...I'm fine with calling these folks undocumented citizens (ideally, on a path toward citizenship).
Undocumented Citizens
from Joseph Fishkin
The term “undocumented” generates a lot of heat in the current immigration debate. I understand the argument of those who feel that this word is problematic because it elides a key distinction: it’s not just that this group of people have lost their paperwork—it’s that they have no legal right to be in this country. That is, indeed, a real distinction. It is also a distinction that some, including the State of Texas, seem determined to undermine. When you take away access to crucial documents such as birth certificates from people who have a right to them, you can create new and strange categories of effectively “undocumented” people, in the literal sense of the word.
Texas recently decided to make it much more difficult for U.S. citizen children of parents here illegally to obtain birth certificates. For some of these children, it is now impossible. Under the United States Constitution, these children are citizens of the United States. On paper. But they don’t have the paper. And so, functionally, they are essentially stateless.
The Texas Department of State Health Services has created this new category of what I would call “undocumented citizens” by revising its interpretation of a comparatively obscure set of state regulations concerning what documents a parent needs to present in order to obtain a birth certificate for his or her child. Under the new interpretation, two crucial documents that used to work to establish the parent’s identity—a photo identification card issued by the Mexican Consulate known as a “matricula consular,” and a Mexican passport that lacks a valid visa stamp—no longer count as valid identity documents. A Department spokesperson argues in comments to news reporters that these documents are not “secure” and might be used for “fraud” or “identity theft.” They offer no explanation for why the policy changed*—at least not in the news stories or anywhere else I have seen.
In a lawsuit being heard in federal district court today in Austin, a group of Mexican and Central American parents of U.S. citizen children are challenging the new policy, on various grounds including that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. This is a tricky argument, because of course, these parents’ children are—in theory—definitely citizens, and DSHS does not argue otherwise. But citizenship is of limited value if you can’t get the documents you need to prove it.
read more:
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2015/10/undocumented-citizens.html
In September, 1942, the American women’s magazine Good Housekeeping published an article on an increasingly important task its readers faced: getting a birth certificate. “America has suddenly become aware of birth certificates,” it declared.1 Between 1940 and 1943, as the United States shifted into a wartime industrial economy, many native-born Americans faced difficulty proving that they were, in fact, citizens by birth. This was particularly true for those who sought work in the aircraft industry, like 42-year-old Grace Wilson. After her son joined the military, she moved from Kansas to San Diego to get a job in an aircraft factory, but without a birth certificate she could not even attend a training school. “It is a bitter hurt feeling,” she wrote, “to know you are an American citizen whose grandparents as well as parents also were, and still not be able to establish citizenship.”
US law had specified for over a decade that aircraft companies must only hire citizens, but the wartime boom made this requirement relevant for many more workers.3 Despite the importance of being able to prove one’s citizenship with a birth certificate, in the early 1940s, about 43 million Americans—nearly one-third of working-age population—had no such document. Their births had never been recorded by government, and they faced complex and unfamiliar procedures for documenting their own births. This process was known as “delayed birth registration;” people sent forms and supporting evidence to the offices of vital statistics in their birth states, then waited for weeks or months to get an answer.
Perplexed by these requirements and delays, some would-be defense workers sent complaints to government officials and newspaper advice columns. One anonymous “Soldier’s Dad” wrote to the Chicago Tribune that he had lost his job for lack of a birth certificate. “I am desperate,” he stated. “I have worked for 40 years and now it looks as if I’m thru.”4 One Rhode Island man declared that “Every time I try to get a job now they make me feel like a foreigner… This is America and its not right to refuse me a job because I have not got my birth papers. I have a wife and child and I want a job.”5 A white Georgian man wrote that “[N]ever have I experienced so much delay and red tape in connection with one paper as I have in attempting to secure what belongs to me.”6 For those who already took the privileges of citizenship for granted, the ability to prove that citizenship with a birth certificate seemed akin to a basic right that they were being denied. Here, I focus on native-born Americans because immigration historians have already documented the paperwork struggles faced by immigrants in their efforts to become citizens.7
The problems these people faced were results of the relatively slow development of government identity bureaucracies in the United States. The US wasn’t like European countries, many of which had developed internal passports and other identity documentation systems in the 19th century or earlier. The United States may have been the first country to have a constitutionally-mandated national census, but that census only happened every 10 years and wasn’t used as a means of identifying particular citizens. Rather, American documentary identity systems-— like the vital-records bureaucracies which issued birth certificates-— were decentralized and locally run.8 Dual-federalist systems for identity documentation resulted in state offices that were unprepared to cope with their roles as citizenship documenting agencies. In the case of delayed birth registration, the diversity of state-level policies and procedures had profound implications for native-born Americans’ ability to prove their identity and citizenship.
read more:
http://cliotropic.org/blog/talks/undocumented-citizens-aha-2010/
= new reply since forum marked as read
