Day 171 - Cotton Candy Syndrome

Not all non-Germans who applied for visas in Stuttgart were just passing through. Many lived in Germany, had German spouses and children, and worked in Germany. They often still fell into the interesting category which led us to invite them for an interview nonetheless. And those interviews were often truly the most interesting of all.

Image of Irish Passport by Sean MacEntee, via Flickr.com

One non-German, for instance, was James who submitted his application with his Irish passport. The application indicated James had been born in the United States so the question of just why was he applying for a visa to travel there had to be asked and answered. U.S. citizens must depart from and arrive into the United States on a U.S. passport. If a U.S. citizen has another citizenship, the U.S. doesn't care which passport is used to travel elsewhere, but no U.S. citizen can arrive in the United States on a foreign passport with a visa.

James came to his interview with a copy of his affidavit renouncing his U.S. citizenship to explain why he was traveling on an Irish passport, but every time he answered one question, two or three more popped up. It seems that James' purpose for traveling to the U.S. was to visit his ex-wife. She was an American citizen who had lived with James in Germany until recently, but once they divorced, she returned to the U.S. That piece of news raised questions about whether he intended to return to Germany or stay in the U.S. But James insisted he had no plans to remain in the United States. He just wanted to visit his ex-wife because in spite of the divorce, they were still friends. His ex-wife didn't like living in Germany while James didn't want to live in the United States because of his renunciation of his citizenship.

Oh and why did he renounce his citizenship? To get a job. His father had been in the military, stationed in Germany, when James finished high school. James went to university to study to become a veterinarian. Once he finished his studies, he returned to Germany. He was able to line up a job as a vet with the U.S. Army in Germany, but the only available positions were for non-Americans.  At that time, there was a complicated system of identifying jobs that could be filled by Americans, but only by Americans who were dependents of military members or foreign service staff, and the rest of the jobs with the military and the diplomatic establishments could only be filled by non-Americans. James was too old to be considered a dependent of his father. Besides, his father wanted him to enter the Army, not remain in Germany. I was aware of this system even before I came in contact with it in Germany. A high school friend had married a man who joined the Air Force and the two of them stayed married far longer than their marriage actually lasted because if they divorced, my friend would have lost her job. James' situation was just the reverse. He happened to have an Irish grandparent which gave him enough of a blood connection to Ireland to be issued a passport. If he had simply renounced his U.S. citizenship without any other citizenship to replace it, he would have had to battle the German government for one of those Stateless Person's Travel Documents.

In the end, James convinced me that he was sincere in his wish to travel to the U.S. and then return to Germany. But he was high on the scale of being an interesting case.

Image of German passport
by sebastiankippe, via Flickr.com

Another somewhat related case was Werner who was much older than James but had also been born in the United States and now lived in Germany where he had been living for thirty years. Werner had traveled to the U.S. on his German passport several times, so he was very confused when we invited him in for an interview. The difference between Werner's previous applications and his application in the late 1980s was that what were considered expatriating acts in the past had been reviewed by the courts. A recent ruling found that no one could be found as having lost their citizenship unless the individual had committed an expatriating act with the intention of giving up U.S. citizenship. About the only expatriating act that was on its face deemed to prove intention was renouncing citizenship, as James had done. In Werner's case, however, he lost his citizenship when he voted in a German election in the 1950s. I think Werner had even fought with the U.S. Army against Germany during World War II, but casting a vote ten years later lost him his U.S. citizenship. In the meantime, he had undertaken a number of other actions that also would have been expatriating at the time. But since he thought he didn't have U.S. citizenship then, no court could ever have made the case that he continued to vote or serve in an official capacity with the German government in order to give up his U.S. citizenship. The result of Werner's application for a visa was that we sent him over to the American Citizen Services side of the Consulate in order to get a new U.S. passport.

More troubling instances of potential U.S. citizens applying for visas were infants and children where one parent was a U.S. citizen and the other not. When a child is born overseas of two American parents, that child is an American citizen by birth.  But when a child was born to a U.S. citizen mother or father but the other parent was not American, there are some hoops the parents and child must jump through. A U.S. citizen who was born overseas would always be a U.S. citizen, but that doesn't mean that his or her children would always be U.S. citizens. When a U.S. citizen is born overseas, he or she must live in the United States for a fixed length of time, at least some of which was before either the 14th or 16th birthday (the law changed often so everything depended on the date and place of the parent's birth) in order to be able to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child.  In most of the cases we saw, the result was that the child was determined to be a U.S. citizen, but there were no shortcuts to that determination. When the parents were at the interview window hoping to get visas to travel the next day, the extra steps were viewed as unnecessary bureaucracy.  My boss called it the cotton candy syndrome.

When she was in high school, my boss had a summer job selling cotton candy at a kiddy's park. She was so excited about having the job and about providing something she knew kids loved. But she was surprised that everyone who came to buy cotton candy didn't seem as pleased as she was. They seemed annoyed. Through that experience she recognized that most people didn't see her as the person who would give them cotton candy, they saw her as the person in between them and the cotton candy they wanted.