Day 178 - Jailhouse Blues

An occasional responsibility for consular officers involved visits to American citizens in prison. Fortunately, these were rare in Germany. Even more fortunately, German prisons are much nicer than prisons in many other parts of the world.

Image of prison by kIM DARam, via Flickr.com

During my training for consular work, we did a lot of role playing. The location was Congen Rosslyn, the name given to the suite of offices that were set up to look a lot like what we would find when we arrived on the job. Rosslyn was a section of Arlington County in Virginia where most of the Foreign Service Institute's courses were held at the time I arrived in Washington. Congen Rosslyn took its name from the location, but it was transformed into the capital of the mythical country of Z. During our role playing, one of us would act as the prisoner, one as the consular officer, and the course instructor and the other ConGen students would observe. At the conclusion of the role playing exercise, we would discuss the scenario. The consular officer and prisoner role players would describe how they felt during the exercise and the observers commented on whether they thought the scenario would have a positive outcome if the situation had been real.

I was surprised that my fellow classmates all commented on how cool and detached I appeared during the role playing. I thought I was being very sympathetic.

When I made my first prison visit, I didn't have the benefit of an observer to let me know afterwards how I did, except that I had to write up a report to send to Washington to ensure headquarters knew we were fulfilling our obligation towards imprisoned Americans.

The first American I visited, Bruno,* was born in Germany of a German mother and an American citizen father. At the time he was born, Germany did not consider the children of German mothers to be German citizens; Germany considered that a child's citizenship was derived through the father. In Bruno's case, his father was American of Yugoslav origin. The importance of this detail comes later.

Bruno was in prison because he had overstayed his visa in Germany. He had grown up in Germany, so he considered himself German, not American. He barely spoke English and that fact meant that he often was thought to be carrying a false passport when the police stopped him for one thing or another and he handed over his American passport as his proof of identification. His mother had died, so he was living on his own in Germany, unable to get German citizenship through a change in the law that might have made it possible for him to take advantage of a provision for certain German women to petition on behalf of their children to obtain German citizenship in spite of their fathers not being German. His mother would have had to petition on his behalf, and she wasn't there. His father also wasn't in Germany. He had returned to the United States where he was prepared to welcome Bruno in spite of the fact that he had done so once before when Bruno had been deported from Germany, but Bruno hadn't adjusted well to life in the United States so he returned to Germany. And that led to his overstaying his visa, being found in the country without permission and then put into prison. Bruno was facing deportation to the United States for a second time.

Bruno thought the solution to his problem would be to renounce his American citizenship. According to his thinking, if he wasn't an American citizen, he couldn't be deported, so he would be able to stay in Germany. He would have to apply for a Stateless person's travel document, but that was preferable to being deported. But Bruno wasn't considering his father's situation clearly enough. His father, though an American citizen, was also very likely also a Yugoslav citizen. There are many countries in the world which do not consider it possible for its citizens to stop being a citizen. Since his father was born in Yugoslavia to parents who were both Yugoslav citizens, the Yugoslav government might consider both his father, and through his blood line also Bruno, to be Yugoslav citizens. If Bruno renounced his American citizenship, he couldn't be deported to the United States. But the German government might instead decide to deport him to Yugoslavia, a country where he knew no one, where the language was completely unfamiliar to him, and where his life would likely be much more difficult than it was in Germany or had been for the year he spent in the United States.

My mission was to meet with Bruno and talk with him about the consequences of renouncing his citizenship. While my boss didn't tell me outright that my job was to talk him out of renouncing his citizenship, it seemed clear that she thought Bruno would be better off being deported to the United States than giving up his citizenship and not having any control at all over what happened next.

Since Bruno's English was very weak, he and I talked about his situation in German. I asked him questions and listened to his answers. I didn't tell him what I thought he should do. I just asked him questions, hoping he would come to his own decision not to renounce his citizenship. I was very pleased at the end of the visit when Bruno agreed that he would not insist on renouncing his citizenship.

When I returned to the Consulate, I happily reported the results of my meeting with Bruno to my boss. She just smiled. At the end of my story, she admitted that Bruno always changed his mind by the end of a consular prison visit. She said I had done a good job. But I walked away knowing that the next consular officer would probably have to go through the same conversation with Bruno, unless the German government finally deported him in the meantime.