Maybe it's just a matter of time before any children of US citizens born abroad get a hundred roadblocks thrown in their faces before they can acquire citizenship. Why? No reason. Just to be mean. It's what Republicans do.
Back when my daughters were born here in Germany (my wife is German), I just called up the American Embassy in Bonn (when it was still the capital of West Germany), asked what I needed to do in order to get them U.S. citizenship. They told me what to bring, and come on down. I did, and, both times, within two hours of walking into the consular section, I walked out with their American birth certificates, US passports and Social Security numbers.
Fast forward to last year, when my younger daughter had her first child. The father was German. She applied for U.S. citizenship at the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt. They asked her to furnish ORIGINALS of her school transcripts while she was in school in the USA, and dozens of other nitpicking documents. My granddaughter now has US citizenship, but the process took over ten months. By the time my granddaughter is ready to have children, if she decides to have them in Germany, she'll probably have to walk on water for half an hour before they can get a US passport.
When my wife and I got married in the Washington area (Arlington, Virginia, to be precise), the US Embassy in Germany said she had to bring an "Ehefähigkeitszeugnis." One of those wonderful German words with a long meaning: "certification of being single." The Germans said they would issue such a document for her, but only in the town where she was born (a tiny farming town up north) and only with the original of MY birth certificate. I said no way was I going to turn over the original of my birth certificate to a bunch of German bureaucrats. I gave them a convincing copy (they probably didn't care). So we finally got this elaborate Ehefähigkeitszeugnis, and brought it to the Arlington (VA) County courthouse to apply for a marriage license. The marriage license applications only had space, where the info on the bride and groom went, for "city" and "state" of birth. Not "country." uh-oh. So when it came to "city," we filled in "Quakenbrück" and for state "Niedersachsen." Hey, it wasn't our fault there was no line for "country." Anyway, so when the official at the Arlington County courthouse read through the application, she stopped at Quakenbrück and Niedersachsen. We held our precious Ehefähigkeitszeugnis at the ready, hoping the lady could read German. She stopped and asked, "is that Germany?" I said , "yes." She answered, "I thought so," stamped and signed our marriage license, and poof that was it. No request for this stupid Ehefähigkeitszeugnis we had gone to such trouble to obtain--at the demand of the US Embassy!! I felt like Arlo Guthrie's Office Obie in "Alice's Restaurant" when he realized that the judge wasn't going to look at his carefully prepared 8" X 10" color glossy photographs of his garbage-dumping crime, since the judge was blind.
It seems to me that bureaucrats make people jump through hoops because they can, not because it serves some useful purpose.
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