South Africa's one million invisible children without birth certificates

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!

So does South Africa. However, capable administrators are severely lacking.

If I was looking to cite evidence that South Africa has a racist past I'm not sure stadium chants would be my _first_ example...

I feel like there is some other racism South Africa might be infamous for...

> South Africans coming forward are being treated with suspicion that they are an illegal immigrant

I can't help but wonder if similar concerns will appear in the US, if they haven't already.

Actual race-based apartheid ended 9 years after the first Windows release.

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.

The Amish have a social security exemption.

My dad was born in the Philippines in 1939. He came over to the U.S. on a Taiwanese passport in 1959, part of a group of students that MIT imported from the Philippines based on letters of recommendation from their Atomic Energy Commission, and then bounced around on various visas for a decade. Finally got citizenship upon marrying my mom in 1971.

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.

>And I made the connection - "Wait. The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?"

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.

McCain was the child of two citizen parents and thus a citizen at birth.

One of the main figures lionized in that song (which is an anti-colonialist chant to be clear) is a white guy, Joe Slovo. These people are unserious.

This is getting off topic but I do not believe that the Commonwealth of the Philippines was legally/formally a US territory in 1939. It was a protectorate whose foreign affairs were administered by the United States, but it had its own government/constitution that was formally independent and administered by Filipinos. It was more like Cuba than Puerto Rico in the context of the Spanish American war.

For now. I'm not being snarky or hyperbolic. Today's Daily pod is related. I'm half way through and no mention of voting yet, but it takes no imagination to see where this is going. Remember the whole "Obama wasn't a citizen" thing? Remember the "illegal aliens elected Joe Biden?" The best way to disenfranchise a segment of the population is to give them difficulty proving they are citizens, so they cannot vote.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project

Joe Slovo isn't Boer; of course he has no problem with Kill the Boer as he allied himself with the ANC againts the Boer. Being white doesn't excuse you from tribalism/racism.

It's already worse than that. There are multiple stories of US citizens being detained just because they look Hispanic, which the authorities have decided means they look like illegal immigrants, and then accused of presenting fake IDs when they try to prove otherwise.

Being a territory doesn't mean you become a citizen in any case. American Samoans are not citizens, nor are they entitled to bypass the naturalization process if they wish to become one.

Legally, he was very much not a citizen at birth. You are simply incorrect. In the year in which he was born, children of citizen parents born overseas were not citizens at birth... that only changed 3 years later when Congress passed a law making it so.

At that point he became a citizen, and not before.

It's "anti-colonialist" in the sense that it encourages the mass murder of the descendants of the original colonialists.

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.

Save me the pearl clutching. The song was penned by people living directly under the thumb of those poor innocent descendants and waging an active battle for their freedom. You'd even deny them their rage against those directly culpable for their oppression.

Tribalism is not when you colonize a country and terrorize the former residents from centuries. Tribalism is when your multi-racial coalition pens a song expressing their rage at said terror. I understand now, priors updated.

> The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?

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.

When the US took the Philippines the plans started soon after to make them an independent country.

Poor innocent descendants -> I did not call them poor, or innocent.

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.

None of the founding fathers were US citizens at birth because the US didn't exist yet.

Isn't there a similar mechanism but for the case where you lost ALL of your documents e.g. in a house fire.

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).

What kind of exemption? (I am French so I may understand Social Security in the US wrong)

They can choose not to get a social security number like anyone else, but the real exception is that they can take a religious exemption to paying social security while basically most everyone else who is of a religious organization objecting to social security past X date (I think around 1960 from memory) cannot ( I suspect this is unconstitutional religious discrimination against later forming religious groups, if I were rich I'd challenge it). However there are a couple other groups -- preachers can exempt themselves as can members of the railroad and a few other industries that have been heavily entwined with government and provide their own pension plan.

Some members of my family have no record of birth or formal existence until they were quite old.

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.

On the other hand, people born in Guam, Puerto Rico, NMI or AVI are US citizens.

https://ballotpedia.org/Citizenship_status_in_territories_of...

The creation of stateless people during WW2, those without passports or birth certificates or citizenship, was a clear path towards the Holocaust. And the same tactic is used to this day to perpetrate genocide around the world.

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...)

Who are you to say what is justified?

Are you familiar with South Africa?

There's at least a dozen different tribes, of which only two are white. There's been inter-tribal violence between all of them since time immemorial leading up to today.

Consider the case of foreign-born Americans living overseas who have lost all of their documents get new US documents. How does the US government distinguish them from a random person in that country impersonating the same?

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.

They don’t bypass naturalization process but US Nationals can apply for US citizenship by moving to United States, which they have right to with no limits, and apply for naturalization within 3 months of being here. They take the tests and boom done, US citizens.

Are you?

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.

Moral relativism at its finest. Turn away now, because this is a dead end my friend. "ethnic cleansing is justified if the violence goes the way I prefer" is the red flag of all red flags.

Your argument was "there's no tribalism except what the whites brought to South Africa", remember?

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.

It seems lawyers are very divided on this. And he was never naturalized so I think there's a strong case for him being natural born.

There is a separate proviso for that!

Before segregation ended, it was relatively common for hospitals to turn away pregnant black women, ultimately forcing them to use midwives instead. Those born via midwives often were not issued birth certificates, so many black Americans have none.

Consequently, that's also why Republicans push so hard for voter ID laws.

Citizenship by blood is not established in the Constitution but by the various modifications of the Immigration and Nationalization Act. In 1936, when McCain was born, the 1934 modified version of the Cable Act allowed transmission of citizenship via his mother as well as his father...

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...

The Cable Act of 1934 allowed his mother to transmit citizenship by blood

There wasn't a concept of citizenship in the original Constitution until the Naturalization Act of 1790

> replies to my comment

> gets a bunch of basic facts wrong

> stomps off, hits block button

The apartheid fans are not bringing their best I'm afraid.

I guess, except that ethnic cleansing bit is something you just made up. What is actually happening is that you've been memed into caring about the winners of a justified war singing their old war songs.

"Allowed" is the operative word. It didn't define it. There was still a process to follow.

1955 was 70 years ago, it doesn’t seem that surprising.

> The apartheid fans are not bringing their best I'm afraid.

Oh believe me, they are.

The expatriation act of 1907 specifically called those children citizens and I don't think the Cable act is relevant here.

The Immigration and Nationality Act is a moving target. Periodically it is amended, or the Supreme Court strikes down certain provisions.

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. .

wow you're really trying hard to be dehumanize someone based on their race.

DEI is discussed at length in the podcast and is the excuse for rolling back civil rights.

>In the year in which he was born, children of citizen parents born overseas were not citizens at birth

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

McCain's parents were both American citizens. I suppose that he would have been a natural born citizen even if born in (say) France. Supposedly Henry Luce was worried that he might not be a natural born citizen, since he was born in China to American missionaries. Apparently he counted as a natural born citizen, though I don't think anyone outside his household ever imagined him as president.

The Expat law of 1907 dealt with naturalization of children born abroad to citizens and that female US citizens would LOSE their citizenship if they married foreign nationals.

You had to file the paperwork at the local consulate. If you didn't the child would have citizenship and it was a mess. Lots of American servicemen, their war brides, and children dealt with this after WWII.

Strangely, I think you might qualify to run for the presidency. Nothing in the Constitution demands that you be a current citizen, only a natural-born one... which, assuming the date was late enough, you certainly were. McCain though, I don't think he made the cut.

My bad. 1 year. I concede the dates as you have outlined.