Daniel has citizenship! While this may not be widely viewed as an achievement worthy of celebration, I am personally quite relieved that this status has been bestowed upon my child. It’s something that will have immense implications on the rest of his life.
Citizenship is widely viewed as something
automatically handed out at birth. This
is often the case since most take the citizenship of the nation-state in which
they were born or inherit the citizenship of a parent. It’s not uncommon for someone to
be born into two or more forms of citizenship.
While some go through a naturalization process later in life and add a
new citizenship, the initial acquisition almost certainly occurred in our infancy
and we likely have given little thought as to how we came to possess this highly significant component of our life and experience in this
world.
However, citizenship is never actually automatic. Each nation-state has its own set of complex
legal parameters to open and close pathways to its nationality-and nationality
is the key issue here because it is the legal basis for assigning citizenship. Nationality laws determine who can receive official membership
to a nation and who cannot, and laws have a nature of being
tragically stringent.
Ruth, a fully fledged Lebanese, gave birth to our
children in Lebanon. Like many
countries, Lebanon does not apply jus soli,
meaning it does not grant citizenship to everyone born within its territory. Unfortunately, Lebanese law is also rooted in gender
discrimination and does not allow women married to foreign men to transmit
citizenship to their children. (One must have a Lebanese father in order to be
considered Lebanese) Therefore the only citizenship
my children had access to was that of
the United States, my country of nationality.
Even so, achieving this citizenship for Daniel was by no means
straightforward. The complex process involved
the following steps (with their costs):
1. Receive
a birth notice from the hospital and signed by doctor
2. Complete
a formal birth certificate document issued by mayor of the town of birth ($13)
3. Certify
birth certificate at the local office of personal registry ($3)
4. Certify
birth certificate at the regional office of personal registry ($14)
This step required
presenting the following proofs of documentation:
Father’s passport
Father’s residency permit
Mother’s identification document
Marriage certificate
5. Translate
birth certificate from Arabic to English ($30(discounted!!!))
6. Certify
birth certificate at the Ministry of Exterior
7. Submit
application for citizenship to American Embassy ($205)
Since
I am the lone U.S. citizen parent I had to provide proof of five years of physical
presence in the U.S. with two of the years being after the age of 14. If I had not established a physical presence
in the U.S. or if I could not provide proof of a presence, my son, by law, may
not have been able to acquire my American citizenship.
As we see here,
citizenship did not come automatically to Daniel. It had to be achieved through a rather
complicated (and relatively costly) process.
If I had failed to complete this process my son would be effectively
stateless. He would exist but, in the
absence of legal papers, would claim no official belonging to any nation-state,
and thus not belong in this world.
Naturally this would affect all areas of his life. He would have no legal identity and would not
have access to countless services, experiences and opportunities. (Just imagine that you lost every form of identification
documents you have and then tried forge a life.
It would not go very well.)
I’m very thankful that
my own children’s plight with statelessness is a theoretical case of what could
have been rather than what is. Sadly,
for millions of children around the world, and many hundreds of thousands
within Lebanon, statelessness is an everyday reality. There are countless children whose births have
never been registered or processed in nationalization (oftentimes due to the conditions of poverty and marginalization they are born into). They do not actualize their right to
citizenship and have no recognized identity.
Other children are victims of chronic statelessness as a stateless
generation yields stateless generation; the legal absence of safeguards and reforms
means they have no path to becoming part of any country.
Many of the children we
serve at Kids Alive Lebanon are trapped in statelessness. Our ministry provides services and care that these
precious lives would not be able to otherwise receive, such as education and legal protection. The opportunities we can provide are
truly life-transforming, but without the possession of legal documentation
these children will always face areality of not belonging, of not existing
in the way all people are meant to exist in this world.
The great hope in the
face of such a massive injustice is that God does not follow our world’s ways. He ushered a kingdom where belonging is based
on the Spirit and not a piece of paper, and all are invited to enjoy the
fullness of membership. In fact, it is
exactly the excluded that receive His keenest consideration. The injustice we see in this world will not
endure and God promises to rectify wrongs and establish right. Until that is fully experienced we can do our
part to extend dignity and humanity to all people. Working towards creating a world where every
person enjoys the privilege of citizenship is a part of this mission. I do not look lightly at the citizenship I boast
or the citizenship my own two children have been granted, and I will never forget
that there are millions of others who long for this recognition.
For more information on
statelssness please visit the U.N.
#IBelong and the Institute of
Statelessness and Inclusion.
