Among many problems with Trump's citizenship executive order (such as its obvious conflict with the constitution) is a practical one: birth certificates, which are currently the primary proof of citizenship for those born in the US, are issued by state and local authorities. These agencies do not (and aren't equipped to) determine or record the immigration status of the parents.
This means that citizenship would no longer be established with a US birth certificate or any other primary document.
@mattblaze I know a couple people who have had problems with that. They're absolutely citizens, but they have to prove it.
One is even harder - they're citizen-by-adoption-as-a-child. Their foreign-citizen father went back home after divorce with adoptive-mother-that-granted-citizenship. Adoptive mother doesn't want anything to do with them anymore, not even provide basic documentation needed for State Dept to acknowledge their citizenship.
Something like this occurred in the UK for post-war Caribbean immigrants and their descendants (the "Windrush scandal"). Decades later, the Conservatives introduced retrospective requirements for documentation to prove the right to stay. Something like three documents for every year, continuously since arrival. Many were deported or lost social security because they didn't have documents they were never told and couldn't know they would need. It was (and still is) disgusting.
@mattblaze it's going to be such a huge mess.
Does it apply only to people born after the order or retrospectively? If so, how many generations do you need to go back to prove citizenship? Are locals with generations of assumed citizenship less able to prove their citizenship now than some immigrant who's father has a certificate of naturalisation?
I guess that's the point. It'll only be used to wield chaos on those with the wrong name or skin colour.
@mattblaze Yes. To inherit my late wife's postal savings account here in Japan, I had to trace her extended family history back to the birth of her father. The full record is a dozen pages long, spanning three major changes to the law and the form of records. Everything was delivered by her home town city hall in response to a single request.
US recording systems are ad hoc and messy by comparison, minimum-passing-effort rather than best-in-class.
ayup. Completely breaks the system.
I imagine there must be tons of federal laws, rules and regulations around birth certificates as identification. This must have all sorts of crazy impacts that seem like they could only be handled properly by doing this at the congressional level and rewriting this piece by piece.
A lot of the first administrations changes fall apart during court challenges based on rules and administrative issues. Is this a viable path of attack?
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