US jus soli edge case Ok, so there is this border wall along the Southern border of the US. However, this wall is not constructed exactly at the border. There is an offset of quite some distance where land south of the wall still belongs to the US but is inaccessible to people from the US side but is freely accessible to people from the Mexico side. So if someone was to give birth to a baby on land that belongs to the US but is south of the wall, and has videographic evidence of the birth process to prove this fact, is the baby then eligible for US citizenship?
The Supreme Court rules in US v. Wong Kim Ark ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment, which 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 It is not disputed that said areas are &quot;in the United States&quot;. The court found that &quot;subject to the jurisdiction thereof&quot; is intended to exclude, by the fewest and fittest words (besides children of members of the Indian tribes, standing in a peculiar relation to the national government, unknown to the common law), the two classes of cases,—children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state neither of which are the case in your scenario. Technically, the child is not &quot;eligible&quot; for citizenship, the child has US citizenship, it is just a matter of getting a government official to recognize it (e.g. in issuing a passport).
The most commonly used definition for statehood is the declaratory theory, codified by the Montevideo Convention. This says that statehood doesn't depend on recognition by other states; it merely requires four things: A defined territory A permanent population An effective government The capacity to enter into relations with other states. You immediately run into issues around the defined territory (you don't really have one) and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. But let's ignore those for a second. Meeting these requirements in some abstract world doesn't mean you get treated like a state. If no one else agrees with your claim to statehood and they act inconsistently with it, you have little recourse. You might get them not caring enough to do anything about it, but if they decide you're not a country you're out of luck. You have some misconceptions about statehood as well. A country is allowed to forbid trade with any foreign country, even ones it recognizes as sovereign states. See: US embargo on Cuba. It is also entitled to deny foreign ships access to its ports. Ships flying the flag of a sovereign state are entitled to innocent passage through territorial waters of another state, but not to the use of that state's ports. A country can certainly allow people to be killed and still be a country. See: the US, which has the death penalty for certain crimes. But if you're killing nationals of a foreign country, that foreign country is likely to take a keen interest in your activities. If the killings are judicially-ordered executions based on violations of your penal laws, that's one thing -- Australia might consider it awful that an Australian citizen was shot by Indonesia for drug smuggling, but they recognize that Indonesia is a real country with its own laws that it has a right to apply. If it's just lawless there, the keen interest might culminate in a travel warning. But in more extreme cases, or where the killings are of people who didn't willingly enter your territory, you're looking at potential military action.
What you claim isn’t true. You can’t usually get German citizenship if you have another citizenship. You can (possibly) get German citizenship if you tried to get rid of another citizenship and failed. You still have the other citizenship, you are not stateless. It’s just that Germany would make an exception for you and allow you to have two citizenships in that case. So Germany will not consider you stateless, because it’s a fact you are not. They will consider you as someone who tried to become stateless.
"Law" is actually a very broad term, which encompasses statutes, rules, regulations, precedent and I'm sure some other things that I'm forgetting. The popular understanding of "law" is the statute, which involves Congress (at the federal level) or the legislature (and the state level). That is the kind of law that we say is "passed". At the federal level, some number of representatives or senators will introduce a bill into the House or Senate, and it is discussed in a relevant committee; if it is approved, it moves to debate by the whole House / Senate and if it passes it moves to the other house. Once it has passed both the House and Senate, it goes to the President where it may be signed, rejected, or ignored. If signed, it becomes "a law", if rejected (vetoed) it can become law anyhow if it gains a 2/3 majority vote in both houses. If the President ignores it ("pocket veto"), it becomes law in 10 days (Sunday is not a day), unless Congress is not in session. Oh, and, that's just the tip of the iceberg. At the state level, there is a similar process, with the further option of referenda and initiatives. In the former case, a particular law will have been passed by the legislature and then it is put to a popular vote for affirmation / overturning, and in the latter case a new law is proposed by the people (generally through a petitioning process) and then voted on by the populace. There is a fair amount of variation on how this works and what can be done, by state. A law can be repealed (withdrawn) by passing a law that repeals a given part of the existing law, and it can be re-written. The Supreme Court of the jurisdiction can also withdraw a (part of a) law if it is found to be unconstitutional. No foreign body can override US law, although if the US is bound by treaty (which necessarily involves another country) then we might have to do whatever that treaty says, because we approved the treaty. One limit on what we can be forced into by treaties is that a treaty cannot violate the constitution. The largest source of law in the US is actually not statutory, it is regulatory law, where a regulatory agency writes rules with the force of law (so really, it is law). In that case, there has to be a statutory basis, where at the federal level a law is passed empowering an agency to write rules, where the scope of the regulation is supposed to be related to the empowering statute in some manner. In that case, there is a vetting process, but basically no voting, just an announcement, some discussion, and eventually the rules are set. Analogous processes exist at the state level. We also have various county and city governmental bodies, where e.g. the city council can vote to create a law; or, they can empower an agency to write regulations. Yet another source of law is the Executive Order, where the president can decree that such and such will be the case (as long as it has something to do with what the executive branch does). These are somewhat limited in scope, but every president seems to like to test what that limit is. Governors get to do it too! And lastly, courts have an indirect power to make law, by ruling on how an existing law is to be interpreted (as well as ruling that a law or part of a law is unconstitutional).
Probably not, because there is no legal case or controversy, and the law is clear enough. In US v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, SCOTUS held that A child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States, by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution The opinion has a long analysis of the &quot;subject to jurisdiction&quot; clause, reasoning that this excludes only children of diplomats, who are not subject to US law. Harris's parents were not immune diplomats so she was never immune to US jurisdiction. They are never forced to take any case, and are especially not likely to take a case so lacking in legal merits.
I have bad news. California's vandalism law prohibits maliciously: defacing property with graffiti defacing property with inscribed material damaging property destroying property Chalking the sidewalk probably doesn't sound very malicious, but maliciousness includes “an intent to do a wrongful act, established either by proof or presumption of law.” So the questions is whether you intended to do a wrongful act -- meaning that you intended to do the act, which happens to be wrongful, not that you intended to act wrongfully. So unless you drew on the sidewalk accidentally, the malicious-intent requirement isn't going to help you. So then you have to ask if your conduct is described by the statute. In Mackinney v. Nielsen, the Ninth Circuit said that sidewalk chalking did not violate the law, but California has since amended the law to add the "deface with graffiti" language. I haven't seen any chalk cases since then, but another case, In re Nicholas Y., from the Second District, dealt with someone who used a marker on a window. He argued that it could be easily erased, but the court said it was still vandalism because: it "mars the surface with graffiti which must be removed in order to restore the original condition" the definition of "deface" "does not incorporate an element of permanence" "marring of the surface is no less a defacement because it is more easily removed." Given that language, I'd argue that the vandalism statute includes sidewalk chalking. But one important element here is that most sidewalks are owned or controlled by the government, so any effort to restrict "expressive conduct such as writing with chalk" (Guilliford v. Pierce County) expressive activity" there must comply with the First Amendment. The government has varying degrees of latitude on the restrictions it can impose, depending on the character of the space involved. So in a courtroom, whose function is incompatible with free-wheeling public debate, a judge can set quite a few rules about how people may speak. But sidewalks are considered a "public forum," where the government's ability to regulate speech is a lot more limited. So how does the First Amendment apply? There's a D.C. Circuit case (Mahoney v. Doe) dealing with abortion protesters who wanted to use chalk on the streets and sidewalks outside the White House. Police told them they would be arrested for violating D.C.'s defacement statute, so they brought a First Amendment challenge. The court upheld the law, saying that it satisfied all three prongs of the public-forum test: The law must be content neutral, meaning that it prohibits conduct without reference to what is being said. The Court said the defacement statute was content neutral because people could be prosecuted regardless of what they wrote or drew. The law must be narrowly tailored, meaning that it serves a significant governmental interest and does not restrict more speech than is necessary to achieve that goal. The Court said the defacement statute was narrowly tailored because it served the government's interest in maintaining the aesthetic appeal of the area in front of the White House and didn't restrict any speech that does not deface public property. The law must leave open ample alternatives for communication, meaning that even if you can't express yourself in the way restricted, you still have meaningful opportunities to express yourself. The Court said the defacement statute law allowed adequate alternatives for communication because the group could still congregate, march, speak, hold signs, and hand out leaflets. There's an interesting wrinkle there in terms of whether the interest in aesthetics is heightened because we're talking about the White House, but generally speaking, aesthetic concerns can still justify speech restrictions. So the bad news is that unchaining your inner six-year-old may subject you to criminal liability. That leaves the question of whether you want to unleash your inner teenager and do it anyway. This could help put you in a frame of mind for making the decision.
The picture shown is not fraudulent or problematic. Fraud involves using a false representation (or concealing a fact) in order to obtain a result that would not have been possible to secure without the misstatement or concealment. No one is using the photograph of the exterior of a passport (which is identical for all U.S. passports) to obtain any immigration benefit or for a non-U.S. citizen to obtain citizenship. All that is being done is visually associating international travel (which would usually be done using a passport) with a credit card that can be used internationally. Since a passport is a federal government document, it is also not protected by trademark or copyright laws -- the exterior, generic design of a passport is in the public domain. It can't be used for a purpose to mislead someone about citizenship or immigration benefits, but otherwise, it can be used for any purpose. I suppose that you could be interpreting the photograph (on a Spanish language speaker's facebook feed) as implying that by getting this credit card you will also get a U.S. passport and cool sunglasses, but that would be a patently unreasonable assumption in this context, particularly in light of the clarifying caption at the bottom, and, of course, many people who speak Spanish as a primary language have legitimate U.S. passports (including more or less all passport holders in Puerto Rico). You could also, I suppose, be interpreting the appearance of the passport as some sort of implicit government endorsement of the product when the government does not, in fact, endorse the product, but again, nothing in the advertisement that I can see that can be reasonably interpreted as conveying that message.
The way "with intent to lose citizenship" works in US law is extremely demanding; it is very hard to establish it by doing anything short of appearing before a consular officer and formally renouncing citizenship. Other ways include serving in the military of a country at war with the US, being convicted of treason for committing one of the specified potentially expatriating acts (serving in an army at war with the US is sort of a trial-less special case of that, because engaging in a war against the US is treason), or serving in a "policy-level position" in a foreign government. The State Department says as much in the link. Obtaining citizenship is listed as a case where the administrative premise applies; so is swearing allegiance to a foreign state, serving in the military of a state at peace with the US, and serving in lower-level government posts of a foreign state. In those cases, the person retains US citizenship but at some point in the future may be asked by the State Department if they wanted to renounce it. Intent to renounce citizenship is established only by explicit declaration if you've only obtained citizenship in another country. With "policy-level posts" the premise doesn't apply, but then the State Department just decides on a case-by-case basis. You may well lose US citizenship (although the King of Thailand was born in the US, and I'm not sure if he's considered to have lost citizenship), but it's not automatic. Your senior ministers may lose citizenship, but it is likewise not automatic. But the normal citizens? The link explicitly says that the administrative premise covers that.