Election year 2008 is the 18th U.S. presidential election during my lifetime and the 13th (an unlucky number?) election in which I will have cast my vote, the Lord willing.
Having been a candidate elected to public office, I know from experience that just about now in any election year all sorts of weird stories about candidates crawl out of the woodwork (where their authors live).
A few months back there was a minor outcry claiming that Senator John McCain, the assumed Republican presidential candidate, may not be eligible to serve as president because he was not "a natural born citizen" as required by the U.S. Constitution. He was in fact born in the U.S. Panama Canal Zone in 1936, where his father was stationed in the U.S. Navy. This outcry was more or less silenced when the U.S. Senate passed a bi-partisan resolution endorsing their colleagues' "natural born" status.
Unnatural Candidate?
Now comes one Philip J. Berg, a former member of Pennsylvania's Democratic State Committee and former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania. A highly disgruntled Hillary Clinton for president backer, Berg filed a lawsuit last week in U.S District Court, asking the court to declare Obama ineligible for the presidency because he is not a natural born American citizen, and he asked the court to prevent him from running for the position. He also asked for a temporary restraining order on Obama's presidential campaign until Obama's eligibility can be verified.
The Berg lawsuit claims that Obama's eligibility is doubtful on several grounds, including allegations by Obama family members that he was born in Kenya, that his parents' status was such that they were unable automatically to grant him U.S. citizenship, the questionable authenticity of his Hawaii birth certificate, and evidence that he was a citizen of Indonesia as a child and retained that foreign citizenship into adulthood without recording an oath of allegiance to the United States, a requirement under such circumstances to retain one's American citizenship.
As the author of The Passport Book (now in its 6th edition) I know something about the legal tangle that can befall an innocent infant born to one or more American parents in foreign lands.
And sometimes the odd circumstances of a foreign birth can call into question the American citizenship of the hapless child. Whether Barack Obama fits into this category I'll let the federal court decide.
Broader Issue
But there is another issue in this story that impacts all Americans who have an official U.S. passport, as about 30% of us do.
In recent times, in various ways, the U.S. government increasingly is using issuance of a passport as a means of coercion. In the United States a citizen can be denied a passport simply for being in debt to the Internal Revenue Service, because of other problems with federal government agencies or because they are behind in excess of $2,500 in back payments for court ordered child support.
Since 1986, the U.S. State Department has been informing the IRS of all persons who renew their U.S. passports using a foreign address. Since passport renewals require an applicant’s Social Security number, this is also used by the IRS to see if applicants have filed income tax returns. An IRS official speaking in Zurich said a special effort was being made by the agency to track all U.S. citizens who renewed U.S. passports while living in Switzerland, for reasons we can surely guess.
The Terrorism Excuse
More recently, employing the excuse of "fighting terrorism" coupled with the infernal cross-checking power of the computer age, U.S. Homeland Security (DHS) bureaucrats have tracked the movements of every U.S. passport that comes or goes by air or sea. Now they have added land border crossings to the list, allowing a travel profile of each and every American.
As my colleague Mark Nestmann has points out: "Instead of known or suspected terrorists, the government is tracking everyone who crosses a U.S. border. And since there are no limits to how the government uses the data collected, the information is almost certain to be used for politically motivated surveillance."
I agree with Mark that the potential for abuse is obvious. "Imagine that such a system existed now, and the DHS were to release data 'in the public interest' that a leading presidential candidate had made previously undisclosed visits to Iran, North Korea, or Cuba. Not to mention the sort of interrogations that would accompany visits to countries with reputations as tax havens, or that otherwise are 'controversial.'"
The Berg lawsuit alleges Obama used his "Indonesian passport" to visit Pakistan when he was 20 years old. Had the current DHS surveillance system been in place then, that act might have come back to haunt Citizen Obama.
Partial Avoidance
Even if this surveillance system is up and running, if you value your travel privacy, you won't always have to use your U.S. passport when you travel internationally. If you're a U.S. citizen, you must use your U.S. passport when you enter or leave the United States, but you're under no such obligation when you enter or leave other countries.
I have no way of knowing the merits of the Berg lawsuit, but the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled in favor of an American citizen retaining their citizenship in the absence of a clear intent to end that status. The Court has also supported the right of American citizens to hold dual citizenship. Those rulings would seem to protect Senator Obama's American status, although he might qualify as a "dual national".
Dual Nationality
Dual nationality simply means that a person legally is a citizen of two countries at the same time, qualified as such under each nation’s law. This status may result automatically, as when a child born in a foreign country to a U.S. citizen becomes both a U.S. citizen and a citizen of the country where he or she is born. Or it may result from operation of law, as when a U.S. citizen acquires foreign citizenship by marriage to a spouse from another nation, or a foreign person naturalized as a U.S. citizen retains the citizenship of their country of birth. But the point is that acquiring and using a foreign passport does not endanger U.S. citizenship.
Some countries won’t permit their citizens to hold a passport from another nation. This was the case in the U.S. until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of U.S. citizens to hold a second, foreign passport. Before that time, the official rule was that a person acquiring second nationality automatically lost U.S. citizenship.
Since 1967, the government generally presumes a U.S. citizen does not intend to surrender citizenship. Proof of that intention is required before expatriation is officially recognized. The burden of proof is on the government to show intentional abandonment of U.S. citizenship. This presumption is set forth in a U.S. Department of State publication, Advice About Possible Loss of U.S. Citizenship and Dual Nationality, (1990). As a matter of policy, the U.S. Government recognizes dual nationality but does not encourage it because of what it views as problems and conflicts that may result.
Protect Your Privacy
But with Big Brother Homeland Security now mindlessly tracking our every offshore move, I think it wise for Americans to acquire a second passport to guard against the eventual, even inevitable, depredations against our freedom to travel and our freedom of association.
I often hear concerns expressed about currency controls -- but a far greater and very real threat is -- people control.
Now you can begin to see why a second passport may be highly useful. Your qualification for a second nation’s passport, one that comes without restrictive strings attached, can serve as your additional passport to greater freedom. That official document can be your key to a whole new world of free movement, expanded international investment, greater flexibility, and adventure. In addition, it can mean safe passage as compared to delay or even worse.
To learn more about how you can obtain a legal, second passport, click here.
Comments