As a member of your parent’s household at the time of your birth, you also enjoyed full diplomatic immunity from the jurisdiction of the United States. As such, you were born not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Therefore, you did not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.
The State Department is technically correct about this. The relevant text is the opening lines of the 14th Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Now the government of which his parents were diplomats no longer exists, and the Iranian state that does exist would provide no home for him. It would regard him as an American and delight in the abuses they would impose upon him if he were deported there. As such, he surely and legitimately qualifies for asylum here, and then for legal residence and eventual citizenship.
However, there are times when it is important to be able to set aside the law in the name of justice. Justice is not as simple as a rulebook, and never has been. The error was not his own, but the government's; and now, when he is 62, is no time to try to correct the error in this technical way.
Judges are not properly empowered to set aside the law, although they sometimes do, but juries can do so. It strikes me that the correct resolution here would be to put the matter to a jury for consideration, and almost any American jury would recognize that it would be unjust to try to pull the rug out from under his feet after six decades of having "been a good citizen," as he thought he was and as which he so behaved. If we're going to be deporting people for technical violations of the rules of immigration, there are literally tens of millions of people ahead of him in line.
3 comments:
Judges are not properly empowered to set aside the law, although they sometimes do, but juries can do so.
So, too, with prosecutorial discretion. That could be applied, here, also, and with no more long-run uncertainty than rolling the dice on a jury trial. Prosecutorial discretion, honestly applied, has the prosecutor declining to prosecute this matter under existing law, as opposed to so many prosecutorial abused-discretion decisions that involve declining to prosecute under the law altogether.
Of course, for prosecutorial discretion to apply to the doctor, the question of whether his presence in the US constitutes a crime to any degree or is a civil wrong would need to be answered.
Eric Hines
I don't think he's committed any crimes; I think he should sue the government and get a jury trial.
Probably he hasn't committed any crimes in any normal sense, but if he's here illegally, that might be a crime, however unfairly, regardless of how he got here.
If he sues, the government might prefer a bench trial and argue for that, with some weight, since it would be the government that's the defendant.
Eric Hines
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