Court Upholds Gender Disparity for Derivative Citizenship

Via Marc A.: Story here. Excerpt:

'The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday held that disparate residence requirements for unwed male and female citizens over the age of 14 who seek to transmit citizenship to a child born abroad to a non-citizen do not violate equal protection.
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...the father must have resided in the United States for at least five years after his 14th birthday to confer citizenship on his child. In contrast, an out-of-wedlock child born abroad to a United States citizen mother had only to reside in the country for a continuous period of one year prior to birth...
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[The appellate judge Pamela Ann Rymer] reasoned that the disparate treatment between mothers and fathers was justified because the government has a substantial interest in avoiding “stateless” children born to citizen mothers, and also a substantial interest in assuring a link between an unwed citizen father and the United States.

Although “the fit is not perfect,” she wrote, “the means chosen substantially further [these] objectives.” Thus, she concluded, the sections withstood constitutional scrutiny.'

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Comments from Marc:
I did a case just like this when I worked for Mental Health Advocacy Services, except the client was mentally disabled and it turned out he was actually a U.S. citizen born abroad out of wedlock in Korea to a U.S. citizen father and a non U.S. citizen mother. His father had done the acts that legitimated him under the laws of his domicile. But since his citizen parent was his father rather than his mother, he had to prove who his father was and that his father performed those acts, which took a huge amount of work gathering documents from Korea, etc. He suffered from severe schizophrenia and believed he was an FBI agent, and he could not possible do all of that. He spent YEARS in detention because of this, solely because his citizen parent was his dad and not his mom. We only learned of him when a group of Quakers from Hawaii called us about him. By that time he had been detained for years. It took more than another year for me to track him down, interview him, gain his trust, gather all the evidence from all over, translate documents, prepare the right motions, etc. etc. He was finally released because he was a U.S. citizen, but that was YEARS of his life locked up for NO reason other than the sex of his citizen parent. Unbelievable. Now the 9th Circuit just upheld this same sex discrimination in the case described below.