For reference, the US has procedures for this: https://www.usa.gov/citizenship-no-birth-certificate because people without birth certificates are still somewhat common, even children.
Vermont didn't require it until 1955!
replies(10):
Vermont didn't require it until 1955!
The Boer in question were the people enforcing apartheid for generations. They're also still the majority land-owners in South Africa due to the apartheid system. As of 2017 it was around 73% of Agricultural land owned by the beneficiaries of Apartheid.
I'm sorry but you can't just cry foul when your racism record setting attempt falls apart in the age of the internet and the victims hold a grudge.
This is the least bit surprising coming from a country that is in steady decline.
When McCain was running for president, there was a big court case about whether being born in the Canal Zone (a U.S. territory) qualified as being a "natural born citizen". And I made the connection - "Wait. The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?"
Moot point by then, he'd already been a citizen for ~40 years, and died the next year. But it was wild to think that the 10+ years of immigration hassles were basically due to an administrative fuck-up, and that legally, he should have had citizenship all along. The process you link wouldn't work for him, either, because the Philippines is not a U.S. territory now.
Unless your dad was part of the elite ruling class which gets to skip and ignore all the rules, the answer is an emphatic no. However, if he was the son of an admiral from a long line of important people who had been in the Senate for years and finally wanted to run for president, well, then Congress might just decide that he's good enough and give their stamp of approval to all of it.
Was your dad the son of an admiral who had been in the Senate for years and finally wanted to run for president?
Besides, the thing with McCain wasn't about whether he was a citizen or not... this was 100% the case. The trouble was that McCain didn't become a citizen until 3 years old. And "natural born citizen" can't happen for a kid who's already 3, nor can Congress pass laws that are ex post facto, meaning they couldn't retroactively declare him natural born. He was absolutely disqualified from running, and if he had had an ounce of decency he would have accepted that and quit pressing his claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/20/world/america...
Temporal causality is not a difficult concept.
The only things that matter, according to those who love to shit on Haiti, is their apparent inability to self govern. This inability must have come from nowhere, or is genetically innate to the people.
It's crazy how every country who has had it's sovereign legs kicked out from under them multiple times just ends up being a failed state. Total mystery!
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/podcasts/trump-civil-righ...
The guest of this pod is the creator of the 1619 project and she is against DEI.
While there might be structural issues in Haiti, a colonial apologist starts with simplified one sided history -> The colonizers civilized the country -> the people deserved it -> The better side won, survival of the fittest
What I have seen is that unlike the Star Trek post scarcity world visions, all discussions are stuck at some sort of national or ethnic identities at one end or a very simplified oppressed vs oppressor ideology at the other end which prevents discussing many ideologies based on their teachings through a modern civilized lens.
It does not look like the divisions would ever improve because we are now moving into a post labor world and the asymmetry is probably a feature that defines geopolitical clout and power and no one has the incentive to think bigger.
Instead, they want to be congratulated for eventually being forced to open the box.
At that point he became a citizen, and not before.
I don't know the US well enough to give you an exact equivalent, but "shoot the WASP" might be more or less the same thing. It wouldn't be any better if the same song sang the praises of a white member of the Weather Underground.
No. Filipinos as a group were never US citizens. They were non-citizen US nationals during the American colonial period. When the Philippines became independent in 1946 the status of Filipinos as non-citizen nationals was terminated and they became citizens of the Philippines only.
https://fam.state.gov/fam/08fam/08fam030806.html
tl;dr your dad really did have to go through all that trouble.
Deny rage -> of course not. I'd be furious too.
But singing songs like "bring my machine gun" and "shoot people from that ethnic group" just aren't justified, especially since South Africa has been a democracy for decades now.
These kids can't access any services because they don't legally exist in government systems. No birth certificate means no school enrollment, no healthcare, no social grants.
You think a 15-year-old footballer who can't play in tournaments because he has no birth certificate is going to be helped by Bitcoin?
What school is letting them enroll because they have a hardware wallet?
This is a civil administration problem that needs government solutions: streamlined processes, digital systems, reduced fees, and political will.
Bureaucracy can be crazy at times, and sometimes it seems like data just gets lost, for whatever reason.
IIRC, you need a couple of people to sign affidavits that affirm you are who you say you are. That's the start of the "paper trail" and then you start rebuilding your document pool.
Getting married and changing your last name is similar (although with fewer documents etc).
Can be quite a risk for people who entered a long time ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
> Bureaucracy can be crazy at times, and sometimes it seems like data just gets lost, for whatever reason.
The easiest way of reconciling data with reality if the rules don't allow changing the data is to change reality. By deporting people.
But my MIL from Mao era has docs from the local officials that's all notarized, as does my wife. The dates might be... you know, not exactly right, but they're close, and importantly they're accepted by both the Chinese government and also other foreign governments for official purposes (immigration, etc).
I think I the article here we're talking about something fundamentally different from the last 70-ish in China. They're talking about people with like no official docs whatsoever, can't get healthcare, national ID card, anything. Very different from China 70 years ago, and very different from even pre civil war China.
Obligations on parents to generate that paper trail exist now but there are still many ways people can fall into the cracks. The US has generally been far more accommodating of Americans without documentation out of necessity than I think people realize. Some parents choose this for their children, either intentionally or through negligence, and those children need a way to bootstrap their documentation as adults.
There was a large contingent of Americans born outside the US to American parents in the aftermath of WW2 that frequently had little or no documentation.
黑孩子 and 黑户 were fairly common until the last 5-6 years.
The issues mentioned in the article were prominent in rural China and the lower tier of migrant workers before e-governance innovations along with a relaxing on the one-child policy started a decade ago.
Furthermore, the township mentioned in the article is itself one of those migrant areas in Cape Town, similar to what urban villages are in Beijing and other cities in China.
https://ballotpedia.org/Citizenship_status_in_territories_of...
However I don't see the binary extremes you see.
The undocumented people can pool together and start their own schools. They can start their own soccer league. They can hire a pooled doctor. They can put some amount of stored value into a crypto account, which might be better in some cases than hiding gold in a hole or something, because they aren't going to be able to access banking.
And yes, that situation sucks, and it's wrong, and it encourages apartheid-light, and is not an acceptable solution. But in the meanwhile, it would be better for them than nothing and it is something they might have the agency to do.
Mass deportations, elimination of legal status, all these things tend towards one very very scary direction throughout history. And you know what they say about people who do not know the history...
(Just going to ignore the DEI comment because I don't know how that relates to anything here...)
What is your indication of decline? Some facts and figures:
- Less than 30% of the population having access to water has increased to near 100%.
- Electricity had less than 30% access and now sits around 90%
- Access to education (The matric pass rate more than doubled from 53.4 in 1995 to 82.9 in 2023) to taking that to near 100% in 29 years is pretty incredible.
- Taking 8 million people out of poverty and lower class into the middle class in that time is pretty great.
- Access to free healthcare for the entire country.
- The freedom of not being discriminated towards due to skin colour.
Yes the ANC has had an opportunity to do much greater good, but if you take in the bigger picture and understand that the white population still holds over 70% of the wealth while being 10% of the population - this is an enforced inequality that needs to be righted.
If you look at the freedoms of South Africa, it has possibly the best constitution in the world. Sure, the enforcement of the laws are not as good as the laws themselves - but the rate of improvement in my lifetime has been staggering. Even despite the setback of the Zuma years.
Even now, we have gone from an ANC dominated political landscape to a Government of National Unity, which forces different political factions to work together. Another huge milestone in the burgeoning democracy of a young country.
It is so far from perfect but if you really have spent any significant time in SA and still think it is a country in decline, then I am more inclined to think you're one of the types of expats who love to shit on something that you have no bond to, and not because your arguments are bound by facts. We must interrogate the long standing consequences of white monopoly capitals violent subjugation of South Africans in both the past and the present to paint a fair picture of the country.
Your quote " a country that is in steady decline." certainly does not paint a fair picture.
It is more involved than just affidavits. The US uses databases on every citizen, some not formally acquired, that can be used to "duck type" individual identity. An affidavit is primarily used to bootstrap the entity resolution process. With only a couple touch points they can reconstruct identity with high probability. It may feel like a "trust me bro" process but it really isn't.
It is related to how the provided information on credit applications is not used to inform the creditor. They already have access to all of this information and are more interested in if your representation matches what they already know.
Could you please finish this thought? There are possible uncharitable readings that don't look so good.
So South Africans not having birth certificates or any birth records is the least surprising.
Identification and segregation is an important element of any welfare system, to prevent the system being destroyed by an unlimited amount of persons drawing aid while only a relatively fixed small pool provide the aid.
The state in the more liberal countries did not usually introduce such measures to make it difficult to live there without ID until the state had pretty much fully taken over the prior job of the church (or family) to provide to the unemployed, sick elderly, etc.
On a smaller scale, imagine back in certain periods of the old days, when families were the main method of social security. If you could not identify who was your own brother or mother, you would constantly being scammed (or even not scammed, just overwhelmed) until you were broke or the system broke.
I don't have any answer how to roll back the nationalistic identification and Orwellian immigration systems without decoupling social benefits from citizenship/residency, or from becoming so incredibly wealthy you just don't care.
Because I don't know a single South African who would describe historical intertribal violence and Dutch colonialism and apartheid as basically the same thing.
Here’s a more reasonable point of view: https://cthulhucachoo.substack.com/p/does-south-africa-reall...
in the same code list, "SA" refers to Saudi Arabia, and Zambia is "ZM".
It's really simple, we as white people have been given - historically and now - just about every advantage a minority can have. If a white person or their parents couldn't make the most of that well then that's ok, because equality and equity are the goals. And just because a PoC are succeeding more now, does not mean white people are suffering in the least.
I just started looking and, for example, when issuing licences to extract water, the authorities must, in accordance with the law, "consider [...] the need to redress the results of past racial and gender discrimination". Why would a water licence need such a consideration, and is it discriminatory in ZA's context?
They've been there over 2000 years, I think we can consider them native at this point.
European colonialists and apartheid justifiers try to shoehorn the Bantu migration as being just slightly before Europeans arrived when fossil records prove it was thousands of years prior.
Have you looked at a map? What would stop the oldest humans, who have been there hundred thousand years, from moving from the central African plans to anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa?
ZA is not ambiguous, it has that going for it.
- Many communities still rely on water trucks instead of water pipe infrastructure. The government loots the funds for it, meanwhile the entire system is on the verge of collapse and there are regular water shortages.
- With the electric grid, the amount of load shedding in the past few years where people are regularly without electric to 6-8 hours a day is absolutely crazy. The country didn't used to experience that. Also, cable theft is common, which wasn't an issue 30 years ago.
- 1.6 million people out of 66 million pay 76% of all taxes.
- Public healthcare in ZA is bad and not recommended by anybody who values their life.
- South Africa has more race laws today than it did during apartheid.
- It has a violent crime rate that is one of the highest in the world.
- Unemployment is high.
- It has suffered from massive underinvestment in infrastructure over the past 30 years.
- Extremely high levels of government corruption.
One thing that really brought home how the situation is in South Africa is was when I was talking to someone I know who works for a furniture company there. They used to make all of their furniture in the country, but recently started importing it from China because that is cheaper than producing it locally. Keep in mind that is with an average daily wage of $30 for a factory worker. If a country with South Africa's nature resources and inexpensive labor cannot compete with China for manufacturing furniture for the local market, it is deep trouble.
That is probably why the CEO of a local Tile Manufacturer recently said that South Africa is one of the worlds least manufacturing-friendly economies due to onerous regulation, infrastructure deterioration, energy uncertainty and rising costs.
And elsewhere you say that because of this, violence against white South Africans are justified.
This is not only insane, but simply historically incorrect. I'm going to stop replying to you now (apparently there's a "HN Blocklist" Chrome addon!) but feel free to keep justifying calls for political and ethnic violence.
It should make interesting reading for others in the decades to come.
So there's already a lack of a stable, functioning government, and the solution you're touting isn't currently a reality, why? In the US when there's little friction in a marketplace people in some communities resort to using Tide laundry detergent as a medium of exchange. There's nothing stopping them from using bitcoin or cryptocurrencies currently, but navigating a market place, finding qualified teachers, finding motivation to use what little resources you have to use a novel medium to pay for teachers in a place with no opportunity, etc., doesn't seem too easy. One tool alone doesn't usually solve any problems.
My own understanding of 20th century Haitian poltics is fairly limited. I don't know if "prioritized tourism via cruise ships over education" is a fair characterization of Magliore's policies in Haiti, or, assuming it is, that this constitutes a good casual explanation of the Haiti/DR economic divergence. I'm frankly skeptical - lots of places that are not Haiti have tourism as a major, government-supported component of the economy, and nonetheless are capable of providing some kind of useful formal education to their populace and have better economic outcomes than Haiti. I suspect the story in Haiti is a lot more complicated than this. But sure, if there's a specific education policy that the DR did implement in the 1950s and that Haiti under Magliore did not, that explains DR's greater economic development today, feel free to make the case.
The colonialist apologist case with respect to Haiti is something like: rich white nations are already spending money and other resources providing humanitarian aid to Haiti, because the human need there is real and the native Haitian government is not capable of governing in a way that would fix these problems. If those same rich white nations were actually formally in charge of Haiti in a neo-colonialist poltical arrangement, they could govern it better and improve the lives of the average Haitian in a material sense. It's not directly related to the colonial history of Haiti, which is over 200 years in the past at this point.
I personally think there are serious issues with this argument, but it's not completely crazy to suggest that the revealed preference of many Haitians is to live under the governance of rich white countries, especially in light of Haitian immigration to the US which was a major issue in the 2024 US presidential election.
- Loadshedding is no more.
- The tax issue is precisely the problem that needs redressing and is primarily because of past injustices. You're almost there.
- I have been treated in public hospitals and while not perfect the access to healthcare is impressive.
- I agree with the race laws. Your basis that SA has more race laws is gaslighting due to the fact of the homeland act. But let's not let facts get in the way.
- Violent crime rate is because why? Apartheid spatial planning. Read up and learn all about why this has re-enforced violent crime.
- Unemployment is high, yes. Doesn't mean the country is in decline.
- Corruption has hit its peak and on the way down post-Zuma years.
I have a close friend who owns a huge furniture company, and builds everything in house and grows year on year very well. So your anecdote is countered by mine.
It's not the case that every country that has had its sovereign legs kicked out from under them multiple times just ends up being a failed state, and this is an important observation if you're trying to come up with a theory for why Haiti is in the state it is in. As the sibling comment mentions, a number of countries that today are peaceful and prosperous places to live, the sorts of places Haitians might want to immigrate to rather than live in Haiti, are countries that earlier in history were badly defeated in war and conquered - this descibes the losing WWII powers such as Germany, Japan, and Italy, it describes countries subject to some kind of colonial influence until well into the 20th century like Vietnam, South Korea, China, India, and many other places. Most of these countries are doing fairly well today, certainly much better than Haiti, which hasn't been directly ruled by a colonial power since the beginning of the 19th century.
Germany in particular was badly defeated and occupied twice in the first half of the 20th century and had crippling debt obligations imposed on it by (largely) France, and is nonetheless a much much better place to live today than Haiti is. This is a fact about the world that needs to be explained.
Consequently, that's also why Republicans push so hard for voter ID laws.
It wasn't until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that todays standards of overseas citizenship conference took shape. Citizenship in the US is a bit of a mess.
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/123.7.Collins_r35np7ug.pd...
https://currencynews.co.za/manufacturing-meltdown-south-afri...
It sounds like you prefer communism over capitalism. Sadly, South Africa is heading towards communism. The only consolation is that then at least everybody will be poor.
Back in 2013, I loved the idea of Bitcoin. Then I actually tried using it. Such a pain. I switched to Coinbase until I gave up entirely on crypto around 2017 and became highly skeptical it was going to change the world as promised. I would love to hear that the world of self-custodied Bitcoin has become less onerous.
I completely agree. The world of developmental economics has had so many great "One tool to fix everything!" ideas, but at the end of the day, they generally don't add up to much without a functioning government that's focused on serving its citizens.
> gets a bunch of basic facts wrong
> stomps off, hits block button
The apartheid fans are not bringing their best I'm afraid.
If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, we'd appreciate it.
I largely agree with you otherwise (viz. South Africa is on the whole improving) but on this specific point I think you’re optimistic. When summer comes round I’m pretty confident Eskom will start loadshedding again, and their public statements more or less align with this.
Regardless: not a sign of decline! Loadshedding is evidence that demand > supply, but that doesn’t imply supply is decreasing or the system as a whole is failing. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that supply has steadily increased since the 90s, new facilities opening and what not. Widespread solar will only improve the situation as the tech improves.
We all saw it with electricity - handing out more access isn't the hard part. Backing that with funding and capacity to deliver is.
Inequality, unemployment and debt/gdp are all on very alarming trajectories. Without a very sharp course adjustment (and soon) there are dark clouds ahead that could undo all the victories you list. Not sure if that makes it a decline, but if it were a car ride I'd say it's time to buy crash insurance
While Cuba is pretty poor(and we can talk about embargo in those respects), they generally met their revolutionary goals. They got the mobsters out of Havana, who previously had massive sway in the government alongside the American ambassador. They massively improved literacy, put tons of effort into health for their citizens(prior to the revolution, a majority of cuban children suffered from foot parasites among other things), and did a relatively forgiving land reform to remove the big land-owners from power(ie Land reform in Japan post WWII by the US was considerably harsher policy wise iirc).
As far as a country with a huge trade embargo against it, they've done pretty well and built up allies around the world.
If Haiti followed a similar path, we'd see just as many complaints over their governance, but from a totally different angle.
As for DR, I think its still debatable. From the 30s to the early 60s, DR was under a dictatorship that was fairly brutal. After that, a democratically elected president was couped with US support, then essentially a man described as a puppet for the previous dictator was put into power for another 12 years. Perhaps the relative stability + having a ruler with US approval is enough to explain the relative success.
I think any time a country is kicked in the shins for being a little too democratic, there's going to be a period of rebuilding. That period gets longer each time they get kicked in the shins, with the more intelligent folks leaving each time, until they're left with the people you don't want leading a country. A self fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
It is an ordeal to go the local DHA offices to do anything - the system is offline :).
Having been born to a Canadian father in the US and moved to Canada when I was nine, my US citizenship lapsed when I turned 25 in Canada (I was quite happy to stay in Canada during the Vietnam war during my twenties). At the time I was unaware of the INA provisions repealed in 1978 that lapsed my US citizenship.
New FATCA and IRS obligations motivated me to research my US citizenship status and I was happy to discover that it had lapsed.
US Customs officers sometimes ask questions when I show up with a Canadian passport with a US birthplace. Now I pull out my copy of State Department FAM 1200 APPENDIX C to explain my status, but the legalese is a challenge for people with just high school. .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Africa
Because of this many companies are reducing staff or pulling out. https://businesstech.co.za/news/energy/837719/important-busi...
....and that's before we get into things like Transnet and SA Air. I'd love to see the country succeed, but putting your head in the sand and denying that there is a problem will not fix things.
> As for DR, I think its still debatable. From the 30s to the early 60s, DR was under a dictatorship that was fairly brutal. After that, a democratically elected president was couped with US support, then essentially a man described as a puppet for the previous dictator was put into power for another 12 years. Perhaps the relative stability + having a ruler with US approval is enough to explain the relative success.
Haiti was also ruled by brutal dictators in the mid-20th century, and was receiving aid from the United States for much of this time. So this can't in and of itself be an explanatory factor for why Haiti is so much worse off than the Dominican Republic.
That's when Bell Pottinger came up with a campaign to stoke racial tension by popularizing the phrase "white monopoly capital" to distract from the Guptas:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/sep/05/bell-pottinger...
https://african.business/2025/10/energy-resources/has-south-...
I'm trying to apply that logic to any of my gov't services, and it would be outrageous to have any random thing responsible with redressing past racial discrimination, water rights, maternity rights, access to public information, literally any government service. It couldn't possibly be in their purview to take such a thing into consideration.
- Googling for water outages gives a lot of results in just the last few days. In the NorthWest for example there are a lot of failing municipalities which are relying on government assistance to just make it month to month. Water trucks are a common occurrence all over. The official numbers on connection to water, electricity etc. are pretty much a joke.
- Loadshedding is indeed no more: Up to about 10-15% of households are now living off-grid, while in the industrial sector I can link you any number of metal processing plants that have closed down, the same for mines, car manufacturing etc. In the last few years our electricity bills have about doubled, rates and taxes aren't far behind either. That's not a win in the least.
- Healthcare: A few of the more well funded public hospitals are ok, but just from Tembisa approximately 2 billion Rands have been siphoned as of recently. Impressive isn't the word to use. Google for images to see the conditions of the hospitals and what the people who go there are experiencing, while on the other hand you can see videos of tenderpreneurs riding their Lamborghini's with police escorts via dirt roads in the outlying areas.
- Violent crime has nothing to do with apartheid (apart from the occasional incitement by political parties etc). We have crime because somewhere between 33-43% of the population is now unemployed, along with having only a barely functional police force. The people stuck on the bottom have no hope of changing their circumstances, which in turn is fueling crime (and violence).
- What makes you think there's less corruption now? The fact that more and more of it is coming to light? As long as the governing party allows it to happen its going to cascade down into all facets of life/business etc. They've begun to realize that they are losing the vote (and with it the power), but we're still a long way off from having any change on the horizon.
- Single anecdotes are pointless, some businesses will naturally grow while other decline, a lot of it is just random luck based on the type, area, time etc. Foreign investment is down something like 29% in just the last two years while we've taken on more than R25 billion in loans just recently.
> They've been there over 2000 years, I think we can consider them native at this point.
> European colonialists and apartheid justifiers try to shoehorn the Bantu migration as being just slightly before Europeans arrived when fossil records prove it was thousands of years prior.
> What would stop the oldest humans, who have been there hundred thousand years, from moving from the central African plans to anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa?
The Khoisan have been in South Africa for 20,000 - 30,000 years.
While the Bantu-speaking groups brought advancements like agriculture, ironworking, and permanence settlements, they also displaced the original Khoisan peoples, pushing them from fertlie lands or hunting grounds. Raids or conflicts over cattle and territory also happened. Assimilation and intermarriage also occured, causing many Khoisan to lose their distinct langage and culture over time.
This is completely incorrect and is not what the issue was with his citizenship. John McCain was born in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone, the area around the Panama Canal that was controlled by the US. The Naturalization Act of 1855 granted birthright citizenship to foreign born children of a US citizen father [1], and was reaffirmed in 1878 [2]. The Equal Nationality Act of 1934 added that a US citizen mother could also confer citizenship to children born abroad [3].
Most interpretations considered The Canal Zone to be foreign territory for citizenship purposes. The issue was in the extremely specific wording of the Acts, which was that children of US parents born “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States” were granted citizenship. The Canal Zone was outside the limits of the US, but was technically under the jurisdiction of the US. So, depending on how you interpret the Act, children born in The Canal Zone are in a weird no man’s land, where they don’t get citizenship as a result of being born in the US, but also technically aren’t on totally foreign territory, which would give them their parent’s citizenship. In 1937 (a year after McCain’s birth, not three years), Congress passed 50 Stat. 558, explicitly making children born in The Canal Zone to a US citizen parent US citizens [4]. There was no citizenship law 3 years after McCain’s birth, but the Nationality Act of 1940 was four years after, however, its significant change was allowing children born out of wedlock to a US citizen mother to be given citizenship [5].
[1] “persons heretofore born, or hereafter to be born, out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose fathers were or shall be at the time of their birth citizens of the United States, shall be deemed and considered and are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, however, that the rights of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers never resided in the United States.” extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-10/pdf/STATUTE-1...
[2] “All children heretofore or hereafter born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose fathers were or may be at the time of their birth citizens thereof, are declared to be citizens of the United States; but the rights of citizenship shall not descend to children whose fathers never resided in the United States.” Original Statutes of 1878
[3] “Any child hereafter born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose father or mother or both at the time of the birth of such a child is a citizen of the United States, is declared to be a citizen of the United States; but the rights of citizenship shall not descend unless the citizen father or citizen mother, as the case may be, has resided in the United States previous to the birth of such child.” 8 FAM 301.5 SECTION 1993, revised statutes of 1878 extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-48/pdf/STATUTE-4...
[4] “any person born in the Canal Zone on or after February 26, 1904, and whether before or after the effective date of this Act, whose father or mother or both at the time of the birth of such person was or is a citizen of the United States, is declared to be a citizen of the United States.” extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-50/pdf/STATUTE-5...
[5] “The provisions of section 201, subsections (c), (d), (e), and (g), and section 204, subsections (a) and (b), hereof apply, as of the date of birth, to a child born out of wedlock, provided the paternity is established during minority, by legitimation, or adjudication of a competent court.” 8 U.S.C. 605; 54 Stat. 1139 https://fam.state.gov/fam/08fam/08fam030106.html
I didn't say that explicitly, but you are right that I'm implying that it is customary to use "native people" to refer to the original occupants of a territory, not subsequent waves of humans.
For context:
a) Khoisan (20,000 - 30,000 years)
b) Bantu-speaking groups (1,500 - 2,000 years)
c) white South Africans (300 - 400 years)
I guess you could say that there is a "degree" of nativeness, where a > b > c, but I would question the motives for doing so.
> No one considers the Roman empire not native to Europe
That's drawing arbitrary lines to suit your argument. Nobody would claim that the Romans were native to Gaul, for example.
I'm trying to understand what is the reason behind your points, but am struggling to do so. The less generous interpretation of your angel is that you're trying to say that white South Africans or Indian South Africans or Chinese South Africans are less native than black South Africans or that black South Africans are more native than the Khoisan. I don't know that you are saying this, but your argument does seem to point in that direction and is divisive, FWIW.
>> Native South African is a debatable word.
There has been a recent right-wing movement in South Africa to politicize the Bantu migrations to minimize the impact of European colonialization and ultimately apartheid.
Has there? I was in South Africa twice earlier this year and didn’t see anything in the news or in public. Do you have a reference that illustrates what you have in mind?
What is also hilarious is ad hominem trying to call me a communist (which I am not), and shouldn't matter either way. But what is funny is how you decry the state of things currently, which is happening under capitalism, yet the extent of your criticism of the society can't reach to the system within which it exists. However you create a nebulous hypothetical in trying to plaster me with an insult that another system would be so much worse, when according to you the state of how things is bad as it is.
So where is your critique of capitalism?
The government is privatising electricity generation and increasing private sector access to the rail network.
The business friendly Democratic Alliance party is in coalition with the ANC, rather than the far left of the EFF which is currently not in government.
You can believe South Africa will end up being communist. But the evidence falls against the statement that South Africa is heading to communism.
Privatisation is not communism.
The Khoikhoi and the Bantu entered South Africa about 2000 years ago, between 1 and 300 AD.
Europeans arrived to settle in the 1600s, bringing with them many people from Asia, Madagascar and the rest of Africa.
The settlement of South Africa by these different groups did not happen within a 200 year window.
This really looks like a propaganda piece. Is there an _analysis_ why they don't have a birth certificate ? AFAIK the apartheid regime was in power until the 90's.
