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Thanks go to Andy Sundberg in Geneva for pointing out this article. The flip side might come as a surprise to some US citizens whose children have been born outside the US. Andy’s remarks: “While some American parents discover to their consternation that it is currently perfectly acceptable under the US Constitution and US law for a child born abroad to a US parent to actually be stateless at birth, this never happens to children born in the United States to illegal immigrants.  It is one of the many human rights absurdities in our world turned upside down, and now this aberration is leading to an enormous mess in trying to send illegal immigrants back home.”

My 20-year-old son, eligible to vote for the first time in the US elections in November 2008, discovered to his astonishment that he could not, or at least not without great difficulty, because he was born outside the US and was therefore stateless. States, not the federal government, are responsible for voter registration and without a state  you have no vote. American Citizens Abroad and the Overseas Vote Foundation are working to correct this. The foundation provides help to voters who have trouble with the system, but it still isn’t easy for many people.

Read the article in USA Today, “Most illegal immigrants’ kids are US citizens”

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