Hacker News Reader

Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

Use state of birth, if it's encoded on the passports, and if not, require a visa from everyone until state of birth is encoded on the passports.

As a point of order, US states do have citizens. As a US citizen, I'm also a citizen of the state in which I reside.

View on HN

You're a resident of the state in which you reside. I have never heard anyone say, for example, "I am a citizen of the state of Massachusetts".

That you can move to another state and claim residency there implies what residency is, transient, whereas citizenship is permanent.

The fourteenth amendment states "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

So someone born in Morocco who moved to France and became a French citizen should be denied visa free entry to the US because their citizenship by your standard is actually Moroccan.

It's what US already does for immigrant visas (referred to as "country of chargeability"), so there is precedent.

If that birth was before 1994, that person has French citizenship anyway, if a parent was born before Moroccan Independence.

You are a resident, not citizen of your state. Citizenship as defined means being a member of a country. Passport and visa regimes are based on that.

Passport and Visa regimes are often based on citizenship or place of birth in addition to passport origin.

Also, the fourteenth amendment says "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

I stand corrected on the internal us terminology. But the dictionary definition of citizenship refers to country. Do you have one example of a visa regime which differentiates between different locations within a country?

Here's are a couple articles about China's special visa practices for people from the Jammu and Kashmir region of India in 2009. [1] [2] I wasn't aware of this contemporaneously, so I don't know quite what it was about, but it sounds like if you were from Jammu and Kashmir, your visa would be issued as a paper visa, and if you were from the rest of India, it would be issued as a stamp. A quick look at sample US passports indicates place of birth including state, so it would be feasible to implement.

My dictionary [3] has many definitions for citizen, none of which are very specific about being ascribed to a country, although the example does use a country:

> 1 : an inhabitant of a city or town especially : one entitled to the rights and privileges of a freeman

> 2a : a member of a state

> b : a native or naturalized person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to protection from it

> // She was an American citizen but lived most of her life abroad.

> 3 : a civilian as distinguished from a specialized servant of the state

> // Soldiers were sent to protect the citizens.

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/visa-and-immigratio...

[2] http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2009/10/02/why-is-china-issui...

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/citizen

I was pretty sure China would be the example that would show up. Not a great example to emulate.

The term state in that context means country, which is why citizen is a synonym for national. in the Oxford English Dictionary, that is the first definition, and secondarily (and more historically than anything) it refers to citizens of a town. It might be in use locally, but I have never heard anyone use the term citizen in that way other than poetically, and I have spent time in a number of English speaking regions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com