2013-11-02

Have Immigrants Failed to Assimilate? Strip Their Citizenship

This could get interesting, with massive foreign populations in many countries due to population migrations over the past 50 years.

Dominican Republic citizenship ruling stirs outcry across Caribbean
The Dominican Constitutional Court, citing the country's 2010 constitution, retroactively stripped the citizenship of people born after 1929 to parents without Dominican ancestry, declaring that they were residing in the country illegally or with temporary permits.

More than 200,000 people, most of them descendants of Haitians, may in effect be left stateless. Government officials and others could deprive them of a host of basic rights and services, including education and employment, activists say.

...Some fear the Dominican Republic will embark on a mass deportation effort. But to where? Haiti and other Caribbean states would be under no obligation to recognize people who were born in the Dominican Republic as anything but Dominicans.

After years of legal dispute and with Dominicans of Haitian descent already feeling prejudice, the court's ruling in late September came in connection with a case involving Juliana Dequis Pierre, born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents in 1984. When she attempted to apply for a voting card, authorities seized her birth certificate and told her she was not Dominican, her lawyers say. Her attempts to challenge those actions led to the high court's judgment.
The issue is whether one views the state as separate from the nation (the nation being the people). If you have a monarchy or an empire, the U.S. being an example of the latter, then within the state there can be many nations who give allegiance to the state. In other places, the nation and the state are one. This is the concept of jus sanguinis:
Jus sanguinis (Latin: right of blood) is a principle of nationality law by which citizenship is not determined by place of birth but by having instead one or both parents who are citizens of the state or more generally by having state citizenship or membership to a nation determined or conferred by -ethnic, cultural or other- descent or origin,[1] e.g. by belonging to a diaspora, i.e. without necessarily having progenitors that are or were citizens of that state per se. It contrasts with jus soli (Latin for "right of soil")

...Apart from France, jus sanguinis is still the most common means of passing on citizenship in many continental European countries. Some countries provide almost the same rights as a citizen to people born in the country, without actually giving them citizenship. An example is Indfødsret in Denmark, which provides that upon reaching 18, non-citizen residents can decide to take a test to gain citizenship.

Unlike France, some European states (in their modern forms) are postempire creations within the past century. States arising out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire had huge numbers of ethnic populations outside of their new boundaries, as do most of the former Soviet states. Several had long-standing diasporas that did not conform to 20th-century European nationalism and state creation.

In many cases, jus sanguinis rights were mandated by international treaty, with citizenship definitions imposed by the international community. In other cases, minorities were subject to legal and extra-legal persecution and their only option was immigration to their ancestral home country. States offering jus sanguinis rights to ethnic citizens and their descendants include Italy, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania. Each is required by international treaty to extend those rights.
There are many Americans who are eligible for citizenship in European nations such as Italy or Ireland due to these laws.

There were major population movements/displacements after WWI and WWII. People moved to the territory of their ethnic group, rather than staying in the place where they may have lived for centuries.

I have heard some people predict the mass deportation of foreigners from Europe, but was a little skeptical. However, considering the law, it is actually quite possible. According to the wiki link on jus sanguinis, for example, Turkey is required to take its people as immigrants due to their own forcing out of minorities, who flowed into other countries. Should Germany decide to deport all of its Turks, they would be able to migrate back to Turkey.

As social mood declines, it is likely there will be more loss of citizenship and forced repatriations. It will shock many people how quickly this happens, as most people are probably unaware of how the law is there to support this in many countries. And where the law does not explicitly support it, it can be amended, with foreign examples serving as guides. This is less likely to happen in the United States, but citizens are required to have allegiance to the state. With the NSA collecting data on all citizens, a more authoritarian state could ease the threshold for foreign allegiance and use emails and telephone conversations as evidence. However, it would take a big decline in social mood and also some type of serious internal or external threat, since the U.S. has a far greater cultural and historical record of openness to foreigners.

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