born, so technically he probably is an Iranian citizen by birth. This isn't uncommon - e.g. my son is a Norwegian citizen as well as British because he was born in the UK but I'm Norwegian.
That said, I think it'd be immensely cruel not to recognize him as a US citizen, and he may well be right it might be unsafe for him to claim Iranian citizenship.
I was pleasantly surprised with the passport renewal process. They said it could take months to get a new passport. Got it within two weeks without doing the rush delivery.
There are many cases where people come over on non-immigrant visas and their kids have to leave the country when they turn 21, even if they've spent all their lives here legally, because US immigration law doesn't provide any time-based path to permanent residency.