[conspire] New laws in 2016, cont'd.

[Nick Moffitt]

Rick Moen:
> Deirdre just now informed me that it's a Federal crime for any US
> citizen to enter or leave the US other than using a valid USA passport.
> 8 U.S.C. 1185(b), https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1185 .

This can get tricky, because some folks actually aren't aware of their
constitutionally-defined citizenship status.  After the US Slaveholder's
Rebellion[1], southern states kept trying to deny the US and local state
citizenship of freedmen.  As a result, the 14th amendment to the US
constitution was ratified to make it very difficult to deny citizenship
to anyone born within the USA.

I worked with someone who flew into the US regularly on his UK passport
for work.  He'd done it often, but one time the border guards stopped
him and took him into an interrogation room with a huge stack of
paperwork, and began grilling him.

At first they just confirmed the data they read out of his UK passport.
But then they asked him "Place of birth?" and he truthfully answered
"Los Angeles" because his two British parents had been living in
California when he was born.

    "We don't mean to alarm you, sir, but the federal government has
    reason to believe that you are a US Citizen."

So, just like that, dual citizenship as the punchline to a nasty shock.
He had technically been violating Title 8 all this time, and as a US
citizen could have been arrested then and there for this.  He was
fortunate in that the Special Relationship makes the US unlikely to mess
with pale-skinned UK nationals.

[1] Also known as the War of Southern Aggression:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Ruffians
    or more commonly taught as the US Civil War.