Have you ever wondered about the possibility of your citizenship being snapped after spending 61 years in a country. The odds are pretty low unless we’re talking about a country which wants to adapt segregation as state policy. But what if I tell you that this happened in one of the biggest and oldest democracies of the world, the USA.
An Indian origin doctor who was born in the United States and lived for the entirety of his life in the US faced a shock when he tried to renew his passport. When Siavash Sobhani applied for a passport renewal, he was told by the authorities he shouldn’t have gotten US citizenship in the first place.
At the time he was born, his father was a diplomat at the Iranian embassy. According to the rules, children born in the US whose parents enjoy diplomatic immunity cannot acquire US citizenship at birth. Diplomatic immunity protects a diplomat from the jurisdiction of the country they are employed in.
The whole scenario here tells us about a clerical error that took place 61 years ago but the fact that no authority ever found any problem in it for all this time is more concerning. Forcing a citizen to lose their citizenship because of an error committed by the State is not acceptable in any scenario.
