Citizenship: essential to all, elusive to many

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.