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Just curious, since I don't often receive this kind of candor.
Have I earned it, in your opinion?
I was born here through no choice of my own. But! I've been here for five decades, speak English fluently, have two houses, was raised in the Christian tradition, have paid millions in taxes, have never been to jail, have a white wife and two white children (three including step child) who are irrefutably citizens via my wife.
Also, kindly let me know what you feel you've done to earn being an American citizen.
It's not your fault your parents fucked you over, and you did the best you could. But no, you're illegitimate. I'd be willing to fast-track you through the immigration system, but you'd have to go back first. Once exceptions start being made, they get made for everyone, otherwise.
Oh, I was born to two citizen parents. Citizenship is mine by blood.
At least you assume so. Unless you can prove that their parents had the power to transfer citizenship, I'm just going to assume you aren't, and that goes all the way back up the chain. You'd better hope that a sufficient number of immigrants in that chain were either here before 1789 or naturalized before they had your ancestors, or else they couldn't have transmitted citizenship to their children and I'd prefer you'd be deported to South Sudan or some other country that will take anyone. At that point you can get in the back of the line behind all the other South Sudanese who want to live in the US (Good luck!).
You're not very convincing, buddy.
I'm not sure what you're failing to understand. If your great-grandfather immigrated here in 1910, had your grandmother in 1925, and naturalized in 1930, he couldn't have possibly passed his citizenship to your grandmother because he had no citizenship to pass. And since your grandmother isn't a citizen in this scenario, neither is your mother, and neither are you. What's the problem here?
There's no problem, just you wrongly assuming I'm not a citizen by blood. I am correcting you. There's no need to try and fearmonger.
Great! Let's start with an easy question: Who was the most recent immigrant in your lineage? You don't have to give a name, just tell me their relation to you, the date they immigrated here, the date they naturalized, and the birthdate of the descendant through whom you're claiming citizenship.
No thanks. I'm not concerned.
Well, you should be concerned, at least theoretically, because I can all but guarantee you can't do this. The only chance I'd give you of actually being able to is if your parents are relatively recent immigrants who naturalized before you were born, and you have access to their naturalization papers. Otherwise it's damn near impossible. I did a fair amount of genealogical work when I was in oil and gas and simply proving a bloodline back 100 years can take a significant amount of work, and that's including unofficial sources like obituaries and affidavits. In particular, anyone whose ancestors came here before about 1890 you can forget about entirely, as vital records simply weren't kept before then and estate records didn't normally include a list of all the heirs. And this work didn't even get into naturalization records, which are filed with the District Court where the person was naturalized, which, good luck that they were properly archived. So I guess you'd agree then that we should establish a system where the most recent immigrants and their descendants are the most likely to be allowed to stay and the people whose families have been here the longest are the most likely to be given the boot?
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