Curious side effect of changing citizenship laws.

[yella_dawg]

This article explains how a recent change to Canadian citizenship laws left a child born in Peru without a citizenship at all (possibly). While the article is unclear about this specific case, it does state that children may be born without any citizenship under Canadian law. Which is the main problem I see with all the bloody shirt politics going on around immigration reform in this country.

[Posteritatis]

1. That one's caused quite a bit of confusion the last few years

The rough version of the situation in the article is as follows:

Person A and B are completely natural-born full-blooded Canadian citizens born to parents who were also born here unto the whateverth generation. While abroad, for whatever reason - work, travel, a surprise birth (this happened to me; I came out two months early while my folks were in the States briefly) - Person C is born. C is a Canadian citizen by virtue of his or her parents. (I think this would also be true if only one of A and B were citizens too; I'm open to being corrected.)

Fast-forward an appropriate length of time. Person C marries Person D, who isn't necessarily Canadian, and the same thing happens as happened with A and B. Person E, who is the result, is not a Canadian citizen under the current law, while beforehand he or she could have been (even if there might be some impressive red tape involved).


It was absolutely well-intentioned - the goal was to fix a really horrible, accidental hole in existing citizenship laws which caused many Canadians to lose, rather than simply never have had, citizenship - but it's incredibly difficult to do even small changes to citizenship laws, even with the most benign intentions, without causing a surprising amount of collateral damage like that. In this case it wasn't the intent, but it comes eerily close to feeling like degrees of citizenship, which I find it very hard to see as anything other than a Bad Thing.

I don't exactly have much faith in the current government's ability to address these sorts of things (grumble grumble nativist fuckheads grumble), but wouldn't mind seeing some tinkering with the situation to address things like this as well. The mobility of people in this day and age really fuzzies up citizenship laws in many countries, which often still assume an ability to move around that was more common in the eighteenth century (or the tenth, for that).

You're absolutely right that unintentional impacts like that need to be considered before even the smallest changes in citizenship laws. The government here went into repairing a law with the most benign of intentions and it still wrought havoc among some families. I've had this on my mind for awhile as a Person C who would definitely like any potential kids to have the same citizenship I do, and preferably in a less annoying way than I got mine confirmed.