Bret L
June 25th 09, 04:58 AM
Dysfunctional Motherland: Reclaiming Ancestral Birthrights in Post-
Imperial Britain
By Alex Kurtagic
>> "For a long time, I dated, and was subsequently engaged to, a ghost. This is because, for nearly four years, my now wife did not legally exist.
She was born in South Africa during the Apartheid years. Her father
was German and her mother English. Her father passed away when she was
very young. Her mother was born in South Africa of British parents,
one of whom had been born, in turn, in Southern Rhodesia, back then a
self-governing colony of the British Empire. Beyond these overseas
imperial Britons, my wife’s blood ties to Britain and Germany go back
millennia.
My wife’s mother spent a number of years in South Africa, working as a
British expatriate in various corporate roles during the 1980s and
1990s. By 1999, however, she decided to return with her daughter to
the British motherland.
Because my wife was young at the time, she entered the United Kingdom
with a South African child passport on the basis of her mother’s
British citizenship. Subsequently the child passport was upgraded to a
full 5-year passport.
The problems began when the latter expired in 2004.
In a sane world, it ought to have been a straightforward procedure for
my wife to reclaim her British citizenship in 1999, given her
ancestral heritage. Indeed, at the time of World War II, anyone born
anywhere in the British Empire was automatically a British subject.
Unfortunately, however, my wife was born in the postmodern age, where
a person’s heritage has been redefined by enlightened politicians as a
social construct with no ancestral basis. Consequently, the small
matter of one’s nationality is a legal construct to which any
featherless biped has equal right of access, pending a bureaucratic
process involving politically-correct forms—and (of course) the
appropriate fees.
The U. K. Home Office’s naturalization forms, therefore, only took
into account the applicant’s parents’ places of birth. It ignored said
parents’ nationality and country of residence. Because my wife’s
mother had been born in South Africa, the forms effectively rendered
my wife’s mother a non-British national, even though she was English,
had been a British subject from birth, had resided in England most of
her life, and her British parents had merely opted to have their
daughter be born in one of the imperial colonies because during the
Apartheid years South Africa had better hospitals.
And since my wife’s mother was regarded as a non-British national, as
far as the bureaucracy was concerned, my wife could not naturalize on
the basis of having a British mother—not without a complicated legal
process.
The problem was compounded by my mother-in-law’s loss of employment in
the aftermath of 9/11, which was in turn further compounded by the
fact that she was grotesquely over-qualified for almost any job, with
a fellowship, two PhDs, two Masters’ degrees, a BSoSci. Thus, by the
time my wife’s passport expired, the costs of legally challenging the
bureaucracy had grown well beyond reach. This led to a two-year delay.
Once my wife was in a position to engage specialist lawyers, it took
endless months, cubic light-years of paperwork, and torrents of money
to ascertain that, as a step prior to reclaiming her British
citizenship, she had to, first, renew the South African passport,
then, second, obtain indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom.
For that, a special application had to be made with the courts—
mysteriously, only after my wife had confirmed that she was
sufficiently well versed in foreign cultures and religions by passing
New Labour’s U.K. citizenship test.
The reason the indefinite leave to remain was the more desirable route
was that it made it possible to apply for naturalization on the basis
of length of residence. Applying without an indefinite leave to
remain, it seemed, would have led to the application being rejected.
The lawyers (ironically, like many of those keeping the gates within
the civil service, of non-European extraction) stated that the process
of naturalization would have been much easier, and indeed less costly,
had my wife been “completely foreign”. And indeed, it appeared that
applicants from Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone, poor, uneducated,
instrumentally motivated, and with no blood-ties to Britain, were,
after only a few years of residence in the United Kingdom,
successfully naturalizing themselves without comparable legal hassle.
You might be wondering why my wife did not simply renew her South
African passport in 2004. The reason: Presumably because the security
consequences of De Klerk’s abandonment of white rule have instigated a
furious and still-ongoing brain-drain, the South African Embassy had
made it a condition for passport renewal that my wife present them
with a letter from the U. K. Home Office (which was to be held on file
permanently) stating that she did not already hold, nor had plans of
ever obtaining, British citizenship.
Of course, this was untrue. Not inclined to permanently renounce her
ancestral birthright, my wife was left unable to proceed.
This was, in fact, how my wife vanished from existence. She was
effectively locked her out of having a legal identity. It made her
unable to work, open bank accounts, obtain a driver’s license, travel,
rent property, marry, or register with a university.[VDARE.com note:
All of those things are available to illegal immigrants in the United
States.] Moreover, it also put her at risk of deportation—but not to
South Africa or any other country, for she no longer held a valid
passport, but, as she often said, probably to a dinghy in
international waters, where she could be conveniently forgotten.
So, after much wrestling with, and throwing gold at the maw of, the
shape-shifting anaconda of politically correct jurisprudence, my
wife’s lapsed passport, an accident of birth and a product of
Britain’s imperial past, remained an immovable obstacle.
Finally, with no other apparent option, she decided to chance a new
attempt at renewing the South African passport.
Here, we had a stroke of luck: either because the rules had been
changed, or the forms had been re-designed, during the intervening
time, in 2007 my wife found herself able to submit her application
without the letter from the Home Office.
The South African passport took many months to arrive. Once she had
it, she made an application for indefinite leave to remain in Britain.
It took months and cost hundreds of pounds.
And once the indefinite leave to remain had been issued, it had to be
endorsed into the renewed South African passport. This took more
months and also cost hundreds of pounds.
Thankfully, the paperwork came through in time for our wedding. My
wife and I were able to marry in the summer of last year.
Thankfully, also, the London School of Economics allowed my wife to
enroll for a correspondence [= distance learning] degree, so she was
able to obtain a university education.
That I write an article complaining about the bureaucratic
perplexities and contortuplications of current British nationality
legislation for VDARE.COM, an American immigration reform website,
will seem ironic only in the largely foreign-originated Freudo-Marxist
scholasticism of postmodern academia. For VDARE.COM readers, it will
be obvious that a Motherland that is generous to distant strangers
while reneging on her own children is a dysfunctional Motherland.
Or, at least, a Motherland forced to do the inexplicable by Left-
leaning utopians, ethnic radicals, and corrupt political opportunists—
both the product and the beneficiaries of the “anti-racist” worldview
of the intellectual elite, who have held Britain hostage since the end
of World War II.
Their ascendance in the wake of the British Empire’s dismantlement has
left many overseas Britons without adequate legal sanctuary or a
cogent legal identity.
Until the academic fraudsters and the corrupt political elite are
fumigated out of the centers of learning and purged from the seats of
power, not just Mother Britain, but also Mother Europe, will continue
increasingly to spurn her own progeny—however bright or capable—in
favor of distant strangers of arguable merit and questionable
motivation."<<
Alex Kurtagic (email him) lives in England. He is the author of Mister
and the founder and director of Supernal Music.
http://www.vdare.com/misc/090623_kurtagic.htm
Imperial Britain
By Alex Kurtagic
>> "For a long time, I dated, and was subsequently engaged to, a ghost. This is because, for nearly four years, my now wife did not legally exist.
She was born in South Africa during the Apartheid years. Her father
was German and her mother English. Her father passed away when she was
very young. Her mother was born in South Africa of British parents,
one of whom had been born, in turn, in Southern Rhodesia, back then a
self-governing colony of the British Empire. Beyond these overseas
imperial Britons, my wife’s blood ties to Britain and Germany go back
millennia.
My wife’s mother spent a number of years in South Africa, working as a
British expatriate in various corporate roles during the 1980s and
1990s. By 1999, however, she decided to return with her daughter to
the British motherland.
Because my wife was young at the time, she entered the United Kingdom
with a South African child passport on the basis of her mother’s
British citizenship. Subsequently the child passport was upgraded to a
full 5-year passport.
The problems began when the latter expired in 2004.
In a sane world, it ought to have been a straightforward procedure for
my wife to reclaim her British citizenship in 1999, given her
ancestral heritage. Indeed, at the time of World War II, anyone born
anywhere in the British Empire was automatically a British subject.
Unfortunately, however, my wife was born in the postmodern age, where
a person’s heritage has been redefined by enlightened politicians as a
social construct with no ancestral basis. Consequently, the small
matter of one’s nationality is a legal construct to which any
featherless biped has equal right of access, pending a bureaucratic
process involving politically-correct forms—and (of course) the
appropriate fees.
The U. K. Home Office’s naturalization forms, therefore, only took
into account the applicant’s parents’ places of birth. It ignored said
parents’ nationality and country of residence. Because my wife’s
mother had been born in South Africa, the forms effectively rendered
my wife’s mother a non-British national, even though she was English,
had been a British subject from birth, had resided in England most of
her life, and her British parents had merely opted to have their
daughter be born in one of the imperial colonies because during the
Apartheid years South Africa had better hospitals.
And since my wife’s mother was regarded as a non-British national, as
far as the bureaucracy was concerned, my wife could not naturalize on
the basis of having a British mother—not without a complicated legal
process.
The problem was compounded by my mother-in-law’s loss of employment in
the aftermath of 9/11, which was in turn further compounded by the
fact that she was grotesquely over-qualified for almost any job, with
a fellowship, two PhDs, two Masters’ degrees, a BSoSci. Thus, by the
time my wife’s passport expired, the costs of legally challenging the
bureaucracy had grown well beyond reach. This led to a two-year delay.
Once my wife was in a position to engage specialist lawyers, it took
endless months, cubic light-years of paperwork, and torrents of money
to ascertain that, as a step prior to reclaiming her British
citizenship, she had to, first, renew the South African passport,
then, second, obtain indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom.
For that, a special application had to be made with the courts—
mysteriously, only after my wife had confirmed that she was
sufficiently well versed in foreign cultures and religions by passing
New Labour’s U.K. citizenship test.
The reason the indefinite leave to remain was the more desirable route
was that it made it possible to apply for naturalization on the basis
of length of residence. Applying without an indefinite leave to
remain, it seemed, would have led to the application being rejected.
The lawyers (ironically, like many of those keeping the gates within
the civil service, of non-European extraction) stated that the process
of naturalization would have been much easier, and indeed less costly,
had my wife been “completely foreign”. And indeed, it appeared that
applicants from Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone, poor, uneducated,
instrumentally motivated, and with no blood-ties to Britain, were,
after only a few years of residence in the United Kingdom,
successfully naturalizing themselves without comparable legal hassle.
You might be wondering why my wife did not simply renew her South
African passport in 2004. The reason: Presumably because the security
consequences of De Klerk’s abandonment of white rule have instigated a
furious and still-ongoing brain-drain, the South African Embassy had
made it a condition for passport renewal that my wife present them
with a letter from the U. K. Home Office (which was to be held on file
permanently) stating that she did not already hold, nor had plans of
ever obtaining, British citizenship.
Of course, this was untrue. Not inclined to permanently renounce her
ancestral birthright, my wife was left unable to proceed.
This was, in fact, how my wife vanished from existence. She was
effectively locked her out of having a legal identity. It made her
unable to work, open bank accounts, obtain a driver’s license, travel,
rent property, marry, or register with a university.[VDARE.com note:
All of those things are available to illegal immigrants in the United
States.] Moreover, it also put her at risk of deportation—but not to
South Africa or any other country, for she no longer held a valid
passport, but, as she often said, probably to a dinghy in
international waters, where she could be conveniently forgotten.
So, after much wrestling with, and throwing gold at the maw of, the
shape-shifting anaconda of politically correct jurisprudence, my
wife’s lapsed passport, an accident of birth and a product of
Britain’s imperial past, remained an immovable obstacle.
Finally, with no other apparent option, she decided to chance a new
attempt at renewing the South African passport.
Here, we had a stroke of luck: either because the rules had been
changed, or the forms had been re-designed, during the intervening
time, in 2007 my wife found herself able to submit her application
without the letter from the Home Office.
The South African passport took many months to arrive. Once she had
it, she made an application for indefinite leave to remain in Britain.
It took months and cost hundreds of pounds.
And once the indefinite leave to remain had been issued, it had to be
endorsed into the renewed South African passport. This took more
months and also cost hundreds of pounds.
Thankfully, the paperwork came through in time for our wedding. My
wife and I were able to marry in the summer of last year.
Thankfully, also, the London School of Economics allowed my wife to
enroll for a correspondence [= distance learning] degree, so she was
able to obtain a university education.
That I write an article complaining about the bureaucratic
perplexities and contortuplications of current British nationality
legislation for VDARE.COM, an American immigration reform website,
will seem ironic only in the largely foreign-originated Freudo-Marxist
scholasticism of postmodern academia. For VDARE.COM readers, it will
be obvious that a Motherland that is generous to distant strangers
while reneging on her own children is a dysfunctional Motherland.
Or, at least, a Motherland forced to do the inexplicable by Left-
leaning utopians, ethnic radicals, and corrupt political opportunists—
both the product and the beneficiaries of the “anti-racist” worldview
of the intellectual elite, who have held Britain hostage since the end
of World War II.
Their ascendance in the wake of the British Empire’s dismantlement has
left many overseas Britons without adequate legal sanctuary or a
cogent legal identity.
Until the academic fraudsters and the corrupt political elite are
fumigated out of the centers of learning and purged from the seats of
power, not just Mother Britain, but also Mother Europe, will continue
increasingly to spurn her own progeny—however bright or capable—in
favor of distant strangers of arguable merit and questionable
motivation."<<
Alex Kurtagic (email him) lives in England. He is the author of Mister
and the founder and director of Supernal Music.
http://www.vdare.com/misc/090623_kurtagic.htm