Born in the USA? When a birth certificate isn’t enough
Until last month, Isabel Concha-Foley assumed she was just a normal American college graduate, fresh out of San Francisco State.
Then she applied for a passport. In a terse letter, the State Department told her that it didn’t believe her U.S. birth certificate was real. Worse yet, a local passport agent told her, federal officials had flagged her as a “possible fraud.”
Why? Because she had been born at home and her birth certificate had been witnessed by a midwife. Never mind that Concha-Foley’s mother, a library director, is an American-born citizen of Irish ancestry. Or that her father is a naturalized American citizen. Or that her older brother has a valid passport. Or that Concha-Foley was born and raised near Lake Tahoe and that the Tahoe Daily Tribune celebrated her feats as a high school basketball star.
It sounds insane, but it’s true. The passport-midwife saga has been going on for years, and it’s really just one piece of a broader problem.
In our panic to keep out “illegal aliens” and terrorists — and to some GOP presidential candidates, those are often the same — we are trammeling the rights of our own citizens.
It’s no secret that legal immigrants in the United States endure all kinds of Kafkaesque ordeals: employers who violate fair labor laws, Border Patrol agents who arbitrarily harass and interrogate them on U.S. highways, local police who put people in jail for 48 hours on the mere suspicion that they may be undocumented.
What isn’t widely understood is that this also affects full-fledged Americans. People who were born and raised here, whose parents are often American, are being treated as second-class citizens who have to prove they deserve to live in their own country.
Concha-Foley’s passport ordeal is chilling not because it’s unique but because she is so demonstrably an American. She has a birth certificate. Her parents are American. She graduated from high school and college here. She has never even been outside the United States.
Yet the Passport Services Directorate is demanding a slew of evidence that would come as a shock to most Americans with Anglo surnames.
Does she have a green card or a border-crossing document? (No, and why ask? If she was born in the U.S., she wouldn’t have crossed a border to get here.) How about medical records from 1992, the year she was born? How about her parents’ tax returns or rental records from 24 years ago?
This kind of documentation can be hard to come by. Concha-Foley’s pediatrician moved away years ago. Her elementary school is still around, but it can’t provide her old records. Her mother, following standard practice, throws out tax returns after seven years. And honestly, only a seriously troubled hoarder keeps rental receipts for a quarter century.
You are no doubt wondering: What is so suspicious about midwives?
Midwives have been with us throughout history, and they attend about 8 percent of American births. Many parents prefer home births, especially those who can’t afford hospital deliveries or who live in remote areas. Many affluent, urban parents prefer home births as well.
Back in the early 1990s, however, allegations surfaced that midwives in Texas and other border states were selling birth certificates. It’s not clear how much this actually happened, but the State Department reacted with outrageous demands of passport applicants who had the double misfortune of a Hispanic surname and of being born at home.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued in 2008, accusing the State Department of “blanket race-based suspicion.” One plaintiff in that case, a decorated Army veteran named David Hernandez, had been rejected for a passport even after he supplied his baptism certificate, school records, immunization records and proof that his mother had lived in the U.S. when he was born in 1964.
The State Department settled that lawsuit and promised to make its procedures more reasonable, but horror stories continue. In Oregon, an Americanborn businessman named Angel Alcántar fought the State Department for more than 30 years before finally getting his passport in 2013. Alcántar had more than just a mass of documentation. His parents had gone to court on his behalf back in the 1980s, and a local judge, after hearing the evidence, had ruled against the State Department and issued a “delayed” birth certificate. Even after that, however, the government refused for years to give Alcántar a passport.
The broader problem is an array of anti-immigrant policies and practices that undermine constitutional rights.
Right now, the Texas Department of State Health Services is refusing to give birth certificates to many babies of undocumented workers, even though the children were born in hospitals. A U.S. district judge recently ruled that the practice “raises grave concerns,” but he refused to issue an injunction while the case makes its way through the courts.
“All of these policies are subjecting people of certain ethnicities to higher standards for proving their citizenship, creating sub-classes of second-class citizens,” says Jennifer Chang Newell, a senior attorney on immigration issues at the ACLU. “The right of citizenship shouldn’t depend on your ethnicity, the color of your skin, your last name or whether your birth certificate was signed by a midwife.”
If someone as obviously American as Isabel can become snared in institutionalized bigotry, imagine the vulnerability of the millions of American citizens who speak with an accent or don’t have American-born parents.
Is this an America we want to be proud of ?