Happy Father’s Day–Unless Your Child’s Born Out of Wedlock

Alex DiBranco writes for Change.org:

Fathers’ rights advocates should be outraged over this little provision of immigration law: if you have a foreign-born kid born out of wedlock, that child has a much better shot of acquiring citizenship if his mom is an American citizen than if you’re the one with a U.S. passport.

The law seems premised on little more than the notion that mothers are the ones who should and will take care of the children, perhaps combined with the idea that men go galloping off to foreign countries and spread their seed willy-nilly, but don’t really need to take any responsibility for raising the resulting human beings. Whatever the justification, this is what, in my opinion, is called blatant gender discrimination.

In March, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments to decide whether my opinion will be considered legally binding — or, rather, if this law violates equal protection principles. The case at hand deals with Ruben Flores-Villar: born in Mexico, raised by his father in San Diego, and now facing deportation. If his mother was an American citizen who had lived in the U.S. for just a year before he popped out, he would have qualified for citizenship. Unfortunately, when your father is the American in the family, he has to have lived here for 10 years prior to the child’s birth, at least 5 of those years after the age of 14. To meet this latter requirement would have required some serious manipulations to the time stream, since Flores-Villar’s dad was only 16 when he entered the world of parenthood.

[The relevant fedeal statutes are at 8 U.S.C. §§ 1401(a); 1409(a), (c).]

bh