Losing Your US Citizenship

Our rights are eroding and it is happening rapidly.

I am a member of Democrats Abroad Germany (DAG), as well as Indivisible Deutschland. One of the things that I do as part of DAG is that I am in a political book club. Our group meets weekly and our meetings always mix in politics and a discussion of the book we are reading. This is the format that has evolved with our group.

The US Supreme Court’s support of Trump’s Department of Justice Memo on stripping Naturalized US citizens of citizenship if they are criminals led to a conversation. Some people in the book club were German citizens who moved to the US and became naturalized US citizens. They could lose their US citizenship if it was determined that they committed a crime. We talked about how people who were naturalized US citizens and had to give up their citizenship from their first country upon becoming a US citizen, would then be stateless if stripped of US citizenship.

One member asked, “what can you do if you are stateless?” Another member said that stateless people can get Nancen Passports. So, I looked it up and according to Wikipedia, they no longer give them out. It says that the office that used to do this was closed in 1938. Stateless people can still get travel documents, but they need to do this from the United Nations. Given that they still have to apply for visas it would not be very helpful if they cannot get a visa because they are stateless.

Substacker Julie Roginsky assumes that people who are made stateless can end up in one of Trump’s concentration camps. We assume this too. Apparently there are around 25 million naturalized US citizens. I have several friends who have become US citizens in order to make going on sabbatical easier. In fact, as academics they and their spouses are naturalized US citizens. Some are from countries that do not allow them to have both citizenships. A friend of mine is from Austria which does not allow dual citizenship. Her husband is Turkish. He can have dual citizenship. Their children, who were born in the US, have 3 citizenships right now. I think their daughter was supposed to choose when she turned 18. I don’t think they mentioned it to Austria. Expats in Austria are working to change these laws so that people in Austria can have dual citizenship, but I don’t think it is likely to happen under their conservative government.

My mother, who came to the United States in the 1950s, never became a US citizen because until recently she was not allowed to have US and German citizenship. She did not want to give up her German citizenship and then have the US take back the citizenship if she naturalized, like they did to Germans during WW2. She did not want to ever be stateless. During WW2, German-, Italian- and Japanese-Americans living in the US were rounded up. Some were repatriated to countries they had often never been to, and some were put in camps. Generally these different ethnic groups were not put in the same camps. Knowing that the US had taken citizenship from naturalized and US born Americans during WW2, my mother did not trust the US citizenship. Seems she was right. Now it is too late. She has dementia and could not pass a citizenship test.

We are wondering what will happen to the US born children when both of their parents are naturalized US citizens, if their parents get stripped of US citizenship. Will there be a move to send them away, and to strip them of their US citizenship too?

What about children born abroad whose parents are both US born US citizens and who live abroad? Will these children be stripped of their citizenship because they were not born in the USA? That would be unfair to people in the US military who work on bases abroad. While that is not part of this memo it seems like it could be on the list of things Trump wants to change. Rights he wants to take away.

Trump is already trying to take away the right to vote from those of us living abroad. Something he is not taking away from us, even though he promised it in his campaign, is our having to file taxes in both the country we live in and the US. Even Green Card holders have to file taxes in the US for 10 years after they move back to their home country or somewhere else. In fact, even if Trump takes away our citizenship we are expected to pay our taxes, but we cannot collect our social security living abroad. Ruth Ben-Ghiat has said that her mother, who lives in England, can no longer get her social security checks because she is supposed to show up in person to process continuing to receive them, and she has dementia and cannot do that. This is one of the ways Trump and his MAGA party steal social security from us.

While naturalized US citizens are only supposed to be able to lose their US citizenship if they commit a crime, apparently just being accused of a crime strips you of the right to free legal defense, which means you do not really get due process. Anyone could accuse you of a crime, making all Naturalized citizens vulnerable. Trump is already using the language that makes protesting into a criminal act. Who knows what will become illegal as his regime continues. I am assuming that what allows people to be able to keep their US citizenship is being docile, and doing what Trump wants you to do. You also have to have the right skin color, politics, religion and perhaps income. I am waiting to see if Trump will follow through on his threats to strip the US citizenship of people born in the US to US born parents. He wants to be able to get rid of anyone. Everything is a source of grift for him. I really don’t think he sees the world as we do. He can only see an opportunity to force people to give him money. He has no use for the rest of us.

I grew up hearing about the East German Stasi, the state secret police and what life in the DDR was like for my relatives who lived there. My maternal grandmother’s family was in an eastern German state, although she and my grandfather lived in the west and raised my mom and her siblings in the west. I don’t even know how my grandparents could have met. I think he was stationed in her town when he did military duty or something like that. Her brother married in the East and left his first family behind in a little German village in the state of Thüringen, near the border to the Czech Republic and moved to the west before the wall went up.

When the wall finally came down and the DDR regime was over, I went with my great-uncle to visit his family. His son and first wife were constantly talking about the Stasi. I could see what an outsized role being spied on played in their lives. Now I see Peter Thiel of Palantir, and Elon Musk as the Stasi in the US because they have gathered all of our data and provided it to Trump who is figuring out how many ways he can use it to control and punish all of us. Not just immigrants, but US citizens as well, and they give him the intel to do this. If someone can figure out how to get us out of their databases, they should win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Many friends who are naturalized US citizens marched with me for the environment, for abortions rights, and all sorts of human rights, but they are not marching any more. Some of them would be stateless if they lost their US citizenship. That is not a position anyone wants to be in. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves, or possibly get arrested. Several friends are traveling this summer to Europe to visit family here, and I assume it will be fine when they return.

I also have family and friends who have permanent residency in the US. Only one such friend is traveling out of the US this summer. She is going with her husband who will be giving a very important speech. He is a naturalized US citizen. Other people with Green cards are not traveling anywhere because they do not want to come to ICE’s attention and find that border control is going to harass or arrest or detain or deport them. So, in essence they are imprisoned in the US.

People who are working in the US are trapped in a bad situation. It is not easy to get a job in another country. Some fields make it easier, and many make it harder. My friends are academics in the humanities and sciences. In the humanities it is hard to get a job abroad. The US has the most universities of any country, and often both people work at the same university in the US, and have tenure. Even to have academic jobs in different universities but the same city is great. That will be hard to do abroad. People like Timothy Snyder and Marcy Cook, who both got offered jobs to a University in Canada, are really fortunate. I have friends who are living apart. She got a job in France and he cannot find a job there or anywhere else in Europe, so he is still at his job in the US. They are moving the children to France to live with their mother this summer.

I will wait and see what happens, and prepare for the worst if I can. When Trump first brought up taking away citizenship I read many legal experts who said that Trump was unlikely to be able to strip us of US citizenship. I was not so sure. I must admit I have never had the much faith in the Supreme Court. It has always seemed kind of miraculous when they do something good. This is not surprising me. I know who is on the court, and I have seen how they have decided in favor of a right-wing agenda.

Stripping people of citizenship is part of a continuum that starts with many Americans not saying anything when Trump talked about deporting immigrants without giving them due process. He has been getting away with ignoring the courts, and finally counted on the Supreme Court to allow him to do what he was going to do anyway. Already at the point of marching as we saw him doing what he said he would do, we were too late to stop him. There was no push back during the election campaign to say, “immigrants are good and we need them. Let us treat them fairly.” Sure we are losing health care, because so many doctors and hospitals will shut down from the drastic cuts, but that won’t matter if we lose our citizenship too. People need to demand a path for immigrants to come to this country, and we should not accept having less rights in the US than we had before Trump came to power again.