A doctor tried to renew his passport. Now he's no longer a citizen
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
There are many cases where people come over on non-immigrant visas and their kids have to leave the country when they turn 21, even if they've spent all their lives here legally, because US immigration law doesn't provide any time-based path to permanent residency.
Just being here long enough should be enough proof to get you into the citizenship pipeline.
The article makes it sound like an anonymous member of the bureaucracy checked a box in a form and now this man is a ghost. No legal proceedings, no transparency, no accountability.
[1]:https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/670964?ln=en
[2]:https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37463/is-revoking-ci...
As far as the article goes, I suspect there’s more to the story.
You don’t study at Fort Leavenworth and then casually pop over to your embassy for a few months as an accredited diplomat. His brother was a professor at Georgetown, and both are politically active.
The US does not require you to be an accredited diplomat to get immunity - members of technical and administrative staff can also get it.
As for being stateless, he may well technically not be, but if he can not safely move to Iran that is a cruel technicality to lean on when someone has lived the vast majority of their life somewhere else.
Having had diplomatic "immunity" as a technical staff member, there are nuances.
Technical staff do not enjoy "full" immunity, but only immunity for acts committed as part of their official duties - this is called "functional immunity". That status does not protect "functionaries" against civil liabilities for activities outside specific duties.
In contrast, members of the diplomatic staff who deal directly with host country officials such as ambassadors or registered diplomats (political officer, econ officer etc) enjoy full immunity and that immunity devolves to their dependents.
Current US law on the matter (22 USC § 254) is pretty much entirely defined in terms of the Vienna convention. As such, current US law on the matter is pretty irrelevant.
I have no idea what the legal situation was when he was born. Likely there was still a distinction, but even today the Vienna Convention, to the extent one can use it to guess whether it's believable that he might be affected (and it's perfectly possible the US State Department official who caused this is just wrong), in article 37 grants "members of the administrative and technical staff of the mission, together with members of their families forming part of their respective households" who "are not nationals of or permanently resident in the receiving State" limited immunity.
So you're right they would not have full immunity under the terms of the Vienna Convention, but some immunity does extend to family, and the question then becomes how much immunity did they have under pre-Vienna Convention US law, and how much immunity is sufficient to justify legally withholding citizenship.
My best guess is that this guy will get his citizenship back, and that it will turn out some overzealous bureaucrat saw that the dad was embassy staff, saw the word immunity, saw the word immunity on some checklist and didn't check the details - whether or not there'd be some technical possible justification for withholding it or not. Hopefully for this guy someone decides it's a stupid waste of both money and political capital to pursue this before he ends up spending even more on lawyers...
To be clear, I think this is a cruel act, and shouldn't be legal, and he may well be right that he practically can't risk to try to claim his Iranian citizenship even if he wanted to, but purely technically he's probably not legally stateless.
That said, I think it'd be immensely cruel not to recognize him as a US citizen, and he may well be right it might be unsafe for him to claim Iranian citizenship.