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The new citizenship rule enacted by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services has done a lot of damage this week, especially because it did little to change the paperwork process from 20 to 30 people a year.
It was not a major policy change on the part of the Trump administration just executed for laughs. It was for the lawyers to act to refine the words in a manual in order to comply with the State Department's interpretation of the existing laws.
This will result in a red tape change for the few American citizens whose children, under long-standing law, do not get citizenship at birth.
USCIS officials said Thursday during a phone call with reporters that they felt the rule could affect up to 25 residents or US citizens each year. They arrived at this estimate by looking at the number of similar requests received in the last five years.
When the rule change was announced on Tuesday, the media became hysterical, under the impression that the administration was effectively removing the automatic citizenship rights of children born abroad to certain US citizens. That's not what happened, officials said.
They said the rule change was aimed at aligning USCIS policies with state department rules and federal laws. USCIS previously interpreted the law differently from state to state, meaning that some foreign-born children were granted US citizenship, but the state told them that they did not follow the appropriate process to obtain a passport.
Who is affected? Like one of those 20-minute Rachel Maddow monologues, the details are really complicated and very dry.
Here is an example: if an American citizen lives in Germany and has a child, under federal law, there are two ways to obtain citizenship of the child. The first, more automatic, procedure under section 320 of the Immigration and Naturalization Act is simply to move to the United States and establish a residence there.
The second process, section 322, applies if the parent can not or will not move to the United States with their child. The parent should apply for citizenship and the child should at least touch the foot in the United States.
The rule change states that federal employees working for the federal government abroad and living abroad must therefore comply with section 322 rather than the section. 320.
USCIS officials would not tell me that any case of section 322 application would be dismissed.
But the bottom line is that children who are not automatically granted citizenship under the current law will follow different process rules that allow them to obtain citizenship. In very rare cases – for example, if the parent is a citizen who has lived less than five years in the United States – this rule change will require the parent to return to the United States and reside here in order to obtain the citizenship of the child. .
Despite all the hysteria she provoked, it's a very boring rule change.
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