Milestone One: Abolishing Conditional Citizenship for Our Children
In 1961, a number of US laws on the books were detrimental to the citizenship rights of Americans who lived abroad. AAWE was founded in large part to work to change these laws.
Not everyone may remember the battles we won, but all of us are the beneficiaries of these successes. As part of the 50th anniversary celebration, the AAWE News will be publishing a series of articles reviewing the milestones of these efforts to improve the citizenship rights of Americans abroad and their families. The first of the “Citizenship Milestones” histories is below.

The Issue
Imagine arriving at the US consulate in Paris to register your new-born daughter (born in France) as an American citizen and being told that she could have US citizenship, BUT it would be revoked if she did not spend five continuous years in the US between her 14th and 28th birthdays?
This was exactly the situation of Phyllis Michaux in 1949. Her reaction was shock, sadness, and alarm. Conditional US citizenship? Who had ever heard of such a thing? Her child would have to move to the United States by her 23rd birthday and remain there for five years to keep her American citizenship. Where would her daughter go in the US? How would the family pay for this? Surely there was something that could be done to change this situation, but what?

Establishing AAWE
The question remained with Phyllis through the years. In early 1961, she met another American woman married to a Frenchman. She realized she was not alone and that a good first step to finding answers was to reach out to others in the same situation. She set about to determine how many other American women in Paris were in dual national marriages. The group soon numbered about a dozen and they were motivated. They devised a survey to locate other “wives of Europeans”, held meetings, and gathered information from each other and from the State Department. By the end of 1961, their number had grown to about fifty women all of whom wanted to solve problems facing Americans abroad. AAWE was born, and eliminating “conditional” citizenship for members’ children was high on the list of priorities.

The Bellei Case
When, in 1969, the case of Bellei v. Rogers arose, the AAWE leapt into action. Aldo Bellei, the plaintiff, was the 29-year-old son of an American mother and an Italian father. Born and brought up in Italy, he had lost his US citizenship because he had not resided in the US for the requisite five years. He brought suit in Federal court seeking to have this requirement declared unconstitutional and his citizenship reinstated.
During the 18 months that ensued until the final Supreme Court decision in 1971, AAWE members moved into action. They raised the funds to file a “friend of the court” brief, wrote letters to Congress, distributed case histories, spoke with US officials; and sought press coverage wherever they could. Time magazine picked up on this activity and published a full-page article on Phyllis’s daughter being at risk of losing her US citizenship and on AAWE’s efforts in supporting the case.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled against Bellei and the AAWE position, but that loss turned into a win: the experience that AAWE acquired in working on the case was invaluable. It became clear that Congressional action was the key. As Phyllis said in her book, The Unknown Ambassadors, “We really never took the time to be disappointed at the Court’s decision. By the time it was announced, we were so involved in reaching Congress that the unfavorable decision only added fuel to the flames.”

Reaching Out to Congress
That summer of 1971, Phyllis went to Washington to explain the need for easing citizenship restrictions. She visited Congressional offices, the Department of State, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. AAWE enlisted the services of an attorney to present its views at several Congressional hearings on immigration issues in 1972. AAWE also realized the need to continue providing persuasive evidence of the unfairness of “conditional” citizenship and redoubled its efforts to collect and provide Congress with case histories from Americans abroad—particularly those whose children had no second nationality to fall back upon and would be stateless if their US citizenship were revoked. In those days, for example, Portuguese law prohibited women from passing on Portuguese citizenship to their children. Thus when the wife was Portuguese and the husband was American, their children had only the nationality of their fathers. If the children lost their American citizenship, they became stateless.

The Requirement Reduced but Still There
Thanks to these and similar efforts, P.L. 92-584 was enacted on October 27, 1972: it reduced the residence period requirement from five to two years between ages 14 and 28.
This was a good start, but the burden was still there to send our teenagers and young adults to the US for the required two years. Also other unfair aspects of US citizenship law were still in need of redress.
By 1973, Phyllis and others felt that the time had come to create a second organization that had a broader focus and would address what seemed to her to be an underlying cause for the failure of Congress to hear our problems: a generally unfavorable image of Americans who lived abroad.
The establishment of AARO and continuing progress. The Association of Americans Resident Overseas (AARO) was thus established in 1973. Its goal was to change that unfavorable view and also to bring together the various groups within the larger American overseas communities to work on citizenship rights and other issues as well, such as absentee voting, taxation, and exclusion from Medicare benefits for those abroad who had paid into it.

AAWE and AARO joined forces on the citizenship issue and continued to push for redress. The two groups were becoming quite adept in collaborating with other overseas US groups, organizing letter-writing campaigns, and speaking persuasively before Congressional committees and individual legislators.

AAWE and AARO each set up a Citizenship Committee, and they held a joint conference on American citizenship laws in Paris on January 14, 1977. Seventy people attended and attested to the need for changing several aspects of citizenship law. Thanks to connections and alliances made at this conference—and AAWE’s increasing knowledge of how Congress worked—a bill was introduced in the House and the Senate that year to ease some of the restrictive requirements. Progress was being made.

In January 1978, a second conference on citizenship issues was held in Paris. This time, AARO and AAWE had the active participation of many other overseas groups including the Republican and Democratic Party Committees of Europe, American Citizens Abroad, the Federation of American Women’s Clubs Overseas, and the Federation of International American Clubs. The voices of Americans abroad were getting louder and being heard in Washington.

Repeal of Conditional Citizenship
Finally, on October 10, 1978, Congress responded, and the “conditional” citizenship requirement was eliminated IN ITS ENTIRETY for children born overseas after 1952.

With a stroke of the President’s pen, the “conditional” part of our children’s citizenship simply disappeared. And this is why today (and since 1952) our children are no longer required to live in the US in order to keep their US citizenship.

But let’s imagine for a moment what the situation would have been had this unfair and discriminatory law remained on the books. How many of our children might have lost their US citizenship as young adults?

One glitch. This amendment worked well for children who had not yet reached the deadline (their 26th birthdays) for going to the US. However, it was not made retroactive. Thus, those, who already had missed the deadline and lost their US citizenship before the new law was passed, were not given the possibility of having it restored.

Ironically, Phyllis’s two children were in this group. Despite her having worked so hard for such a long time, her own family did not benefit from the 1978 legislative victory over “conditional” citizenship. Phyllis’s family had to wait quite a few years more before this situation was improved, but that happened several “citizenship Milestones” later and gets us ahead of the story.

• Michael Adler and Kathleen de Carbuccia

Citizenship Milestone Two: Ensuring that Our Children are US Citizens at Birth
This is the second article in a four-part series on Citizenship Milestones.

In the previous Citizenship Milestone article (“Abolishing Conditional Citizenship for our Children” in the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of the AAWE News), we reviewed how AAWE and other American organizations¬ worked to abolish the US law that required our children to reside in the US for two to five years by age 26 in order to keep the US citizenship they were born with. If a child failed to go to the US as a teen or young adult, his/her US citizenship was revoked. Happily, Americans abroad finally convinced Congress to abolish this requirement; and ever since 1978, child¬ren who are US citizens are no longer required to spend any amount of time in the US in order to retain the citizenship they were born with.
In this article we will take up an equally serious issue: the limitations US law imposed — and to a lesser extent continues to impose — on overseas American parents’ eligibility to transmit US citizenship to their children born overseas

Eligibility to Pass on US Citizenship
Prior to 1986, US law stated that an American married to a non-US citizen was eligible to transmit US citizenship to a child born overseas only if the US parent had spent ten years in the US prior to the birth of the child, and five of those ten years had to have occurred after the American parent reached age 14. The periods of time the parent spent in the US did not have to be continuous; they could be aggregated.
The procedure was usually as follows: The parent went to the local US Consulate to register his/her newborn as a US citizen. The parent was asked to fill out a form that included having to list all of the time he/she spent outside of the US. The parent was not told the implication of this form (ie, that a ten-year physical presence requirement needed to be met). The Consular officer would retreat to another room and count up the time periods listed. If the parent had spent 10 years (120 months) in the US, five years of which (60 months) were after age 14, the Consular officer would register the child, and that would be that. However, if the parent had not been in the US long enough, the child was denied US citizenship at birth.
By the time the parent learned of this requirement, it was too late because the time spent in the US had to have been prior to the birth of the child.

Examples of how this played out.

Teresa lived in the US all of her life. She was 20 when she married her French husband and moved to France. Transmitting US citizenship was no problem for her. Her friend, Martha, however, had spent her childhood and adolescence with her American parents in various capital cities around the world. Martha was born in the US, but that was not enough. Given that she had married a non-American and her children were born abroad, Martha’s children could not be US citizens at birth because she had not spent the requisite “10 years/5 after age 14” in the US prior to their births.
Another example of the problem was the case of the American woman who, during her “Junior Year Abroad,” married a Frenchman and stayed in France. Up to then, she had lived all of her life in the US. She was 18 when she left the US to reside in France, and when her child was born in France two years later, she had more than ten years in the US, but did not meet the “five years after age 14” requirement.

Citizenship Committees continue their focus on Washington

In early 1979, AARO, AAWE, ACA, and FAWCO embarked on a concentrated campaign to change this law. Phyllis Michaux and others went to Washington in that year to meet with the staff of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, key State Department officials, the Acting Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and—very importantly—members of Congress and their legislative staffers.
Our position was that the requirement for the US parent to transmit US citizenship to children born abroad should be reduced to two years of US residence in the aggregate.

Senator Edward Kennedy introduced a bill with just such an amendment, but it languished in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Special Commission also recommended such an amendment in its final report issued in 1981, but this recommendation was never acted upon. From 1979 until 1986, the Citizenship Committees of AARO and AAWE, and our counterparts in ACA and FAWCO and other overseas groups, did everything we could think of to make our case for reform.

We launched letter-writing campaigns. We prepared position papers and presented case histories of children of Americans who were harmed by the requirement. We developed effective working relationships with members of the Administration. We also met and communicated with the members of the staff of the Congressional Committees and Sub-committees that had jurisdiction over this legislation.

The Good News and the Bad News

Persistence paid off … somewhat. After six years of our efforts, in 1986, the Department of State put forth its legislative proposals and included an amendment reducing the transmission requirements. These were incorporated in the Citizenship Reform Act of 1986. The good news was that the residency requirement for transmission of US citizenship was reduced from ten years/five after age 14 to five years/two after age 14. The bad news was that Americans abroad still had a significant hurdle to overcome to transmit their US citizenship to their children.
From 1986 to 1994, overseas groups from all over Europe worked vigorously to have this requirement reduced to a simple two years in the aggregate. But despite all our efforts—including official testimony at hearings in 1992 and 1993 before the House Subcommittee on International Law, Immigration, and Refugees of the House Judiciary Committee—Congress resisted further changes.
And thus this provision remains the law to this day: a US parent married to a non-American who has a child born overseas must, prior to the birth of the child abroad, have spent five years (60 months) in the aggregate in the US with two of those years (24 months) occurring after age 14 to transmit US citizenship.

Making the best of this situation.
As the saying goes: Being forewarned is being forearmed. At least we now know that this transmission requirement exists.
American parents who were unable to transmit US citizenship to their children should be aware that other options exist for having children obtain US citizenship if they are under 18 years old. Those options are the subject of a future article in this series.

The importance of documentation.
Parents who fulfilled the US residency requirements should note that they still apply in the case of potential grandchildren. The question then becomes: how can you safeguard the US citizenship of a potential grandchild in the event that your American child, at some later point in his/her life, decides to marry a non-American and has a child born abroad? The answer is document, document, document. The case history and discussion below are based on a March 1997 article that appeared in the AAWE News on this question. The article is as relevant now as it was then.

Case History
Valerie, an AAWE member, was born in Boston and lived in the US until she was 22 years old. In 1977 she married André, a French citizen, and moved to Paris where she has resided ever since. Her daughter, Judith, was born in 1980 in Paris and was registered as a US citizen at the Paris Consulate with no problem. Valerie had more than satisfied the US physical presence rule. Judith, a Franco-American citizen, grew up in Paris with her parents. She spent a number of Christmas and summer vacations in the US visiting family, went to summer camp, and attended a US university. In 2005, Judith married a French citizen, and the couple resides in France. They have just had their first child, Sam, Valerie’s first grandchild.

Is this grandchild a US Citizen at birth?
He is, (1) if before Sam was born, Judith had spent a total of 60 months in the US with 24 of those months occurring after Judith was 14 years old and (2) if she can convincingly demonstrate this fact to the US Consular Officer. It should be noted here that it does not matter whether or not Judith was born in the US. What brings the requirement into play is that she is a US citizen, married to a non-US citizen and the child is born abroad.
Because Judith has resided outside of the US for most of her life, her application to register Sam will probably be carefully scrutinized. The five-year requirement is objective, and without objective evidence, how can the Consular officer be reasonably certain that Judith actually spent 60 months in the US? Providing documents and other kinds of tangible evidence showing when she was actually present in the US greatly strengthens Judith’s verbal assertions.

Documents that could be helpful.

There is no set rule about the documents needed, but Judith and her mother would have done well to have kept any of the following as Judith was growing up: Judith’s US passports (with entry stamps), her airline tickets to and from the US. (Since US authorities give no exit stamps, it is important to keep airline tickets and boarding passes that corroborate the exits corresponding to the stamped entries.) Other possibly helpful items might include letters from summer camp, school records, work records (including summer jobs), copies of tax forms, old diaries and agendas covering the time-frames in question, college transcripts.
Consular officers don’t require written proof of every day the parent was in the US, but they do need enough documentation to give them good reason to conclude that the parent was there. For example, if the parent was enrolled in a US university, Consular officers will not count that as a full 12-months of physical presence, but they probably will if it can be shown that the parent remained in the US for the summer and Christmas vacation, i.e., that the parent actually spent the time claimed. Consular officers also look for false documentation. The US-citizen daughter of an AAWE member we know of had proof from an employer that she worked a summer in New York. On seeing this document, the Consular officer followed up with several questions about the job and what it entailed.

The moral of the story.
Future AAWE grandmothers should be aware of the need to collect documents and other evidence of their children’s time spent in the US as they are growing up. One might simply keep such papers unsorted in a shoebox or the like, just in case. If the occasion arises in which these documents are needed, that will be one box of souvenirs one won’t regret having kept.
Watch this spot for future articles. The next one will take up the question of alternate ways for children of Americans abroad—including children adopted abroad—to obtain US citizenship.

-Michael Adler and Kathleen de Carbuccia

Citizenship Milestone Three – Citizenship for Children Not US Citizens at Birth

This is the third article in a four-part series on AAWE Citizenship Milestones.

In previous articles, we reviewed how AAWE and other American organizations:
1) in 1978, abolished conditional citizenship for our children born abroad prior to 1952, and
2) in 1986, modified the requirements for transmission of US citizenship to children born overseas to one American parent, so that now five years of prior US residence is required, of which two years must be after reaching age 14 (rather than 10 years total, five after the age of 14 as previously required).
But what about the children born to American parents who had not lived in the US long enough, or at the right ages, to transmit citizenship to their children born abroad? The 1986 law was a big improvement, but a number of AAWE members’ children were already without US citizenship because of the old law, and not everyone could comply even with the 5-year requirement. In addition, children adopted abroad by US citizens residing overseas could not acquire US citizenship at all unless they immigrated with their parents to the US.
This article will discuss the options we have now for such children.

Lobbying Congress: Help and Hindrances

From 1986 to 1994, AAWE participated actively in the lobbying effort, first to reduce the residence requirement further, which Congress resisted as reported in Citizenship Milestone Two, and then to find another way for these children of Americans abroad to become US citizens.

By 1987, we had found a new friend in Congress, Bill Alexander from Arkansas. A long-time friend of American Citizens Abroad president Andy Sundberg, Congressman Alexander was interested in developing foreign trade by making it easier for Americans to live and work abroad. He introduced a bill to reduce the residency requirement mentioned above and to automatically grant US citizenship to any child born abroad of a US citizen parent if that child would otherwise be born stateless. He continued to reintroduce this legislation until 1992. While we had the support of the State Department that the issue of statelessness needed to be addressed, Congress was unwilling to further ease restrictions and seemed generally indifferent to the problems of Americans abroad.

Then, even without Facebook, we found another friend, Congressman Mervyn M. Dymally from California, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Operations. He was originally interested in the security of US diplomats, but became sympathetic to our issues too. He held hearings in 1989 on the range of federal laws that work against Americans living abroad, including citizenship, taxation, and voting issues. AARO, FAWCO, ACA, Democrats Abroad, Republicans Abroad and the European Chambers of Commerce testified. Michael Adler, testifying for AARO, submitted a statement for the record from AAWE outlining the needed changes in citizenship law and policy.

World Conference of US Citizens Abroad

After that hearing, Congressman Dymally brought a bipartisan task force to Paris to hear more testimony, which led to the first World Conference of US Citizens Abroad, held at the American Hospital in 1990 and organized by the same associations. Ten members of Congress attended. The federal agencies most concerned with overseas Americans were represented and over 200 people attended from all over the world. It was a very useful gathering, a kind of town hall meeting on the problems of Americans abroad.

Several AAWE witnesses testified about their children’s citizenship problems¬. They included the parents of adopted children and an American mother married to a European whose assignment abroad by her US employer prevented her from satisfying the 10-year residency requirement. As a result, her older child was not American but her younger child, born after the 1986 law, was. Speaking of children born overseas to Americans, she told the Congressmen: “No country in this day and age can afford to dismiss such a mine of inter¬national goodwill”.

The World Conference did not result in citizenship legislation, but it gave our issues impetus and visibility. It was the catalyst for changes in the State Depart¬ment’s interpretation of the loss of nationality rules so that, henceforth, applying for a foreign nationality did not automatically mean that the applicant intended to renounce her/his American nationality. There will be more on that topic in the next article.

Expeditious Naturalization

By 1992 it was clear that transmission reform would not happen and that we needed to find a way for the non-US citizen children who wanted US citizen¬ship to be naturalized. We worked with Congressman Romano Mazzoli, chairman of the House Subcommittee on International Law, Immigration and Refugees, and his staff on expeditious naturalization procedures that would:
1) be feasible for Americans abroad to follow, and
2) satisfy the insistence of Congress that the children have a strong link with the US.

The resulting bill included a procedure available to children under 18, including adopted children, having an American parent or grandparent who had resided for at least five years (two after age 14) in the US. The process was entirely under the jurisdiction of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (which, in 2002, was merged into the Department of Homeland Security which now has responsibility for administering it). The process begins with an application filed from abroad and sent to a Homeland Security district office chosen by the parent. (These are located throughout the 50 states.) When the application is approved, the child and the parent make an appointment at the district office where there is a short interview and, if the child is old enough to understand, he or she takes an oath of renunciation and allegiance and is granted a Certificate of Citizenship.

The bill passed the House but was not enacted into law and was re-introduced in 1993, when Michael Adler testified again at subcommittee hearings. The bill finally passed the House and Senate and became law in October 1994.

We had a solution, but it was less than perfect.  Considerable documentation had to be filed in the US; communication was difficult; many district offices had not even heard of the law at the time of enactment; some lost the file or simply delayed so long that a few children reached age 18 and could no longer qualify.

As time went by, however, Homeland Security became more familiar with the procedure, and currently it appears to be working reasonably well – although a bit cumbersome. It requires a measure of determination. Still, quite a few AAWE grandmothers now have American grandchildren through this pathway. We would like to think that they feel it was worth the effort.

“Automatic” Citizenship:  The Child Citizenship Act of 2000

In 2000 a new law was passed to grant immediate naturalization to a minor¬ child upon lawful admission as an immigrant to the US. It was intended to provide an easy and immediate road to citizenship for children adopted from abroad by Americans residing in the US, but, as a matter of equal application of the law, it covers biological children as well.

An application for an immigrant visa is made at a US consulate abroad. (It should be noted that some consulates outside of France prefer that Americans abroad use the expeditious naturalization procedure.) When the immigration visa is ready, the child travels to the US and becomes a naturalized US citizen upon arrival on US soil — i.e., when going through immigration at the point of entry. In many respects, this is a simpler way to obtain US citizenship for children under 18 because communication is easier with one’s local consulate than with a Homeland Security official in the US and no appointment at a district office needs to be scheduled in the US.

If you are contemplating either of these alternatives for your children or grandchildren, please feel free to contact Kathleen de Carbuccia for more information.

-Kathleen de Carbuccia and Michael Adler

Citizenship Milestone Four – Safeguarding US Citizenship When One Takes on a Foreign Nationality

What would you do if you wanted to pursue a profession in France (such as teaching) that required you to become French, but you knew that obtaining a foreign nationality was almost sure to result in your US citizenship being revoked?

For the American women who came together in 1961 to form AAWE, this was not a theoretical question. Not only were there problems surrounding their children’s US citizenship, as we have seen in previous articles, but these AAWE members were all too aware that there were certain “wrong” acts that could result in their losing their own US citizenship. Fear of this loomed over their heads like a dark cloud, and as it turned out, this cloud remained there for over three decades.

Expatriating Acts
Prior to the 1950s, section 349 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) listed the specific acts that were expatriating. It stated that a US citizen “shall lose his (sic) nationality by voluntarily performing any of the following acts:”. The first act on that list was “obtaining naturalization in a foreign state upon his (sic) own application.” There were other expatriating acts listed such as taking an oath of allegiance to a foreign state or serving in a foreign military service; however, the main act leading to loss of US citizenship for AAWE and AARO members was applying for and becoming a naturalized citizen of a foreign country.

The State Department’s literal interpretation.
The State Department viewed the word “voluntary” as meaning “of one’s own volition and choice” (as opposed to involuntary, such as if a gun was held to one’s head). The words “upon his own application” were interpreted to mean taking any action whatsoever, such as filling out a form. The working assumption was that applying for and accepting a foreign nationality was proof that the person no longer intended to be a US citizen.

Needing foreign nationality in order to work: between a rock and a hard place.
Of course, the truth was that the vast majority of Americans faced with this situation absolutely wanted to retain their US citizenship. For them, taking on a foreign nationality was only an interim step for them to be able to pursue their professions.

In France, many jobs at that time required that applicants be French citizens. Such jobs included working for the CNRS, working for the French government at certain levels, teaching in certain positions in the French public schools, practicing dentistry, or getting admitted to the French bar.

The AAWE and AARO Citizenship Committees spent many hours talking to distraught fellow Americans who faced this dilemma. We strategized about how to get around it with other organizations of Americans abroad. We worked hard in the 1970s and 1980s to persuade the State Department to soften their stance, and we spent many hours consoling those who had had their US citizenship taken away.

The State Department’s insidious procedure.
If its interpretation of the law was harsh, the State Department’s process for determining Section 349 cases was secretive and mean—at least it felt that way to the person who was in danger of losing his or her citizenship.

First, the local consular official would not give any advance rulings so there was no way to determine the outcome prior to actually obtaining the foreign nationality. Once a person did obtain the nationality, a report was prepared by the local consulate on that specific case and sent to Washington, DC, for determination.

Second, State Department personnel—not a court of law, not a jury of peers, but unnamed federal employees in Washington, DC—would look over all the documents and “facts” of a case and make a determination about the voluntariness of the act. From there, the reviewers would draw conclusions about the intention of the person. Even when the person wrote a letter attesting that he or she did not want to lose his or her US citizenship, such a document held little weight. As noted above, the Department’s view was that performing the act of becoming a foreign citizen was proof, in and of itself, that the person intended to give up US citizenship.

Further, if the State Department ultimately decided to revoke the US citizenship (which it did in many, if not most, cases in those days), it was then too late to undo the damage.

Vance v Terrazas (1980) — Supreme Court to the rescue.
This case was the turning point. Mr Terrazas had had his US citizenship revoked under Section 349, and he challenged the law and the way it was being carried out. The Court held that the government could not designate a particular action as automatically resulting in loss of citizenship, even if such an action were voluntarily performed. The court was clear that voluntariness in a Section 349 case was not proof of the person’s intent. Intent had to be proven separately. And the State Department had the burden of proving that the person actually wanted to lose US citizenship by performing the proscribed act.

This was the outcome we had been hoping for! It provided the Constitutional protection that had been so lacking in previous Section 349 cases. The bottom line was this: An American’s US citizenship could not be taken away against his or her will.

Some improvement between 1980 and 1986, but not enough.
The Terrazas decision was a tremendously important leap forward. The State Department incorporated the holding of Terrazas in its review procedure, and far fewer people lost their US citizenship under Section 349 after 1980. But doubts still remained, mainly because the Department did not outwardly change its modus operandi.

Cases were still handled individually and somewhat mysteriously; decisions were still made in Washington, DC, by federal employees; and the Department of State also continued to refuse to give advance rulings or advisory opinions prior to a person’s formally obtaining a foreign nationality.

The advice the AAWE and AARO Citizenship committees gave to people regarding Section 349 was to document everything they could about their intention to retain US citizenship and to repeat this intention in writing at each step of the way toward their obtaining foreign nationality. This approach was quite successful, but it still required the American to put his or her citizenship up for grabs—even if the risk of loss was small. This was nerve-wracking and stressful. We needed a better approach to Section 349 cases. The question was how to get it.

Congress to the rescue.
By 1986 Congress was considering various amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act. (These included a provision that AARO, AAWE, ACA and FAWCO had worked long and hard to bring about: the reduction of the US residency requirements for American parents married to non-Americans to be able to transmit US citizenship to their children born abroad (See Citizenship Milestone Two.)

At this time, we realized it would be advantageous to have an amendment to the law that explicitly reflected the Terrazas decision. We raised the issue with Congressional staff members, and they agreed that bringing Section 349 into line with the Supreme Court mandates was a good idea. This proposal was added to the bill containing other amendments to the INA. The bill was enacted as the Citizenship Reform Act of 1986. And we rejoiced.
Since 1986, the amended text of Section 349 now reads: [a US citizen] “shall lose his nationality by voluntarily performing any of the following acts with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality.” Those eight additional words took away much of the lingering mystery and risk that the State Department procedure engendered.

Finally, in 1990, the State Department officially announced a 180-degree reversal of its policy on Section 349.

Among other things, the changes dictated by Terrazas and codified in the 1986 amendment apparently made Section 349 cases more complex, more time-consuming, and more difficult for the State Department to pursue. And so the Department changed its course on these cases.
It announced that it would no longer presume a person intended to relinquish US citizenship by performing one of the acts listed in Section 349. In fact, the Department would henceforth assume the individual intended to retain US citizenship. (Today the State Department pursues loss-of-citizenship proceedings only when an individual affirmatively states that he or she intends to relinquish US citizenship.)

The Department further announced that persons who had lost US citizenship prior to 1990 could, if they wished, have their cases reopened and re-adjudicated under the new policy.

And so it came to pass in 1990 that whatever vestiges remained of that dark cloud that hovered above our heads since the 1960s simply evaporated. The threat of losing one’s US citizenship against one’s will was gone.

A final footnote to this story.
The first Citizenship Milestone in this series of articles was on abolishing conditional citizenship for our children. One of the major reasons for founding AAWE was to repeal the US law that required our children born abroad to spend five continuous years in the US before they reached age 28 or lose their citizenship. It took seventeen years of effort by AAWE, AARO (and other concerned groups and individuals—particularly Andrew Sundberg) to convince Congress to abolish this law in 1978. While this success solved the problem for children who were born abroad after 1952, the amendment was not retroactive and did not restore US citizenship to those born before 1952 who had already lost their citizenship at the time of the law’s passage. One of the ironies of the situation was that Phyllis Michaux’s two children were in this later group.

It bothered us that Phyllis’ children and the children of certain other AAWE members did not benefit from the 1978 law that the club fought so hard to achieve.

Thus, as we close this series of Citizenship Milestones, we are happy to highlight one piece of citizenship legislation not previously mentioned: Obtaining a remedy for those children.

The AAWE and AARO Citizenship Committees proposed a separate amendment that was included in the 1994 citizenship law. It allowed those born prior to 1952 who had lost their citizenship as teenagers and young adults to be reinstated as American citizens through a simple swearing-in process before a consular officer.

In May 1995, Phyllis Michaux’s two adult children were sworn in as US citizens. Once they “(re)became” American, their children became eligible to be naturalized under the Expeditious Naturalization procedure and did so. Today, Phyllis’ children and several of her grandchildren are US citizens.
This final footnote to the story represents AAWE’s coming full circle in its citizenship work—at least in its first 50 years. We are gratified to look back and see that so many issues were resolved, or at least improved upon.

The need to carry on this work and to be vigilant goes on, particularly as Congress continues to consider major changes in immigration and citizenship law. Whatever issues await us in the future, we feel sure, that AAWE—true to form—will rise with determination and grace to meet the challenges ahead.

– Kathleen de Carbuccia and Michael Adler