There may be some more light in the tunnel for international adoptees in the form of U.S. citizenship. Legislation was introduced June 10 by Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), and co-sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), on the House side (H.R. 5454), to provide retroactive citizenship for all international adoptees. The bill is companion legislation to S. 2275, introduced on the Senate side by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) last fall. Both bills have been referred to their respective Judiciary Committees. Next steps could be hearings in those committees, though nothing has been scheduled yet. These bipartisan bills represent significant progress on citizenship for all international adoptees. The work is not done yet by any means, but having bills on both the Senate and House side is significant.
In a press release, Rep. Smith said “Adopted individuals should not be treated as second class citizens just because they happened to be the wrong age when the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 was passed.” You can read the entire press release here.
Today is the second Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) Day of Action, and international adoptees and allies are on Capitol Hill to advocate for passage of the legislation. The first Day of Action was on April 19. The National Korean American Service and Education Consortium is among the leaders of today’s event. Their press release includes this story:
“Kris, an adoptee from Washington who is impacted by the ACA, said: ‘The US is my home and I am an American citizen of the United States, even if a piece of paper says otherwise. I attended college, raised 2 children, and paid my taxes as a citizen. I worked for Fortune 500 companies as a highly successful database engineer and project analyst. Now I am in a precarious state and am concerned about my citizenship and employment status. I was born in Vietnam and was to be brought to the United States with other children through the Operation Babylift during the Vietnam War. My parents who are U.S. citizens were stationed there at Anderson Airforce Base in Guam while volunteering for the Red Cross and adopted me in 1975. Somehow, my adoption paperwork was lost during the naturalization process. My parents thought the process had been completed, as there was no indication of a problem. This loophole needs to be fixed for the thousands of others who are living, like me, without citizenship.'”
It seems amazing that, for decades, international adoptees were not granted automatic citizenship when they were adopted by U.S. citizens and arrived in the U.S. You can learn more here.
Some folks might forget that international adoptees are immigrants, with all the complexity that immigration involves. I urge all adoptees and their families to make sure they have a Certificate of Citizenship. A passport is a limited means of proving citizenship, can expire, and is issued by the U.S. State Department, The Certificate of Citizenship is issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and does not expire. State and Homeland Security use separate databases, and so having a passport may not be adequate proof of citizenship for some purposes.
You may never need the CoC. I get that. But the parents of deported adoptees (those convicted of a felony and without citizenship) probably never envisioned their children subject to deportation either. Nor, of course, did the adoptees themselves, including those who have been deported to Germany, Korea, Brazil, and elsewhere, who are sitting in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, or who are unable to vote or get financial aid because they have no proof of citizenship. Why risk it?