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.

Day 184 - The Man From TTPI

Image of TTPI license plate bywoody1778a,
via Flickr.com

My most memorable passport applicant was Miguel,* a service member who was referred to us from the consulate in Frankfurt. Of the nine consulates in Germany, only Frankfurt processed immigrant visas. Miguel joined the Army when a recruiter from Guam visited his home on one of the islands in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI). The TTPI was a UN protectorate that had been administered since 1947 by the United States. Miguel didn't need a passport or a green card when he entered the U.S. because military members travel on their orders and his orders then were for him to complete basic training and then be assigned to Germany where he had been for the past three years.

During that time, he married a German woman with two children. He had gone to the consulate in Frankfurt to apply for immigrant visas for his wife and children because he was being reassigned to the U.S. He knew that his wife and children needed passports and immigrant visas. He didn't realize he couldn't sponsor them because he himself was neither a citizen nor a permanent resident. That is why Frankfurt sent him to Stuttgart for his family to apply for non-immigrant visas. When they appeared in the visa section, their applications were denied because they expected to remain in the U.S. with Miguel.

Miguel was understandably upset because of the runaround he was getting. Fortunately, his timing was perfect. We had just received a telegram from Washington about the end of the U.S. administration of the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, making way for the islands that made up the TTPI to determine whether they wanted independence or to form a different type of association with the U.S. Until the islands made their decision, the residents of the islands had the option to apply for U.S. citizenship, provided they didn't have claim on the citizenship of another country. Determining that latter condition was something that could only be done by headquarters in Washington. My job was to gather the information from Miguel that Washington needed to do the research. I also had to advise that he probably wouldn't be able to bring his family with him right away and suggested he find a place they could stay.

Questions that I thought would be easy for him to answer turned out not to be so easy. But that didn't mean that I disbelieved him. I never felt he was trying to hide anything from me. The questions were just hard for him to answer.

Miguel explained that he joined the Army in order to get away from his home because he saw everyone around him showing no initiative, with many men choosing to drink all night and sleep all day. He knew he didn't want that type of life, so he left it all behind. As a result, he wasn't sure of what his birth date was, or at least he couldn't provide me with evidence in the form of a birth certificate or a baptismal certificate because he wasn't sure that his parents had them or would get around to getting a new copy. I told him he should call his family to ask. He said he had already tried and had been waiting for months. He didn't expect to get an answer. He gave me the information he could and I sent my report to Washington. I told him to call in a week. He told me he was being transferred to the States in a week. I told him to come back the day before he had to leave to find out if I had an answer by then.

The day he came back was the day after I received a response. The sticking point had been that one of his grandparents was Korean. Miguel's answers had to go to the Embassy in Seoul for them to do the research. I don't remember the details, but I remember the result: Miguel had no claim to Korean citizenship so if he wanted to claim American citizenship, he qualified. I sent Miguel out to get passport photos so I could put together his American passport. With that in his hand, he could apply for immigrant visas for his wife and children.

I will never forget the look on Miguel's face when I handed him his passport. He opened the passport, looked at his photo, and a smile crossed his face from ear to ear as he looked up at me and said "Thanks."

Then I smiled. For the rest of the day.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 182 - A Tisket, A Tasket, Oops, I Lost It

Image of sign on a bus by Lodigs, via Flickr.com

The majority of non-routine passport cases involved reports of lost passports and requests for replacements. Some were true reports. Some were not. Of the latter, some were trivial. Some were not.

I relied on my gut reaction to the initial report of the loss to decide which cases to question further. Like so many of my German visa applicants, many Americans also were not good liars. The first clue was when answers to questions were vague or included too many "I don't remember" responses. When the person on the other side of the counter could give a credible and more or less complete description of the last time he was aware he still had the passport and a logical explanation for when it was lost, I didn't ask a lot of additional questions. If the person reporting the lost passport had already reported the loss to the police, I had even fewer questions. But when the answers were overwhelmingly "I don't remember," and no report of the loss was filed with the police, I kept asking questions, pointing out that my questions were to jog her memory to help find it.

One rash of reports of lost passports arrived from high school students in the early spring. It was like a minor epidemic at a school. Everyone seemed to have lost their passports and needed replacements. The first case probably seemed normal with the likely outcome that we issued a replacement passport. But by the third report, things started sounding fishy. As I asked additional questions, more and more "I don't remember" answers came up. It was clear the persons requesting replacement passports were trying to hide something. In one case, after I asked my questions and sent the young woman away with instructions that she should look a little harder before coming back to request a replacement, she left, but only for a short time. She returned to explain why she had asked for a new passport.

Her class, she explained, was taking a trip to East Germany and they were planning to travel by bus. But she was the daughter of a U.S. service member which meant she had a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, stamp in her passport. The status of forces agreement outlined the rights and responsibilities of U.S. service members and their family members while in Germany. One of the responsibilities was to limit travel between West Germany and West Berlin to three routes - one by air, one by train, and one by one highway. The young woman's class trip would not follow one of those routes. So she thought she would get a second passport without a SOFA stamp. Someone had told her all she needed to do was say she had lost hers and she could get a new one.

I was probably more bureaucratic than sympathetic in my response. I pointed out that those covered by the status of forces agreement had responsibilities as well as rights. The bottom line - I wouldn't issue a second passport to her.

Other reports of lost passports appeared to be less benign. Another group of lost passports was reported by former U.S. service members who were living in the Mannheim area. We suspected that passports were being sold. And there were still active underground terrorist groups in Europe, so the thought of U.S. passports in the hands of the Red Army Faction was unpleasant at best.

One man who reported his passport lost was most memorable for the contrast between all of his "I can't remembers" and the full details he could recall when I asked clarifying questions. For example, he couldn't remember where he last used his passport although it was within the past month. He traveled a lot for his job as a logistics specialist. Maybe it was when he traveled to France, or maybe it as to Switzerland.  I pointed out that the French government had only recently introduced the requirement that American citizens had to have visas to travel to France. My conversation with him went something like this:

"Have you ever applied for a French visa," I asked.

"No," he responded.

"Then I think it is unlikely that you last used your passport on a trip to France. Maybe it was when you traveled to Switzerland." I suggested.

"I didn't need to get a visa for France," he countered with just a bit of a challenge in his voice, "because I traveled by train. They issue visas to passengers on the train at the border."

It was amazing how well he remembered some details, but not others.

The interview window in the American Citizen Services section was within line of sight for the Marine on duty in the consular waiting room. While I was interviewing this man with two contrasting memories, the phone on the desk near me rang. The applicant had raised his voice so loudly that the Marine wanted to know if I needed help. I declined the offer and explained to the applicant, again, that in cases such as his, I advise looking harder for his lost passport before returning to apply for a replacement again.

He didn't return. But he did write a letter to the Consul complaining about my refusal to issue a replacement passport in which he exhibited his superior powers of observation as he described me, the color of my dress, and my matching shoes - shoes that he couldn't see while at the interview window. When my boss read the letter, she agreed that his letter just further undermined his credibility as the contrast between the details he chose to recall and those he couldn't was so dramatic.

Day 181 - The Weiss Brothers

After a year working in the Visa Section, I moved to the American Citizen Services Section where the majority of the work involved issuing passports and reports of birth abroad to family members of service members in Germany. Once again, like visa applications, most of these cases were straight forward. But a few were interesting.

The Weiss brothers were definitely interesting.

Image of cowboys by DangerRanger,
via Flickr.com

The two brothers showed up wearing cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and big smiles, requesting that we arrange to repatriate them back to the U.S. because they had run out of money. But the kicker was that they had previously been repatriated back to the U.S. from Stuttgart and their explanation for why we should do it again was that they hadn't yet repaid the repatriation loan from that first occassion three or five years before. They had copies of the paperwork to prove it.

The brothers were Amcits, State-speak for American citizens, but they spoke English with an accent that suggested an eastern European background. Russian was my guess.

The reason their case was interesting is that the brothers shouldn't have been issued new passports until after they had repaid the previous loan. When U.S. citizens are repatriated, their passports are annotated to expire when they arrive back in the U.S. and a hold is placed on any new applications until the loan to cover the cost of repatriation has been repaid. Repatriation is intended to be a last resort for Americans in trouble overseas. Even people who are evacuated out of dangerous places such as Tehran in February of 1979 end up with a bill for a representative cost of their last-minute flight out if town. Let that be a lesson to you if you were thinking of taking an adventure vacation in one of the world's hot spots, assuming the USG, that is how we refer to the United States Government in State-speak, will bail you out.

So the Weiss brothers showing up, claiming they were broke and needed to be repatriated again in spite of the fact that they still owed the government for the earlier trip home, was interesting. The first question to answer was how they got those passports. And that required sending a message back to Washington to verify that the passports were legitimate.

They were. All we got as an explanation was that someone made a mistake when the new passports were issued. So we decided we needed to dig deeper. Since the original case was several years old, that meant digging into our files in the basement. We explained to the brothers that they would have to come back in a few days.

They were impatient, so they came back earlier than we were ready to give them an answer. And this time, they brought their parents. They were not U.S. citizens, so they had no passports. They also didn't have the same last name. Theirs was definitely Slavic, perhaps Russian. They were permanent residents, green card holders, who had reentry permits. These are travel documents issued to permanent residents who have a legitimate reason to be out of the U.S. for an extended period of time. The boys informed us that they wanted their parents to be repatriated as well. Now that posed a few problems because repatriation isn't extended to non-citizens, even those with green cards. But we collected their reentry permits and photocopied all the pages, at the strong recommendation of my boss. It turned out to be a very good step since there were pages missing from both of those documents. That led us to look more closely at the brothers' passports. They were also missing a few pages. The boys claimed they had been in Germany only a few weeks, but missing pages suggested there may be something bigger they wanted to hide.

After interviewing the brothers again, asking a long series of questions regarding where they had been since they left the U.S., I sent a second report to Washington with their explanation for their predicament, along with a summary of their previous repatriation file and their request that we repatriate their parents as well. I also copied the other consulates in Germany in order to find out if the brothers had previously appeared anywhere else to request assistance.

We received approval to repatriate the brothers, but the addition of the parents complicated things.  The brothers complicated things even more. In spite of the likelihood that we would not receive approval to pay for the parents' return, the boys kept upping the ante. They insisted that we repatriate them via ship instead of by plane because, they said, their parents were afraid to fly.

By this time, it seemed clear that they knew we weren't going to repatriate all four of them, and that we wouldn't agree to send them back by boat. But they had started the process, so they had to follow through. The smiles on their faces gave away that they were just playing a game. Or so I thought.

Image of Mercedes Benz by pilot_micha, via Flickr.com

As suddenly as they appeared, they disappeared. They never returned to find out if we would book their return via ship. But we did hear more about them later. They turned up at another consulate in Germany. I think they had a new story and a new request. The details are not in my memory. What I do remember is that the brothers and their parents had been sleeping in two brand new Mercedes Benz vehicles which they probably purchased in Stuttgart, the heart of Mercedes Benz manufacturing.

They must have run out of money before they could ship them to the U.S.

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.