citizenship laws

Statelessness: You don’t understand citizenship

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I have written before about the misunderstood and taken-for-granted nature of citizenship. In many countries, you can be born somewhere and live there your entire life and still not be a citizen. In some countries, your citizenship will be stripped from you when you leave the country for some period of time. It is potentially a more fluid state of being than one imagines. As I have argued before, most people don’t think about it until something happens that forces them to.

I just watched a documentary on Al Jazeera English covering the stateless citizen problem in Greece for the Turkish minority there.

One woman has spent more than 20 years as a stateless person – born in Greece, her citizenship was revoked when she went to Turkey and married a Turkish man, but she cannot get Turkish citizenship without a Greek passport to give the authorities. She is not legally allowed to work in Turkey – she only has a residence permit – so survives on her husband’s pension. She was not able to travel back to Greece to attend her own father’s funeral.

The laws in Greece have shifted throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, but many of these displaced people have been unable to find their place or legal recourse through any of the changes. One such change in the law was to implement a process by which former citizens could reclaim their Greek citizenship – but the process was more like naturalizing a foreigner who was becoming Greek for the first time, which struck most people as discriminatory. The thinking being – a person who has lived in Greece all her life is not a foreigner, and should not have to declare that she is for the sake of getting her nationality back.

As I wrote above – people don’t think about these things until something happens that forces them to. In an article in The Guardian, writer Kamila Shamsie describes, based on her own experience migrating to the UK, the uncertain citizenship journey. First, when a person moves to a new country, s/he assumes that the path is laid out clearly. If she just follows the rules, she is on the right course to achieving citizenship. It’s just a matter of time.

But, as I, the Al Jazeera story and Shamsie point out: immigration and citizenship laws are in constant flux. You might be staying in the country of your dreams legally – for now – and have a good handle on what you have to do and be, following all the steps to the letter. But by no means is that the end of it. Until you have the new nationality confirmed, in your hands, you are not home free. Something can always change, making the feeling of settling down and finding a comfort level almost impossible and out of reach. As Shamsie wrote: “I wasn’t prepared for the mutable nature of immigration laws, and their ability to make migrants feel perpetually insecure, particularly as the rhetoric around migration mounted.”

Real estate porn and Swedish salespeople

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Sometimes for fun I look at real estate. Sometimes idly, flipping through pictures and descriptions on websites and other times more actively, actually attending viewings and contacting real estate agents to get my questions answered. Sometimes I take my own research to a strange place. When I was interested in Berlin property, I started investigating the weird and wonderful world of foreclosed properties. Of course, the information about foreclosures is only available in German, which is not a language I know – but I was determined to dig into this properly and thus armed myself with a German dictionary and figured out the how, when, where of purchasing foreclosed-upon properties in Berlin. Sure, I never applied the knowledge, but how often do I apply most of the random knowledge that is rattling around in my head (e.g., citizenship laws for too many countries to count).

In the process, both in my real estate porn and in my actual home purchase process several years ago, I discovered that Swedish real estate agents are just weird. “Weird”, I grant, is not descriptive and in this case singles out one way of doing things (the “Swedish way”) and makes it sound as though it is wrong. In fact, it is simply different from what I think property sales and salespeople should be like. Out in the country where I live, I understand that there is not much incentive (they get no or tiny commissions), and to some extent, in cities, the markets are just so “hot” that agents don’t really have to do much.

My thinking, though, is that if I found a property I liked and lived in the US, I would contact the agent and express this interest. They would be obsessive about trying to sell it to me and,in case that did not work out, would actively be looking at other comparable properties and be pressing me on looking at those, too.

On several occasions in Sweden, when I contacted an agent again after looking at a property and seeing it had been removed from the web, they say simply, “It is sold. Sorry.” And nothing more.

This would rarely, if ever, happen with an American real estate agent, who would say, “I am sorry, but the property you were interested in is sold… but I have x in the same neighborhood and have a comparable type of property in X neighborhood.” Selling. Always trying to keep you on the hook. While I appreciate low-pressure salesmanship, this Swedish way feels lazy and not at all like any kind of selling. I have found in most cases that people here do not care if they are helpful or if they sell anything at all.