The Newspaper of Record had a profile recently of a Yemeni citizen who was found to have been mistakenly recognized as an American citizen.  It is a typical story of Yemeni immigrants, at least those who don't come here to kill us all like the Lackawanna Six.

In this case the much abused method of immigration is quite disturbing.  It is a roundabout way of gaining citizenship without having to go through the immigration process.  Basically, an alien comes to the United States as a legal permanent resident, then obtains citizenship.  The newly naturalized alien then leaves the United States and usually starts living again in his country of origin.  It shows just how little immigrants think of their ties to the United States.  For them, citizenship is a just a passport of convinience.

NYT February 26, 2012 by Kirk Semple

Because U.S. Erred in ’90, Bronx Resident Becomes a Man Without a Country

Abdo Hizam says he has always tried to be a good American. Born in 1980 in a small village in Yemen to a Yemeni-American father, Mr. Hizam received an American passport through a law that provides citizenship to the children of Americans.

He moved to Dearborn, Mich., when he was 9 to live with his grandparents and embraced his new world. He gave up his Yemeni citizenship. He graduated from high school and earned a business degree at a local college. He worked for years at a local restaurant, and he opened a small grocery store. Throughout, he rooted passionately for the Detroit Lions.

But last year, his life was suddenly upended. The State Department told him that he had received his citizenship in error in 1990. The mistake had been no fault of his or his parents, officials said, but rather a bureaucratic blunder by the government.

Still, the State Department said it could not fix the mistake. Officials said the law left them with only one option: They revoked his passport and effectively stripped Mr. Hizam of his nationality, plunging him into an extraordinary stateless limbo.

Mr. Hizam, who is living in the Bronx, has filed a lawsuit against the government, demanding that it affirm his citizenship and reissue his passport.

“I feel betrayed,” he said during a recent interview in a conference room at the New York University School of Law, where he is being represented by members of the Immigrant Rights Clinic.

Notice that he did not come to live with his father.  Notice also the pattern, father goes back to get a bride, but leaves bride and child there for whatever amount of time.  And he also  appears to be living back in Yemen.  And Hizam is also on the same plan, live here a while, go back for a bride, don't sponsor her for years, have a child or two born overseas so they can get their initial upbringing in dangerous and hate-filled country, just so future children don't "Americanize."  It must be, as why would anyone leave a wife or child in that violence plagued and Islamist country?  Only one who did not want young children, or wife, exposed to anything un-Islamic.

He quickly found his place among the large Arab-American population in Dearborn and became assimilated into American life. Over the next two decades, he traveled back and forth to Yemen several times and the American government renewed his passport twice.

On one of those trips, in 2002, he wed a young Yemeni woman in an arranged marriage. They now have two children.

“My plan was to get that 9-to-5, be out of debt, be financially stable enough to bring my wife and kids and live my life here,” he said. “I’m trying to get ‘the picket fence.’ Everything you get drilled into your head, I’m trying to live it.”

In 2009, like his father two decades earlier, Mr. Hizam applied for citizenship for his two children and wife so they could join him in the United States.

But after several weeks of delays, a consular official in Sana told him that the United States authorities had discovered a problem in his file: His father apparently had not satisfied the requirements for conveying citizenship to him two decades earlier.

According to the laws at the time, Mr. Hizam’s father could transmit citizenship to him if he could show that he had lived in the United States for at least 10 years before his child’s birth.

Mr. Hizam’s father, it appeared, had filed his paperwork with the correct dates delineating his time in the United States, but that time apparently added up to less than eight years, according to court documents. State Department officials approved the citizenship anyway.

Also of importance is that there is nothing for the State Department to do.  Hizam is not an American citizen, he just does not qualify.  His father did not live in the U.S. long enough to pass on his citizenship.  The whole story is baby-waving for the benefit of the current Regime's Administrative Amnesty.

The even more frightening thing is not that aliens are gaming the system, but that people of such low regard for the U.S. that they won't look for a wife in the "large Arab population" of America, but have to go back to get married, and then leave wife and children in that country.  Why, pray tell?  And Yemen of all countries, the nation that gave us Osama Bin Ladin. 

But as Congress has lessened the time required for naturalized citizens to reside in the United States, the problem is only getting worse.  Pakistan similarly provides many who immigrate, but don't acculturate, frequently departing the U.S. as soon as they are naturalized, then passing citizenship on to children for who an American passport is just a convenience.  Like Faisal Shahzad, who naturalized yet never acculturated, and later became a threat.  Note that his Pakistani American wife apparently derived her citizenship, but fled to Pakistan before Shazad's terrorist attack. 

Derived citizenship is just another source of hate-filled aliens, like the rest of the immigration system.  Time to restrict it to native-born and long-resident citizens who just happen to give birth overseas because of some temporary government or corporate assignment.  Not for those who game the system.