Day 190 - What Does Citizenship Have To Do With Grades?

Image of German flag by fdecomite, via Flickr.com

One of the most interesting American Citizens Services cases I handled was when a father brought his 15-year-old son to the consulate for him to renounced his American citizenship. The father had renounced his citizenship many years before. The mother was German. And the boy was born before 1975 when the only claim to German citizenship was through the father and not the mother. Exceptions included cases where the parents were unmarried (in which case German mothers could pass on citizenship) or where the German mother applied for the child to be registered as German on or before 31 December 1977. His mother had not applied for him by the deadline which meant the boy was American and only American.

The boy couldn't renounce his citizenship because he was not yet 18. If he had filled out the application to renounce his citizenship and sworn, or affirmed, that he chose willingly to give up his American citizenship, he could have later claimed the renunciation was invalid since he was still a minor at the time. Maybe that's what I should have done - allowed the boy to renounce his citizenship because his father insisted and then explained to the boy that he could take back his renunciation later. But I was still learning how to be a bureaucrat in those days. I had spent a lot of time learning all about the rules and I felt I was responsible for following them.

So first I talked with the father. I explained that his son wasn't old enough to renounce his citizenship. The father responded that his son wasn't doing well in school because he couldn't speak German. The father believed that because his son was an American and not a German, he would continue having problems learning German as well as other subjects.  He thought his son's renouncing his American citizenship was important. The father said he himself had experienced similar problems before he renounced his American citizenship. At work, he didn't do well because he didn't speak German. Once he renounced his American citizenship and became a German citizen, his life at work improved.

I could understand that his father's life probably improved once he became a German citizen. But I wasn't able to make the connection to his claim that his son wasn't doing well in school because he didn't speak German well and that was because he was still an American citizen.

Maybe there were some undercurrents of prejudice at work in the boy's school. Looking back to my elementary school days, I recall years when our classrooms had more than the normal number of students at the beginning of the year and then again at the end of the year because of the children of the migrant workers from Texas who spent May through September in the Red River Valley working in the sugar beet fields. Because those students were in our schools for such short times, it would be easy to understand the teachers not spending much time on them. After all, they would be gone soon. In fact, I can only remember one of my elementary grade teachers making any effort to integrate the migrant children into our activities. Maybe I wasn't paying attention the other years. But I don't think so.

Maybe the teachers in the boy's school thought he was just like the other American children, dependents of American service members, who might be there for a full year, but eventually would be gone. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the father's pleas on behalf of his child.

But I was a bureaucracy neophyte. So I explained to the father that it wasn't fair for him to decide on behalf of his son, that only his son could decide whether to renounce his citizenship, and that his son was too young to do so now. When his son turned 18, he could come on his own to renounce his citizenship. Or, at 18, his son could decide to travel to the U.S. to study, work, and live, something he might not be able to do if he didn't still have his American citizenship.

His father then insisted that the German authorities had advised him that it would be better if everyone in the family had the same citizenship. The boy's younger siblings, born after January 1, 1975, were dual nationals, holding German citizenship through their mother and American citizenship through their father at the time of their birth. The boy was the only one stuck in the middle, with only American citizenship.

I then talked with the boy without his father present. He had difficulty speaking either English or German, so I then had a better notion of the challenges he faced in school. And it felt all the more like his father didn't have a realistic grasp on the situation, somehow hoping that solving the citizenship dilemma would carry over to solve the boy's educational challenges.

In the end, father and son left the consulate that day, probably not convinced that I had helped them in any way.