Today in one of my classes we learnt that if you are a Turk and you’ve lived in Germany for X number of years and you get pregnant and have a baby*, your baby is not a German citizen. It wasn’t the main point of the class, it was just kind of glossed over and our professor is an Ameircan, so I wonder if somebody can clear this up for me? It seems absurd to me, but I’m sure I’m missing something.
*Does it matter if the baby’s other parent is German? As I said, it was just barely glossed over, but I’m very interested now.
“Under previous German law, children born to foreigners in Germany were not entitled to German citizenship (jus sanguinis): a large population of permanently resident non-citizens developed, with the consequence over time that even the third generation born in Germany remained foreigners. As late as 2004, 36 per cent of Turkish citizens living in Germany did not have German nationality despite being born there. In 2000, legislation was passed which conferred German citizenship on the German-born children of foreigners, and the naturalisation process was made easier, though dual citizenship is still not tolerated and any person possessing it by virtue of birth to foreign parents must choose between the ages of 18 and 23 which citizenship she or he wishes to retain, and forfeit the other.”
Germany isn’t the only country that has had that sort of law.
I’ve a friend whose family had been living in what was Yugoslavia for about 200 years and when WW2 broke out his parents’ villages were deported back to Germany.
He told me his parents never would have met each other had they not been sent to Germany because they had no other reason to leave their village.
His father was drafted and learned how to speak German while serving in the Germany army.
When the war was over his parents immigrated to the USA.
I’ve another friend whose parents and grand parents were born in Holland but appearently that didn’t entitle them to being citizens of the Netherlands.
When WW2 broke out the whole family was deported back to Germany.
Her father was drafted and was awarded metals for serving in the German army until they discovered his religion was Jewish and put him in prison.
Fortunately he was able to escape and join the rest of the family already settled in England. He joined the British army and earned metals fighting on their side too.
After the war the whole family immigrated to the USA because they thought it would be easier for all of them to become citizens here.
I imagine the laws have since changed in Holland?
On the other side of the coin,
years back, when hijakers were yanking American citizens off airplanes some people tried carrying 2 passports to avoid being identified as an American if need be.
I don’t know if its changed but Ireland had a policy of offering Irish citizenship to the children and grand children of Irish citizens even if they were born on foreign soils.
One of Che Guevera’s daughters in Cuba recently was in the news for being awarded an Argentinian citizenship based on her father being originally from there.
I have no idea how many countries still offer that option.
The USA gov. frowns on its citizens holding dual citizenships.
Canada is rife with dual citizenship. It’s a bit of a joke really. People in sh!thole countries like in the Middle East take out Canadian citizenship in case they need someplace to run when things turn bad, but then they are back living in their original country when things settle down again. Even though they don’t live here they get to vote. When things go bad, the Canadian gov’t gets to spend our tax dollars to haul them out of there. What a deal for … them.
I didn’t think of this as a political discussion, just informative. I certainly wasn’t making any judgements about if any of this was right or wrong.
I’ve a friend whose parents moved from Chicago to upstate Minn. over 40 years ago. One of her brothers married a local girl and runs a grocery store in a small town. All of his children grew up being referred to as being the “Chicago kids” by the locals (those who had ancestors buried in the local cemetery).
I was visiting my mother some time back who lives in the same house I grew up in. The neighborhood has since “changed”. An African American person I worked with saw me on the street during the visit and later asked me what I was doing in her/ a Black neighborhood.
If you’re White and shopping in the neighborhood of Chicago that I live in now you will be spoken to first in Polish.
I’ve had a couple guys working on my building who refuse to believe I’m the owner of the building because of all the herbs I grow in the yard.
They insist no American would grow such herbs in their yard.
I hope your German teacher told you the word “Gastarbeiter”, Cranberry.
And if you are born in Norn Iron, you can apply for an Irish passport or a British one. I’m told that some people have managed to acquire both. But I’ve also been told that if one passport office learns you have a passport from the other, they’ll invalidate the one they might have supplied.
Dunno if it’s relevant, but my wife is Turkish - from what she says, there is a long traditional association between Germany and Turkey. I suppose the item might have become sygnificant with all the inevitable cross-breeding. Just a thought.
I have dual Irish/American citizenship due to my grandfather having been born in Dublin. My wife has dual Italian/American citizenship due to her having been born in Italy. I pursued the Irish citizenship so that both of us would have Euro citizenship. We have planned to live part time in Italy after retirement and having the Euro passports will make that easier. We don’t know if we will attain our dream but we’re trying.
BTW, the US government does not forbid dual citizenship but you must travel under your US passport when leaving or entering the US.
That sounds about right. All the relevant laws were consolidated effective 1/1/2005 into a new code, the Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz. Limited exceptions to the ban on dual citizenship are now accepted, by the way.
One might also want to add that it has (of course) always been possible to naturalize (to become a German citizen after living and working in the country for a number of years). The “Gastarbeiter,” it was originally thought, would either make money and then return to their countries, or they would choose to stay in Germany, integrate and take the German citizenship (meaning that their children would be German as well). What in fact overwhelmingly happened is that they neither returned nor naturalized, creating a growing number of young people in Germany without German citizenship, who were culturally more German than anything else. The reluctance of many of the Gastarbeiter to integrate fully into German society has led to a complicated subculture, and to tensions, as you can imagine. Only in the past 15 years have things begun to really change, mostly due to an increased self-confidence, affluence, and attainments of the German-born children of the Gastarbeiter. Turkish words have entered German youth-slang; descendants of Gastarbeiter are working at all levels of the economy, and are members of parliament.
Cran: Think back over (European) history and consider why certain countries use the lex sanguinis and other the lex solis. For an obvious example: the US has constantly grown through immigration and profited from it, so that it would make sense to seek to integrate the next generation as quickly as possible. Germany, on the other hand, faced the fact that after WWII there were lots of Germans outside the German borders who weren’t exactly popular with their non-German neighbors. Lex sanguinis is a means of extending to those Germans outside Germany, and to their descendants, the protections of German citizenship (including, most importantly, a right to reside in Germany). Still, thousands of descendants of Germans arrive each year in Germany from countries outside of Germany .
The situation that had been the case in Germany is reminiscent of citizenship laws in Japan.
Japan is about 99% ethnic Japanese, however it does have a few small minorities of foreign origin or descent, mostly Koreans and Chinese. Even though many of these people have lived in Japan for generations (descendents of laborers brought over to Japan during the war, for example), most of them are not fully integrated into Japanese society. Many Korean-Japanese go to special Korean schools (which are ideologically affiliated with either S. Korea or N. Korea, effectively splitting the Korean-Japanese community in two) and at the age of 20, they are forced to choose either Korean or Japanese citizenship. Up until 1996, all Korean-Japanese were required by law to carry special identity cards. There have been numerous stories of Korean-Japanese who committed a crime and were deported to S. or N. Korea even though they didn’t speak a word of Korean or of Korean-Japanese who had been asked to change their nationality by employers so as to better their promotion prospects.
As for foreigners wanting to immigrate to Japan, it is possible for people of Japanese descent to gain citizenship–there is currently a growing influx of such people from Peru and Brazil doing this, the most famous example being Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru wanted by Interpol for human rights violations…Interestingly, his Japanese citizenship was processed far faster than that of ordinary Japanese-Peruvians and nobody ever seemed to mention relinquishing his Perivian citizenship, which is legally supposed to be part of the deal. A number of foreigners who become citizens keep foreign passports on the sly, though. A few foreign-born citizens are quite famous and well-liked now, such as Marutei Tsurunen, a Finn and the first foreign-born member of the Diet, and Anthony Bianchi, the American-born mayor of the city of Inuyama. The vast majority of Japanese-Peruvians and Brazilians on the other hand face serious problems with discrimination that are likely to get worse before they get better.
Uh huh, uh huh.
But the bottom line is polititians didn’t dream up the laws to be cruel. The immigration laws of a country reflect the cultural opinions of a time. If or as the culture changes, the laws eventually change.
Cultures that tend to draw lines between themself and who they think isn’t them
tend to see no problem turning that into a law.
Many years ago we visited my father’s old home town in Maine. He thought he recognized someone and struck up a conversation with the guy. The guy asked if my father still had relatives in the area. My father mentioned a cousin by name, and the guy said, “You mean the girl who ran off with that Peterson guy?” They’d had a regular old wedding after a regular old courtship – 40 years earlier – but they moved all of 15 miles, which evidently constituted “running off”.
BTW, in Maine you’re called “from away” if you haven’t been there for a couple of generations.
