Downgrading Citizens

If an American marries a foreigner and lives abroad permanently--as roughly 200,000 Americans do--are his or her children U.S. citizens?

The answer depends largely on the whim of Congress. At first, the law required that the child's father be a U.S. citizen who at one time had resided in the U.S. Later, either parent's residency sufficed, but the children were required to live in the U.S. for a specific period of time to maintain their citizenship.

In 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had no power to strip a person of citizenship: he had to renounce it voluntarily. But last month the court backed away from the implications of that decision. By a vote of 5 to 4, it ruled that a key section of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act is constitutional. That section terminates the U.S. citizenship of a foreign-born child of an American parent unless the child lives in the U.S. for five consecutive years between the ages of 14 and 28.

Global Dismay. The Government wants to retain that seemingly xenophobic rule to prevent feelings of divided loyalty by the child born and living abroad. With the required U.S. residency, the argument goes, the child will better understand the citizenship he wants to hold. But the Government's victory has baffled and angered Americans all over the world. Examples:

> Aldo Mario Bellei, who challenged the constitutionality of the McCarran Act in the Supreme Court case, is no longer an American. Son of an American mother and an Italian father, Bellei, now 31, was born and brought up in Italy. As a youth, he visited the U.S. on his mother's passport; in 1952, the State Department issued Bellei his own passport, which was routinely approved until his 23rd birthday. Then, in 1966, the American consul in Rome informed him that he had lost his U.S. citizenship. Now living in Rome, Bellei spent years fighting for his right to be an American, and lost in the court of last resort.

> Gerard Menuhin, son of Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, was born in Edinburgh when his parents were there for a music festival. Now Gerard, a film editor in London, must return to the U.S. by his 23rd birthday on July 23, and live in the U.S. for five years or lose his American citizenship. Ironically, his younger brother Jeremy. 19, has spent less time in the U.S. but does not face the same danger; he was born in the U.S. Says their father: "It seems illogical to divide two brothers with the same parents and the same experience in life because one happened to be born in San Francisco, one in Edinburgh."

> Christopher Laird, the son of an American journalist in Paris, will be stateless in five years unless he returns to the U.S. Reason: his British mother's government does not grant citizenship to the children of British mothers and foreign husbands. The French will not easily grant him citizenship. The boy was born in Switzerland, not France. And the Swiss do not recognize territorial birth.

> Harry Goldberg, head librarian at the American Library in Paris, is married to a Frenchwoman and has two French-born children. He wants his children to retain their U.S. citizenship, but sees no way it can be done. "With the kind of job I have and the sort of income," says Goldberg, "it is financially impossible for me to send my children to the U.S. for five years so they can remain American citizens."

Terrible Disappointment. Last week Phyllis Mitchell Michaux, founder of the Association of American Wives of Europeans, began drawing up a petition urging Congress to eliminate the U.S. residency requirement for foreign-born American children living abroad. Mrs. Michaux's own French-born daughter Carolyn, 22, must now decide whether to move to the U.S. for five years. "The Supreme Court decision was a terrible disappointment to thousands of Americans living abroad," said Mrs. Michaux. "But we hope to win the second battle in Congress." If Congress balks, what Justice William Brennan Jr. called in his bitter dissent the "downgrading [of] citizens born outside the U.S." may become a permanent reality.

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