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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 29, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So! There's a tiny chance I'll be booted out of the US because 5 decades ago my parents were illegal immigrants and the SCOTUS might agree they were foreign invaders, thereby yanking my birthright citizenship.

Meanwhile, right-wing nativist Chuds in my parents' country have decided they think bloodline-based citizenship is the actual menace and are taking steps towards ending it.

I don't really want to live in the old country, but to add insult to injury it's narrowly possible I'll lose residency in the US while my kids become ineligible for residence in the old country and navigating that sounds really unpleasant.

This is really speculative of course. But for peace of mind, are there any decent countries that I can buy a citizenship in? Either cash money or via "investment"? The obvious contenders like Cyprus and Portugal seem to have scaled back the enticements recently.

thereby yanking my birthright citizenship.

I don't think it's how it works. See for yourself: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/

Specifically section 2(b):

(b) Subsection (a) of this section shall apply only to persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order.

I don't know when exactly have you been born, but I assume it was before February 2025, right?

Sure but if this is brought before the SCOTUS they may rule the POTUS only has the authority to do this because the 14th does not confer birthright citizenship to illegal immigrant children.

They might, but it still does not apply to anyone who already has the citizenship, and in fact anyone who has already been born. Moreover, SCOTUS already decided the government can not revoke a lawfully acquired citizenship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk so unless you voluntarily decide to denaturalize, Trump can't do much here.

THIS order doesn't apply. That doesn't mean that three months from now there might not be another order that does.

Five years ago birthright citizenship wasn't on the table.

That way of thinking easily leads to unbounded paranoia. Yes, Trump didn't issue an executive order to round up all foreign-born people into camps, but he might do it. Yes, SCOTUS made it pretty clear they don't like the government to revoke the citizenship retroactively, but they might change their minds. Yes, there's no official state-sanctioned cult of Trump The Divine with five daily kneeled prayers and mandatory floggings of non-citizens, but there might be. I mean, no known physical law forbids it, and even if they did, there might be new law discoveries that allow things that we consider impossible now.

You have to stop this somewhere, otherwise it will lead you into madness. Worrying about things that might happen if the world became completely unlike the world we're living in now is not the way to live in the world we're living in now.

Dude, there are literally thousands of people being removed from the country weekly who, in the world we lived in last year, were in no danger of deportation. Many had some form of legal or protected status, others had simply been living here for decades.

The world now is, for those people, completely unlike the one they lived in last year.

So yeah, research into alternatives is a reasonable thing to start doing on the off chance we see similar changes by next year.

Dude, there are literally thousands of people being removed from the country weekly who, in the world we lived in last year, were in no danger of deportation.

Yes, those are illegal aliens. If you are one, it's very much the time to prepare a plan B. And nobody made a secret of it since the beginning for Trump campaign, which is years from now - one of the major promises Trump made was to deport illegal aliens. He run the whole campaign on it. He never made a promise to revoke citizenship from existing citizens.

So yeah, research into alternatives is a reasonable thing to start doing on the off chance we see similar changes by next year.

If that's what you want to do, don't let anybody to stop you. Some people prepare for alien invasion (the Mars kind, not the Guatemala kind), some for the rapture, who can forbid one to prepare for Trump revoking citizenships? I am just providing some data on how realistic this scenario actually is, where to take it from there is one's own business.

Meanwhile, right-wing nativist Chuds in my parents' country have decided they think bloodline-based citizenship is the actual menace and are taking steps towards ending it.

What is the reasoning here?

Your report was obnoxiously unfunny and we have to deal with enough spurious and bad-faith reports on posts.

Normally I'd leave it at that, but you have a history of this kind of obnoxious trolling, so banned for a day. Knock it off.

Too many undesirables from Brazil using it to resettle, apparently.

Fascinating. Are they agitating to reset jus saguinis?

I can see that being a valid approach for a Westphalian nation-state, every couple hundred years or so as its culture slowly shifts.

“Everyone who is here right now, and has some percentage of original stock blood, gets to be a citizen. Everyone outside that circle, you are more not like us than you are like us so we don’t want you anymore.”

Presumably you would get some churn in the population genetics without experiencing a total overturning of the original culture.

Could work out.

Doesn't seem like the best idea if you have declining fertility because you can't even get your own domestic original stock bloods to reproduce.

You eventually have to make up the deficit with foreigners and it's better to have foreigners with domestic great grandparents than no relation at all.

I will just say that I think fertility is a bit of a crisis in a lot of places, but not necessarily in the way people think.

If the concern is “Lowered fertility makes the GDP line stop going up,” that’s not a crisis. GDP lines should be allowed to fluctuate up and down as populations grow and shrink. It’s not the end of the world, especially in the nuclear age.

From that standpoint, there is no deficit that needs to be made up with foreigners. The native population will organically wax and wane over time if not interfered with. It’s only when a lot of foreigners are brought in that a native population might begin to feel pressured to spur increased fertility rates as a way of not being boxed out by invasive newcomers, which creates a fertility crisis.

Are there any decent countries that I can buy a citizenship in?

A search for "golden visa" reveals lots of options. 1 2

Doesn't necessarily equate to a passport and/or a useful passport