Will see with the final version is, and the degree to which it has any nuance or not (the question below, given its absence of any discussion of reasonable accommodation, suggests unlikely):
If there’s a clash between a religious so-called law and a parliamentary law, which trumps the other?
That’s just one example of the new types of questions which will appear in the slightly updated citizenship test from November this year as aspiring Austrlaians face a tougher vaules test amid challenges to address social cohesion and foreign interference.
Acting Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs Minister Alan Tudge said on Friday that the questions are being inserted to address “our liberal democratic values as opposed to kids facts”.
A new booklet guide will be released to inform people of the changes to the multiple choice test.
Understanding that language acquisition is important for social cohesion and belonging, Mr Tudge announced last week that permanent residents and citizens with poor English skills would be given unlimited language classes but he said there are no plans to introduce an English language test as part of the citizenship process.
Mr Tudge said the questions will be easily understood by anyone who has been in the country for a period of time and who shares Australian values.
One of the (intended) effects of Trump administration policies:
On a Wednesday morning in late February, Annie Johnson Benifield was already through the doors of the M.O. Campbell Education Center, in Houston by 5:30 a.m.
The occasion was a once-a-month naturalization ceremony, where anywhere between 1,700 to 2,600 legal permanent residents swear a 140-word oath in order to become U.S. citizens. The ceremony wouldn’t begin until later in the morning, but Benifield and the 40 or so volunteers from the League of Women Voters (LWV) had arrived early to set up.
The League is the official registration partner for many naturalization ceremonies across the country. And before the pandemic, these events happened frequently, taking place once, or sometimes twice, each month at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices as well as some federal courthouses. The League had predicted that, in 2020, it would interact with up to 200,000 new citizens and their family members in 1,000 events across the country.
The Houston chapter specifically had an 85 to 90 percent success rate in new voter registrations, for an annual average of 30,000 new voters, according to Benifield. But this year, with the widespread interest in the presidential elections, she thought registrations might crack 40,000.
“I was getting excited and feeling giddy about it,” she told FiveThirtyEight, “but COVID-19 had a different plan.”
Newly naturalized citizens are one of the fastest-growing voting groups in the United States. In February, the Pew Research Center published a report that found that 23.2 million naturalized citizens would be eligible to vote in November’s presidential elections, making up a record 10 percent of the total electorate. And according to a February analysis by the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), a coalition of immigrant advocacy organizations, 860,000 new Americans were expected to have naturalized by November before the pandemic brought things to a halt.
But not all eligible voters actually vote, and naturalized Americans have historically trailed native-born Americans at the polls.1 In 2016, for example, 54 percent of naturalized citizens voted in the general election compared with 62 percent of native-born citizens. According to studies, one explanation is an element that could be missing again this year: voter registration. It’s not a lack of desire to participate, the study finds, but rather it’s an unfamiliarity with how or where to register, registration deadlines, and language issues. Once these barriers are overcome and new Americans are registered, they tend to vote at the same rates as native-born members of their demographic group.
Take someone like Raz Ahmadi, a new U.S. citizen from Afghanistan. For the past five years, he has worked as an organizer registering voters and advocating for progressive environmental policies in Virginia. And this year, after completing the naturalization process, which had been interrupted by COVID-19, in mid-July, Ahmadi will finally be able to cast his own ballot.
Though he has already been involved in politics, Ahmadi says that being able to actually participate is a whole new feeling for him. Being “empowered to vote, mentally, it gives you a lot of power,” he says. “It just personalizes a lot of things. Now you’re more involved in the community.”
But even before COVID-19, the wait time for citizenship applications had hit new highs under the Trump administration. According to USCIS numbers, the naturalization process averaged 8.8 months in 2020, compared with 5.6 months in 2016 and a peak of 10.3 months in 2018,2 though in some cases, it could take up to three years.
COVID-19 exacerbated this delay. On March 18, USCIS temporarily shut down all public-facing activities, including interviews for visas, asylum and naturalization as well as oath ceremonies. The agency did not make plans for virtual alternatives, bringing much of U.S. immigration to a halt.
For each day that USCIS remained closed, 2,100 potential new voters would be disenfranchised, according to a frequently cited report by Boundless, an immigration-services company co-founded by an Obama administration official.
USCIS field offices reopened on June 4 and prioritized in-person oath-swearing ceremonies. Some field offices held drive-through ceremonies, while others held more frequent, but smaller, indoor or outdoor ceremonies. By the end of July, the agency says that it has cleared the backlog of 110,000 oath ceremonies delayed by its closures, as well as an additional 7,905 oath ceremonies not scheduled before the pandemic.
Still, these 7,905 new naturalizations in July represent a twelve-fold decrease than the typical 95,850 naturalizations completed each month. So even though in-person oath ceremonies are continuing, “the fact of the matter was that there was already a backlog of people waiting to be naturalized,” says Jeanette Senecal, who oversees voter-engagement programs at the League of Women Voters, “so unless USCIS is both increasing the number of people who are getting naturalized at each one and offering more ceremonies, there’s really no way they can make that up.”
From the outset of USCIS’s closure, a diverse group of bipartisan policymakers, immigration lawyers, community advocates, and third-party voter-registration organizations like the League of Women Voters have called on USCIS to follow in the footsteps of other federal government agencies in moving activities online. In June, the USCIS Ombudsman’s Office, a small, independent office in the Department of Homeland Security that appeals specific immigration cases and suggests improvements for USCIS, weighed in, calling remote oath ceremonies, held via video teleconferencing, “a legally permissible and operationally feasible solution” for the agency in the short term and a potential long-term solution to “increase efficiencies” in its annual report to Congress.
But still, the USCIS rejected a virtual option. Spokespeople told FiveThirtyEight repeatedly, both before and after the Ombudsman’s report, that “the statutory language mandated by Congress contains certain requirements that are logistically difficult for USCIS to administer naturalization oaths virtually or telephonically.”
USCIS says that they’ve taken steps to clear the backlog in oath ceremonies, but these ceremonies are not the only steps in the naturalization process that are delayed.
Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, calls USCIS’s emphasis on clearing the backlog in oath ceremonies “really misleading” because it wasn’t just oath ceremonies that were paused during this time. “It was also interviews, which meant that naturalization applications weren’t being processed,” said Pierce. She added that unless USCIS was also trying to expedite processing of naturalization applications, there was “no way” the agency was going to be able to naturalize the same number of people by the election.
Dan Hetlage, a USCIS spokesperson, told FiveThirtyEight that the agency has also “prioritized rescheduling interviews for naturalization and adjustment of status that were postponed,” but as of early August, immigration lawyers I spoke with said that their clients had not been contacted to schedule naturalization interviews.
There are currently 315,000 naturalization applicants awaiting their interviews, which on average occur two months before an oath ceremony, according to a Boundless analysis. In two months it will be October, which is the deadline for voter registration in many states. That means an unknown but likely significant number of those 315,000 applicants will not naturalize soon enough to register by October and vote in November.
It’s not just USCIS that has changed as a result of the pandemic. A recent report from the Migration Policy Institute cataloged 63 executive actions undertaken by the Trump administration since March that have further restricted immigration.
Pierce, who co-authored the report, says that these changes represented some of the Trump administration’s “boldest actions on immigration to date” that, in some cases, they had long been pushing but had been unable to achieve. This includes a travel ban on 31 countries, the end of asylum at the southern border, and the suspension of immigration for many family- and employment-based categories as well as four temporary-worker programs.
“During an unprecedented pandemic, which includes both public health and economic crises, you would expect immigration to take a backseat,” says Pierce, “but rather, the opposite has been true.”
When USCIS offices reopened on June 4, organizations like the League of Women Voters scrambled to help with voter-registration efforts. Benifield, from LWV-Houston, recalls reaching out multiple times to the local field office. “We were prepared to go and set up in the parking lot … if they allowed us,” she said.
In the end, her persistence paid off. “The branch chief … agreed that we could actually bring cards” for officials administering the naturalization ceremony to give out. The League cannot be on-site to register applicants directly because of the continued threat the pandemic poses, but they can drop off folders containing voter-registration packets to the local field office to be distributed at the socially distant ceremonies. USCIS is legally mandated to provide, at a minimum, voter-registration forms at each naturalization ceremony.
Benifiled said she was glad they could distribute materials, but she remained unsure how effective this form of voter registration would be. “Clearly, it will not be 30,000 like … last year.”
This is affecting the League’s activities across the country. “Spring and summer are usually really busy seasons for voter registration, but especially in presidential years, we usually see massive increases… [in] naturalization ceremonies,” says Senecal, from the League’s national office.
Volunteers understand the public health prerogatives that prevent them from conducting registrations in person, especially since many are older and at higher risk for COVID-19, but many, like Benifield, are concerned about the effect on registration numbers and broader civic engagement.
“The opportunity cost is not just registration,” adds Senecal, “it’s also voter education.”
At a basic level, in-person voter registration provides necessary information in native languages, says Nancy Xiong, the communications director for Hmong Innovating Politics, a California-based nonprofit that aims to increase civic participation among Southeast Asian Americans.
Native language materials are essential, since many new citizens, especially in already marginalized communities, have challenges with English. Even when they are provided with translated voting materials, Xiong adds, these materials “may not always be helpful because county/state offices do a word-to-word translation, without much context.”
This can create the perception that these communities are uninterested in politics, leading to “big campaigns never or rarely contact[ing] the Southeast Asian community,” Xiong says, even though 92 percent of the 310,000 Hmong Americans are citizens, one of the highest rates among Asian Americans, and 45 percent are eligible to vote. And this perpetuates a cycle of disenfranchisement, at the very moment when immigrant voters might be especially incentivized to vote, if previous elections in which immigration was a hot topic are any indication. In 2008, presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s suggestion that immigrants should “self-deport” and hardline views on DACA, for example, have been linked to a jump in voter registrations between 2008 to 2012.
Sundrop Carter, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition (PICC), which partners with the Philadelphia USCIS field office as its official third-party registration organization for naturalization ceremonies, told me part of the problem is that: “[B]y definition new Americans have no voter history.” As a result, she said, they’re often bypassed by most get-out-the-vote efforts. “New voters … they’re just invisible.”
This is despite the fact that in many battleground states, like Pennsylvania, where Carter is based, as well as Michigan, Florida and Nevada, the number of new Americans who are eligible to vote now is larger than the margin of victory in the 2016 elections, according to the June 2020 report from the NPNA. “Newly naturalized citizens could help to sway the outcome of national elections,” says Diego Iñiguez-López, the NPNA’s policy and campaigns manager. But more importantly, he adds, “what’s at stake is the political empowerment of newly naturalized citizens … and for the democratic ideals of this country to be fully realized and exercised.”
Community organizations have always tried to fill in the gap — and this year, just as the need for their services ramp up, COVID-19 has made them more difficult to deliver.
Hmong Innovating Politics (HIP), in California, and the nonprofit Bonding Against Adversity in Houston, which works mostly with Latin American immigrants, are doing their best to adapt by moving their activities online. HIP has switched to a text-messaging platform, which uses current friends-and-family circles to encourage contacts to register to vote. Bonding Against Adversity, meanwhile, has expanded another SMS-based communications platform to provide real-time immigration application help, and plans to restart an online version of their 14-session “citizenship college” civic-education program and application workshops in August.
Meanwhile, LWV-Houston members have paid for a QR code that brings up voter-registration information, which it is sharing on signs and, for a while, in person at public libraries, community and faith-based organizations, protests and even a taco chain restaurant.
But still, many organizations are afraid that some of the most vulnerable communities, who already feel left out of the political process, will fall through the gaps. “A lot of the communities that we work with have elementary education, are not computer-savvy, and don’t speak good English,” says Mariana Sanchez, a co-founder of Bonding Against Adversity. That’s why she says in-person registration and education is essential.
But the pandemic has put these in-person services on pause, and as a result, the applicants who need the most support are unable to access it.
COVID-19 shows little evidence of slowing down. By June, hospitals in states like Texas that had avoided the early wave of infections were warning that hospital beds were close to full, and in-person voter-registration activities, which the League of Women Voters had just restarted alongside USCIS’s reopenings, were put on indefinite pause.
In the meantime, smaller oath ceremonies continue, with USCIS spokespeople emphasizing their adherence during the ceremonies to public-health guidelines, including masks and social distancing. But it is not clear if USCIS has any contingency plans in place for alternatives to in-person activities.
The potential of more stay-at-home orders at a local level is also a possibility, which would affect which activities USCIS could continue. Guam’s USCIS office, for example, was shut down for a week as the territory’s COVID-19 case count led the governor to issue orders to shelter in place. Hetlage, the USCIS representative, did not respond to a specific question on contingency plans but reiterated that virtual oath ceremonies weren’t possible.
This has many immigration advocates perplexed. “Almost every business, school district, university and government agency across the country has made adjustments to keep their organizations — and the country — moving,” says Eric Cohen, the executive director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, an advocacy group. “Why should USCIS be any different?”
The question represents an ongoing frustration: Yes, there is an unprecedented public-health crisis, but there is also a human-made immigration crisis stemming from the administration’s policies and USCIS’s decision-making during the pandemic.
“It’s hard to look at the actions the administration has taken that result in decreased immigration, and not think that there was some intent there, especially when you’re talking about an administration that is historic in its stance on legal immigration.” says Pierce, of MPI, on whether the immigration agency’s decision-making could be political. Beyond the 63 actions taken during the pandemic, Pierce’s report identified over 400 executive actions by the Trump administration taken in the past four years that have shifted the immigration system toward removing suspected undocumented immigrants, and away from processing applications for naturalization and legal immigration.
It stands in stark contrast with the second night of the Republican National Convention, when Trump naturalized five new citizens at the White House in a prerecorded video. The president welcomed them to “a family comprised of every race, color, religion and creed united by the bonds of love,” as he said in his concluding remarks. “We are one people sharing one home, saluting one great American flag.”
USCIS representatives did not respond to a request for comment on whether the five were given voter-registration forms, as required by law.
Since early summer, USCIS has warned that if it does not receive $1.2 billion in emergency funding, the agency would furlough 13,000 workers – 70 percent of its workforce — and slow or pause many immigration processes. On August 25, after months of back-and-forth, Congress and USCIS reached an agreement that would avoid the furlough.
That agreement would not, however, avoid further delays in processing, as Joseph Edlow, deputy director for policy at USCIS, told The Washington Post: “Averting this furlough comes at a severe operational cost that will increase backlogs and wait times across the board, with no guarantee we can avoid future furloughs.”
In an effort to increase its financial sustainability, USCIS will increase fees by an average of 20 percent across the board, and more than 80 percent for naturalization applications. For groups like Bonding Against Adversity and Hmong Innovating Politics, which were already under-resourced before the pandemic, these changes will only add to their immediate workload.
Sanchez says she’s already received more inquiries from people who want to apply for citizenship before application fees for naturalization increase. “The immigration laws are so difficult,” says Sanchez, that “the only way, for some of the people we serve to help their families is through citizenship…and voting.”
But USCIS is making the process more difficult. That’s why the NPNA sees naturalization delays as an issue of voting rights.
“It’s part of the larger anti-immigrant agenda that the Trump administration has pursued over the last few years,” says Iñiguez-López. “Keep immigrants feeling unwelcome, keep them afraid, keep them intimidated, and keep them away from knowing and asserting their rights, including their right to vote.”
In other words, while these would-be citizens are trying to follow the rules of the U.S. immigration system to naturalize and effect change through the established democratic processes, the system has itself become the barrier.
More coverage of the latest non-resident birth numbers, including MA graduate Yousif Samarrai’s proposal to use SIN as a gatekeeper for those on visitor visas (in contrast to students and temporary residents who are issued SIN).
Those without a SIN would not be issued a birth certificate by the provincial vital statistics agencies (hospitals would still issue attestations of birth).
Like all proposals, there would be a number of complications, operational, jurisdictional and legal, but if doable, it would be a targeted approach that would reduce collateral impact.
Three hundred more non-resident women gave birth at a handful of Canadian hospitals in 2019 compared with the year prior, with the largest increases occurring at two Toronto-area hospitals and one within Vancouver.
The statistics from the Canadian Institute for Health Information show that Richmond, B.C., still registers the highest number of these births in the country, with 502, or one out of every four babies born last year involving women who are not Canadian residents.
The national tally of births from non-resident mothers represents only 1.6 per cent of all births across Canada last year, save Quebec, but locals in and around Richmond have denounced the practice of “birth tourism” – where women travel to Canada to deliver a baby who will then gain Canadian citizenship.
While municipal, provincial and federal politicians want the practice banned, Andrew Griffith said the data he obtained from the Crown corporation captures those women, as well as students studying in Canada and women who live here but who have not completed the citizenship process.
Mr. Griffith, an Ottawa-based fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and a former high-level federal bureaucrat, said because of the lack of precise data, the long-term impact of any birth tourists remains unclear.
It is legal for non-residents to give birth in Canada, which then grants the baby citizenship, but Mr. Griffith said changing birthright citizenship probably isn’t worth the effort at this time given the numbers.
“And if you assume that roughly half of those numbers are pure birth tourists, you’re still talking about less than 1 per cent of the total number of live births in Canada, and you’re still talking about less than 1 per cent of the total number of immigrants to Canada,” Mr. Griffith said.
“Are you going to penalize the 99 per cent to address a problem that affects the 1 per cent?”
The data show that after Richmond Hospital, North York’s Humber River Hospital had the next-highest number of these births last year at 329, followed by Mackenzie Health’s facility in Richmond Hill, Ont., with 287. Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital recorded 203 during the 2019 fiscal year, more than double the number recorded five years earlier.
Spokespeople for these various hospitals told The Globe and Mail on Monday they never deny or delay care to anyone based on their residency status, but they do seek compensation for this care from patients without medical coverage, with these fees covering the treatment.
Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie said steps need to be taken to prohibit birth tourism, which he said is creating pressure on resources of the city’s lone hospital.
“It is fundamentally not right that people would adopt a strategy to come here and have their babies and then go back without contributing in any meaningful way to the local economy or paying taxes here or any other form of support,” he said in an interview.
In February, Richmond City Council wrote letters to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other federal and provincial politicians requesting a change to immigration laws to end “this strategic opportunity taken by people who have no official connection to Canada.”
A year ago, Joe Peschisolido, Liberal MP for Steveston-Richmond East, called on his government to end the practice of birth tourism, telling The Globe that he had spoken with then-minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship minister Ahmed Hussen about the issue.
On Monday, the federal Immigration Minister’s head spokesperson said Ottawa is focused on cracking down on immigration fraud and while “birth tourism is not widespread” the department is researching the extent of the practice to see how many of these non-resident mothers are tourists.
Yousif Samarrai, who recently wrote his master’s thesis in public policy on the issue at Simon Fraser University, said “birth tourism” has become so controversial in B.C. because unlicensed hotel companies in Richmond have been caught marketing packages to expectant Chinese mothers.
He said a simple fix to this issue would be to require a new parent to submit their own social insurance number in order to get a birth certificate – and the resulting citizenship – for their child. Every class of visitor to Canada receives a SIN except tourists, he said.
“The whole idea of changing these laws is you don’t want to impact anybody that’s coming here through legitimate means,” Mr. Samarrai said. “However, if we change the administrative way that people attain a birth certificate, that’s a little more practical.”
The most in-depth article and analysis of the data regarding Americans renouncing their citizenship:
The swearing in of new citizens often makes news in the U.S., especially if it happens in unusual circumstances such as one party’s national convention. Much less reported are the many citizenship renunciations by Americans, and the travails leading up to these life decisions. Almost all those giving up their U.S. nationality are expats. And for each renouncer going through the ordeal, there are countless others thinking about it. Why?
One recent press release in particular has caused quite a stir. It suggested that, after “a steep decline” in recent years, renunciations in the first half of this year soared to 5,816, more than twice as many as gave up their passport in all of 2019. The implication, as reported breathlessly in the American media, was that expats, already fed up with President Donald Trump, finally despaired over his mishandling of Covid-19 and quit. Other factors were cited as merely secondary.
But these renunciation numbers are notoriously flawed. They’re based on a list of names of renouncers published every quarter by the Internal Revenue Service — experts call this a form of “doxxing.” That list lags in time and jumbles data. In reality, most embassies and consulates stopped making renunciation appointments this spring, owing to the pandemic. And the dip in prior years, according to experts, was due to backlogs and underreporting.
By the best estimates (see chart), renunciations have been rising since 2010, when the Obama administration passed the notorious Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), inflicting misery on U.S. expats everywhere. In 2014, the government raised the renunciation fee from $450 to $2,350. Undeterred, expats kept at it. The American bureaucracy then indirectly slowed the pace with red tape in the first three Trump years. But we’re back on trend in 2020.
Now, it may be true that most expats aren’t crazy about Trump. Americans abroad tend to be cosmopolitan professionals, often married to foreigners or following international career paths. Watching their home country in their host nation’s news, or talking about it at local dinner parties, has stopped being fun. The images occasionally evoke a banana republic succumbing to pestilence while arming for civil war.
But that’s clearly not the reason why so many expats have been trying to drop their nationality for the past decade. Instead, as I described last year, it’s the nightmare of American tax and financial reporting, in which any accounts or assets deemed in Washington, D.C. to be “foreign” are automatically suspect, requiring extra disclosures that can be ruinous in time, expense and peace of mind.
The U.S. is almost unique in the world in taxing based on citizenship rather than residency. It’s also uniquely parochial in being unable or unwilling to distinguish between, say, a rich American living stateside and stashing money offshore and, for example, a middle-class American married to a German and teaching elementary school in Berlin. The hell starts with that conflation.
Before 2010 America’s citizen-based taxation didn’t necessarily disrupt the lives of expats like this school teacher. That’s because few expats even knew about the horrendously complex reporting rules or bothered with them. But FATCA required them to make new and redundant disclosures or face the prospect of tens of thousands of dollars in fines or even prison. It also required their foreign banks, brokers and insurers to report on them to the IRS, or face draconian sanctions.
Unsurprisingly, many foreign banks and brokers therefore stopped taking “U.S. persons” or green-card holders as customers. So American expats have increasingly been locked out of retail finance in their host countries.
Worse, the European Union then started passing laws with bureaucratically sublime names such as MiFID II and PRIIPs that imposed new rules on everything from mutual funds to life insurance. This scared the U.S. banks and brokers of American expats living in Europe, so they also started kicking out their customers with foreign addresses. Many Americans overseas are financially marooned.
In their desperation, several have been taking their struggle to the courts. Fabien Lehagre, a French citizen who is also an “accidental American” because he was born in California, wants to invoke the EU’s data-privacy laws to have FATCA declared illegal in Europe. A U.S.-British dual citizen calling herself “Jenny” is trying to crowdfund a legal odyssey to do something similar in the U.K. Another challenge is underway in Canada. Occasionally, there are even small victories.
But on the whole, Americans abroad feel ostracized by their own country. Like their fellow citizens back home, they’re caught up in the tribal clash between Republicans and Democrats. But when it comes to acknowledging the hardship of expats, the Democrats have mostly refused to listen. The GOP has since 2016 called for the abolition of FATCA and citizenship-based taxation in its platform. But the few Republicans who’ve tried to effect change have so far failed.
If the estimated 9 million Americans living abroad were recognized as a political geography, they would rank ahead of 40 states by population. Their ill treatment by the U.S. tax and compliance regime would be headline news, and probably solved in a bipartisan tweak of common sense. But they’re not a bloc. Like much about American democracy, this discrimination seems unfair. And yet, these millions of voices must be heard.
Of note, the impact of Brexit on citizenship applications:
Tens of thousands of British citizens are among the many descendants of Jewish refugees who can apply for Austrian citizenship from Tuesday under a new law that campaigners say finally delivers a measure of historic justice for their ancestors’ expulsions under Nazi rule.
About 120,000 Jewish refugees fled persecution after the Nazis took power in Austria in March 1938. The second most common destination after the US was the UK, with up to 20,000 refugees registered in 1945.
Most refugees naturalised in their adoptive countries out of necessity, but the postwar Austrian state had a bar on dual citizenship, so considered them to be foreigners.
Obstacles to former refugees reclaiming Austrian citizenship were lifted in 1993, after the country began its first real debate about its culpability for Nazi-era crimes. Around 10% of survivors took it up. But a law extending the possibility of dual citizenship to descendants eluded its advocates in the Austrian parliament, suggesting a lack of interest in restoring the once 200,000-strong Jewish community, even in principle. One rightwing MP reportedly objected: “Enough has been done for the victims already.”
It took the present chancellor Sebastian Kurz, of the rightwing Austrian People’s Party, to bring conservatives into line with the other mainstream parties. Since he was first elected in 2017, Kurz has asserted repeatedly the country’s friendship with Israel and its responsibility towards Austrian victims of national socialism.
Hannah Lessing, secretary general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, lobbied successfully to include more descendants – for example, of those who left Austria after the war if they were unable to settle. She applauded the law, while recognising its limits.
“This law is an important step that says Austrian society is finally ready to welcome the families that it drove away,” she said. ‘However, like other gestures, it can never truly make amends for the Holocaust.”
Bini Guttmann, the Austrian president of the European Union of Jewish Students, urged people to look beyond such gestures to the country’s current political climate. “Unfortunately, the far right is on the rise again in Austria, assisted by politicians who have adopted its discriminatory agenda,” he said. “As a result, many among Austria’s minorities feel that they are not welcome here.”
But most applicants from the minimum of 200,000 people estimated to be eligible by the Austrian government are likely to look past Austria’s contemporary politics to focus on the benefits of EU citizenship.
An EU passport project hosted by the Jewish Historical Society of England asked former Jewish refugees from Europe and their descendants to describe their motivations for or against reclaiming European citizenship.
Simon Albert, who initiated the project with Dr Ruvi Ziegler, said: “The benefits of EU citizenship have driven a post-2016 surge in citizenship applications from British people with a Jewish background to countries their ancestors fled, in Germany’s case up to 6,000.
“Such a ‘return’ is unprecedented in Jewish history and raises often painful dilemmas, unlike for other Brits claiming EU citizenship.”
Becca West, 26, the grandchild of a refugee who escaped in 1939 , said she would apply. “EU citizens’ rights are important, but my grandfather had a strong Austrian identity despite his suffering. Citizenship is mainly a way to know his character better,” she said.
However many dual citizens are created under Austria’s new law, which brings it into line with Germany’s legislation, they are unlikely to boost Austria’s small resident Jewish population of approximately 10,000.
Guttmann suggested that descendants could nevertheless make their presence felt. “Descendants know where intolerance can lead,” he said. “As citizens, I would encourage them to have a say in the country’s direction through their vote. That way the citizenship law offers more than historic justice, because it can also help to deliver justice for their successors here and for the future.”
The number of women coming to Canada to give birth, which automatically bestows citizenship on the baby, is expanding much faster in British Columbia than the rest of the country.
Richmond Hospital is the centre of the trend, often called “birth tourism.” New data released this week shows one out of four births in the past year at the hospital in the Vancouver suburb, which features many illicit “birth hotels” advertising their services in Asia, were to foreign nationals.
A Veteran Richmond councillor, Chak Au, says virtually everyone in his municipality, in which more than half of the population is ethnic Chinese, would be disturbed to learn that 502 non-resident births took place in the past year at Richmond Hospital, 48 more than in the previous year.
Richmond residents, Au said on Thursday, want politicians to stop birth tourism, in part because they realize it burns up resources that could be directed to other health departments.
St. Paul’s Hospital and Mount St. Joseph’s Hospital, both in Vancouver, are also fast turning into hubs for birth citizenship, with the two hospitals experiencing a 38 per cent rise in births by non-resident women, one in seven of the total.Virtually no country outside North and South America provides citizenship to babies solely because they’re born on their soil.The newly released figures show there were 4,400 births in Canada in the past year to non-resident mothers, an overall hike of seven per cent. Ontario doctors still preside over the most non-resident births, 3,109, with one hospital in Toronto, Humber River, having a sudden jump of more than 119 per cent.But Ontario’s volume of privately funded procedures has not risen nearly as fast as in B.C., which had a total of 868 non-resident births. That’s a six-fold increase from 2010.
Source: Canadian Institute for Health Information/Andrew Griffith
The new data, compiled by Andrew Griffith, a former senior director of the federal Immigration Department, comes from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which captures billing information directly from hospitals up until the end of March. It doesn’t include births in Quebec.
Birth tourism has recently been strongly condemned by Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie, Liberal MLA Jas Johal (Richmond-Queensborough), former Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido (Richmond East), the head of Doctors of B.C. and others.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, which controls immigration policy, has been silent on the matter. Former Conservative party Leader Andrew Scheer said in 2018 he would end birth tourism. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has accused those who raise the issue of being guilty of “division and hate.”
In February, Richmond council sent letters to Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino, to leading B.C. politicians and to Vancouver Coastal Health. Council called for “permanent changes to immigration laws which would end automatic Canadian citizenship being bestowed on babies born in Canada to non-resident parents who are not citizens of Canada.”Last week, Mendicino’s department finally responded, saying the minister is aware “of the increase in births by non-residents in Canada” and promised to “monitor” it.“All levels of government are trying to pass the buck” on birth tourism, said Au. He acknowledged Richmond was itself failing to combat the dozens of shadowy birth hotels and agents in the city, which help women give birth in Canada for fees in the tens of thousands of dollars.Ads aimed at women in China who want to have babies in Canada tout luxurious accommodation, birthright citizenship in the “world’s most livable country,” 12 years of free public education, university fees just 10 per cent of those paid by foreign students, free health care and eventual family reunification for the parents of the baby who obtains the passport.Au said Richmond officials could be cracking down on underground birth-tourism operations because they don’t have proper business licences. But council and staff, he said, haven’t yet come up with an effective way to do so.
Au is also suspicious that hospital administrators and the few doctors who perform full-fee deliveries for foreign mothers are not countering the problem for financial reasons. “We don’t want our hospitals dependent on this income.”
Source: Canadian Institute for Health Information/Andrew Griffith
In a piece on his website, Multicultural Meanderings, Griffith says figures provided by the Canadian Institute for Health Information show all “non-resident births” in Canada, which includes women who give birth while here as foreign students or temporary workers. Griffith estimates about 50 per cent of the total are full-blown “birth tourists.”
After Griffith wrote a 2018 piece on the subject for Policy Options, three female academics responded by saying those who want to end birthright citizenship are “demonizing pregnant migrant women,“ “encouraging violence against stateless people” and “fuelling discrimination.”
Nevertheless, the academics supported Griffith’s call for better data. He lamented this week, however, that the federal departments that previously promised to link health care and immigration data to monitor non-resident births have “stalled.”
David Chen, the former Pro Vancouver mayoral candidate, has publicly expressed concern about birth tourism. He said Thursday that granting citizenship to anyone born on Canadian soil “poses problems on several fronts.”
As a child of immigrants, Chen, who is now a vice-chair of Vancouver’s NPA party, said it “shortchanges those who went through proper channels only to see people with much more disposable cash jump the line and have an easier route to Canadian citizenship.”
Australia, Britain, New Zealand, France, Germany and South Africa have all, in relatively recent times, altered their citizenship laws to discourage birth tourism. More than 150 nations do not permit it.
While recognizing the issue is complicated, Au, a nine-year member of council, said he believes he understands the views of most Richmond residents, where the fast-changing population is now 53 per cent ethnic Chinese, 24 per cent white, seven per cent South Asian and seven per cent Filipino.“Ethnic Chinese feel the same as everyone else in Richmond,” he said. “They’re concerned.”
It was another record year for birth tourism in B.C., according to new data released by health officials.
The province saw a 21.9% spike in non-resident births between April 1, 2019 and March 31, 2020, as 868 non-residents of Canada – the vast majority of whom are understood to be Chinese nationals on tourist visas – paid to give birth in local hospitals in order to garner automatic citizenship for their newborns. The prior year, 712 non-residents gave birth in B.C.
“Vancouver area hospitals continue to have the largest percentages of non-resident births, with an active cottage industry supporting women coming to give birth from China,” said researcher Andrew Griffiths, who first reported the new annual data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
The epicentre of the budding industry is Richmond, where an annual record of 502 births to non-residents took place, up from 458 in the year to March 2019 and 474 in the year to March 2018.
Those 502 newborns represent 24% of the 2,094 total newborns at Richmond General Hospital. That is the highest total and share of non-resident births at a hospital across Canada. Meanwhile, Vancouver’s St.Paul’s Hospital is second in the nation, with 14.1% of all births being to non-residents. There, 203 babies were born to non-residents.
Non-resident births also peaked across Canada, with CIHI reporting 4,400 newborns to non-residents in 2019/2020, up 7.3% from the previous year’s total of 4,099, excluding Quebec.
B.C. figures do not include international students, who are enrolled in the public healthcare system. As such, Griffiths said B.C.’s figures are a more accurate indication of birth tourism (those non-residents who fly to Canada for the explicit purpose of obtaining citizenship for their newborns).
Griffiths, a former director general of the Citizenship and Multiculturalism Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration, said he estimates about half of the non-resident births outside of B.C. to be tied to parents on tourist visas. However there is no reportable data along those lines, as a federal review of the issue, first announced in November 2018, appears stalled.
“Hopefully, the work to link healthcare and immigration data will resume shortly, not only to provide more accurate numbers with respect to birth tourism but to improve our understanding of healthcare and immigrants more generally,” said Griffiths.
Non-resident births by hospital, 2018-2019 and 2019-2020. Figure by Andrew Griffiths
Glacier Media requested information on non-resident births tied to patients on tourist visas but Vancouver Coastal Health Authority said such data does not exist and the task to obtain it from paperwork would be too onerous – although such data is what the federal government stated it would acquire in its review.
Canada is one of two Western countries, along with the United States, to offer birthright citizenship – a concept also known as jus soli – meaning babies born to two foreign nationals on tourist visas are granted automatic citizenship.
It remains unclear exactly what the federal government is doing to enact policies to curb the practice. To date, no enforcement measures have been announced, unlike in the U.S., which has convicted “baby house” operators of money laundering and fraud in 2019.
The U.S. State Department further cracked down on birth tourism in January, with a new rule that “travel to the United States with the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States is an impermissible basis” for a tourist visa.
The lack of action to address birth tourism, which is widely perceived by the public as an abuse of Canada’s immigration system, has frustrated Richmond community activist Kerry Starchuk, who has documented dozens of “baby houses” in the Vancouver suburb offering accommodation and doula services for Chinese nationals, who typically arrive three to four months prior to giving birth on a six-month or extended tourist visa.
“It’s a joke. It’s so blatant you can see it. They’re advertising this in China,” said Starchuk.
In a written response to Starchuk, dated July 8, 2020, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said it was “aware of the increase in births by non-residents in Canada.”
IRCC said, “While statistics indicate that birth tourism is not widespread, IRCC is researching the extent of this practice, including how many of the non-residents are short term visitors.”
Birth tourism is technically legal in Canada, in so much that nothing bars a pregnant woman from entering Canada to give birth, so long as they are honest with border agents.
“Providing false information or documents when dealing with IRCC is considered misrepresentation and has immigration consequences. However, non-residents giving birth in Canada is not considered fraud under the Citizenship Act,” stated IRCC.
“Additionally, under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, a persons are not inadmissible nor can they be denied a visa solely on the grounds that they are pregnant or that they may give birth in Canada,” wrote IRCC.
Starchuk said the federal Liberal government has dragged its feet on the matter.
“I’m not interested in writing any more letters. I want action,” she said.
Non-resident births in Canada by year. Figure by Andrew Griffiths
Richmond Conservative Members of Parliament Kenny Chiu and Alice Wong have proposed a hybrid jus soli policy that would bar those on tourist visas from obtaining citizenship for their newborns. Newborns of non-resident international students, for instance, would continue to obtain citizenship under their proposal.
Griffiths said birth tourism businesses in Richmond are at a stand still with COVID-19 flight restrictions and visitor visas from China down 72.2% between January and March, and down 99.79% by June.
A poll from Research Co. in February, 2019 showed almost three in four (73%) believe it is time to end automatic citizenship for people born in Canada (adopting rules used by most Western countries). An Angus Reid poll in March, 2019 showed 60% of Canadians want the law changed.
Immigration Minister Marco E.L. Mendicino declined to be interviewed on this matter.
A year ago, the office of Citizenship by Investment Program (CIP) in the small Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia had received no applications from any Africans in its nearly five years of operations.
But in the past few months, it has issued up to 60 passports to Nigerians and is reporting steady increases in applications from the country—still its sole African market.
That sharp rise reflects spiking demand among Nigeria’s wealthy private citizens who are increasingly tapping into “investment migration” programs offered by foreign countries. The programs allow foreign nationals to obtain fast-tracked citizenship and passports or permanent residency permits in exchange for specified amounts of cash investments. The payment for the passports can come in form of direct “contributions” to the development funds set up by the national governments or through investment in real estate projects which offer the promise of not just passports but also possible profits.
With around 40,000 passports believed to have been issued through investment migration programs globally, citizenship by investment is now estimated to be a $3 billion industry. It is often favored by high-net worth individuals from countries with “weak” passports often from countries in sub-Saharan Africa and some Middle Eastern countries.
“What you have is a community of wealthy individuals who cannot travel without visas.”
Henley & Partners, the world’s largest investment migration consultancy, has also set up shop in Africa’s largest economy after seeing a sharp rise in demand from the country over the past three years. The office in Lagos is only Henley & Partners’ third in Africa, in addition to offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg opened six years ago.
“The reason we opened in Nigeria is because we saw significant potential in the market with growth in private wealth without global mobility for high net worth individuals,” says Paddy Blewer, public relations director at Henley & Partners. “What you have is a community of wealthy individuals who cannot travel without visas.”
That reality is best captured by the weakness of Nigeria’s international passport. In fact, Nigerian passport holders can visit two fewer countries now than they could in 2010 without first obtaining a visa. The country also suffered the worst decline in passport power over the past decade, according to rankings on the annual Henley Passport Index.
But even paperwork-intensive visa application processes have also gotten more complicated for Nigerians. Under the Trump administration, for example, US visa application fees for Nigerian applicants have been increased, an interview waiver process for visa renewals for frequent travelers has been indefinitely suspended while a ban has also been placed on issuing immigrant visas to Nigerians. The net effect of these restrictions resulted in Nigeria recording the largest global drop-off in visitors to the US last year.
In search of improved international mobility, investment migration programs by Caribbean nations offer wealthy Nigerians and other citizens a legal and established workaround that ticks two crucial boxes: price point and access.
For instance, St. Lucia’s lowest-priced program, a “contribution to the national economic fund,” costs $100,000 for individuals and $140,000 for a family of four, as well as $15,000 for each additional family member. “That pricing model has really resonated well with the Nigerian community,” says Nestor Alfred, chief executive of St. Lucia’s CIP office. “A lot of our Nigerian applications consist of families.”
Other Caribbean islands including Dominica as well as St. Kitts and Nevis also offer investment migration programs with minimum costs of $100,000 and $150,000 respectively, a lot less than similar European programs typically cost. The US program issues permanent residence permits in exchange for investment ranging from $500,000 to $1 million.
But in addition to relative affordability, passports of Caribbean island nations also rank much higher than Nigeria’s on a global scale. For instance, St. Lucia passport holders have visa-free and visa-on-arrival access to 145 countries—more than triple Nigeria’s figure. And for extra context, St. Lucia passport holders’ visa free access allows them into the entire European 26-country “Schengen” area, the UK, and Switzerland.
Nigeria and South Africa dominate demand from Africa and currently account for 85% of Henley & Partners’ business on the continent, with Nigeria growing rapidly with an interest in Caribbean-based citizenship programs.
That momentum will likely remain fueled by Nigeria’s super-wealthy with the country’s population of people with a net worth of more than $30 million—currently at 724 people—forecast to grow by 13%in the next five years.
But as it turns out, interest in emigration is not restricted to Nigeria’s super-wealthy alone. Over the past three years, middle-class Nigerians have also increasingly emigrated through skill-based programs offering legal pathways to residency and citizenship in Canada and Australia. In the last five years alone, the number of Nigerian immigrants issued permanent resident permits in Canada has tripled.
One distinction however is that high net-worth individuals who have earned most of their wealth locally are typically simply looking to boost their mobility options rather than permanently relocate. “What we’re dealing with people whose businesses and largely their wealth is derived from Nigerian investment—they’re not going to leave permanently,” says Blewer. “This is about being able to go where they want at the drop of a hat. It’s not about leaving Lagos.”
Double-checking
For tourism-based economies in the Caribbeans, investment migration programs offer a significant alternative to receiving foreign direct investment. And as recent history shows, with the Covid-19 pandemic paralyzing global travel and tourism, the revenue diversification opportunities these programs offer can prove vital. Indeed, after Hurricane Maria devastated Dominica in 2017, the government sought to shore up tourism deficits by reducing some of its processing fees to make its investment migration programs more attractive and in turn, provide much-needed funds to rebuild and boost the local economy.
But Dominica has also been caught in the crosshairs of a corruption scandal involving its passports program. Last year, an Al Jazeera investigation showed high-powered officials involved in brokering transactions to sell diplomatic passports to foreign business people suspected of corrupt dealings. Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s embattled former minister of petroleum who is wanted for alleged corrupt dealings while in office, was identified in the investigation as one of the recipients of a diplomatic passport under questionable circumstances.
The scrutiny from such scandals amplify why investment migration programs claim to place a premium on due diligence. Even though it’s not legally required to, Henley & Partners says it carries out client verification processes, covering sources of wealth, and criminal history.
“We’re not interested in persons involved in military, government officials, or politically exposed persons. Our interest is more in executives and young professionals,” Alfred tells Quartz Africa. As such, the increased applications from Nigeria being primarily from private business executives across sectors, including banking, is ideal for St. Lucia because “it’s easier for us to determine the source of funds,” Alfred says.
The 2019-20 numbers, obtained from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) for all provinces save Quebec, show an overall increase of about 7 percent compared to the previous year, with British Columbia showing an increase of more than 20 percent.
Quebec does not authorize CIHI to release their comparable data, unfortunately.
As non-resident numbers are a broader measure than those on visitor visas coming to give birth (e.g., students, temporary workers), my estimate is that about 50 percent are likely birth tourists.
It appears that the efforts underway by IRCC, CIHI and Statistics Canada to link healthcare and immigration data, that would allow identification of those on visitor visas from other non-residents, has stalled given shifting priorities due to COVID-19.
So these numbers remain the best we have.
Vancouver area hospitals (Richmond General: 24 percent, St. Pauls and Mount St. Joseph: 14.1 percent) continue to have the largest percentages of non-resident births, with an active cottage industry supporting women coming to give birth from China. While awareness of COVID-19 in China was greater and earlier than elsewhere, with a corresponding decrease in visitor visas issued and air travel, this did not impact non-resident births, likely given that plans were set.
2020 numbers, of course, are expected to reveal a sharp decline reflecting travel restrictions, particularly with respect to birth tourists on visitor visas.
Hopefully, the work to link healthcare and immigration data will resume shortly, not only to provide more accurate numbers with respect to birth tourism but to improve our understanding of healthcare and immigrants more generally.
Restrictive second generation citizenship policies compared to jus soli:
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, Italy’s second generation of immigrants is renewing the fight for automatic citizenship in a land where migration is at the heart of the political debate.
“Jus soli!”, the Latin term which literally means “right of soil,” or birthright citizenship, has become the new rallying cry among the children of Italy’s 5.3 million legal immigrants.
In early June, thousands of demonstrators marched in Rome in memory of African American George Floyd, who died on May 25 when a white policeman kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes, triggering an outcry in the United States and around the world.
The march spurred renewed vigour among the children and grandchildren of migrants in Italy, who share the language and country’s cultural references but do not have the right to citizenship until they turn 18.
Even then, it is subject to strict conditions and often gained only after a lengthy and heavily bureaucratic process.
“In this country, citizenship is treated not as a right, but a concession,” said Fatima Maiga, who was born in Italy but is of Ivorian origin.
Legal immigrants say their plight has been overshadowed by the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, which since 2014 has seen more than half a million new immigrants arriving on Italy’s shores.
They claim their fight for citizenship is also weighed down by anti-immigrant sentiment at home, fomented by the far-right League party, which left government in 2019 after only a year in power.
Of the 5.3 million foreigners living in Italy in 2019, around 1.3 million were under 18 and three quarters of those were born in the country.
Among those most affected are the children of Albanians, Moroccans, Chinese, Indians and Pakistani immigrants.
– Italian/not Italian –
Maiga, 28, co-founded Italiani Senza Cittadinanza, or Italians Without Citizenship, in 2016 to help second-generation migrants — known as the G2 — become Italian.
Under a 1992 law, anyone born in Italy can apply for citizenship at the age of 18, on condition of having legally lived here “without interruption”.
However, the process must be launched before they turn 19.
Up until that point, they are given residence permits.
If that window is missed, people can also become a citizen on the grounds of legal residency for a decade and on the condition of a minimum income of 8,500 euros ($10,000) a year over three years.
Nevertheless, the process can take a long time and involve complicated paperwork.
“I applied when I was 18. I had to wait for four years before getting my papers,” Marwa Mahmoud, 35, told AFP.
“I know what it’s like to live as an Italian in everything but in law,” Egyptian-born Mahmoud said.
Mahmoud and others also worry the ongoing migrant crisis — in which hundreds continue to arrive on Italy’s shores every day — is pushing their own struggle further down the agenda.
The numbers of people arriving in this way have risen by nearly 150 percent over the past year, the majority coming by boat from Tunisia, Italy’s interior ministry said last week.
“Our situation is being passed over in silence,” Mahmoud lamented.
“Since Italy started getting embroiled in the migrant crisis it’s like we’re starting at zero again,” she said, adding that Italians “tend to put everyone in the same basket”.
“But the situation of an unaccompanied minor who arrived yesterday is not comparable with that of an immigrant child born and raised here,” she said.
– ‘Not a priority’ –
During his year-long tenure in 2018-2019 as interior minister, Matteo Salvini, the head of the League party, pushed through new rules extending the waiting time to process Italian nationality applications from two to four years.
“Nationality is not a ticket to the funfair,” Salvini said in 2017.
Supported by the G2 network, Italy’s governing centre-left Democratic Party (PD) is now pushing for reforms — among them, advocating for five-year continuous residency to qualify for citizenship.
But so far, the PD’s coalition partner, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, has been non-committal.
Still, a fairer birthright citizenship system is under discussion in parliament.
But “it’s not a priority”, said Giuseppe Brescia, a Five Star deputy, who heads parliament’s committee on constitutional affairs.
The G2 movement now plans to hold a demonstration on September 19 in the hope of advancing the cause of what it calls Italy’s “forgotten non-citizens.”
Not surprising given earlier stories and the kinds of people these programs can attract:
Convicted fraudsters, money launderers and political figures accused of corruption are among dozens of people from more than 70 countries who have bought so-called “golden passports” from Cyprus, according to a large cache of official documents obtained by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit.
The Cyprus Papers is a leak of more than 1,400 passport applications approved by the government of the island nation between 2017 and 2019, and it raises serious questions about the Cyprus Investment Programme.
Passports from the Republic of Cyprus can be important for individuals from countries that have restricted access to Europe, as Cyprus is a member of the European Union (EU) and a passport offers its holder access to free travel, work and banking in all 27 member states.
In the coming days, Al Jazeera will reveal the identities of dozens of people who acquired Cypriot citizenship who, according to the country’s own rules, in many cases should not have received a passport.
Security risk
To apply for a Cypriot passport, applicants must invest at least 2.15m euros ($2.5m) in the Cypriot economy, usually by buying real estate, and have a clean criminal record.
However, applicants provide their own proof of eligibility, and although Cyprus claimed to check applicants’ backgrounds, the documents obtained by Al Jazeera prove that this did not always happen.
Since its inception in 2013, the programme has received repeated criticism from the EU, which has called for it to be closed down.
“It’s high value for everyone who comes from a country where there’s a lot of dirty money involved”, German MEP Sven Giegold, a strong critic of the programme, told Al Jazeera.
“You open a bank account, a business relationship and less questions asked, no visa requirements, easier to get access to get everywhere to travel than if you are from Russia, China or even more doubtful countries.”
Since 2013, when the passport programme started, the country has made more than 7 billion euros ($8bn), used to keep afloat the nation’s failing economy.
Burisma and Gazprom officials
Between 2017 and 2019, the countries with the highest number of people applying were Russia, China and Ukraine.
Among the approved applications seen by Al Jazeera was Ukrainian tycoon Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the giant Burisma energy company.
When Zlochevsky bought his Cypriot passport in 2017, he was already under investigation for corruption in his home country.
In June 2020 Ukrainian prosecutors said they were offered $6m in cash to drop the investigation.
Zlochevsky and Burisma deny any knowledge of the bribe.
Like many on wanted lists in their home country, Zlochevsky’s Cypriot passport allows him to live beyond the reach of Ukrainian law enforcement.
Gornovskiy was already on Russia’s wanted list for abuse of power when Cyprus approved his passport in 2019 and has so far thwarted all attempts to extradite him.
Other applications were approved even after the applicant had been arrested and sometimes even served their time in prison.
Ali Beglov, a Russian national, bought his passport despite serving a prison sentence for extortion, which should not have been possible according to Cyprus’s rules.
Chinese businessman Zhang Keqiang also received a Cypriot passport, despite having spent time in prison for a fraudulent share deal.
Vietnamese businessman Pham Nhat Vu’s passport was approved a month after he was charged with giving millions of dollars in bribes in a telecoms deal.
He is now serving three years in jail.
According to Laure Brillaud, Senior Policy Officer with Transparency International, an NGO focused on combatting international corruption, these results are worrying but not surprising.
“These programmes bear inherent risks of money laundering, corruption and tax evasion. They were designed to attract people just looking for a fast track to the EU,” she told Al Jazeera.
Stricter rules
In May 2019, Cyprus introduced tougher rules on who was eligible for citizenship, which banned anyone under investigation, wanted, convicted or under international sanctions from buying a passport.
Cypriot parliamentarians in July finally passed a law that gave the country the power to remove citizenship after several scandals involving notorious golden passport investors, but politicians voted against any move to publish the names of those who buy Cypriot citizenship.
The new stricter law applies to anyone who commits a serious crime, is wanted by Interpol or subject to sanctions in the 10 years after they bought their passport.
Cyprus is reviewing all past applications and announced about 30 unnamed people face losing citizenship, but The Cyprus Papers reveal many more may fall foul of the new law.
They include people such as Venezuelan Leonardo Gonzalez Dellan, an ex-banker, who was sanctioned by the United States for laundering millions in illegal currency deals for the Venezuelan government.
Another person who could lose his passport is Oleg Bakhmatiuk, under investigation in Ukraine for embezzlement and money laundering relating to his giant agricultural firm.
He called the charges “a complete fabrication and politically motivated”.
Although Bakhmatiuk told Al Jazeera the proceedings against him had ended with the charges dropped, the country’s official prosecutor confirmed he is still on Ukraine’s wanted list.
Embezzlement and money laundering
Some other examples of passport holders facing serious charges are Russian brothers Alexei and Dmitry Ananiev, who bought citizenship in 2017.
They are accused in Russia of embezzling from the bank they once owned.
Lastly, there are Maleksabet Ebrahimi and his son Mehdi, who are both on Interpol’s most-wanted list for money laundering and fraud in Iran and facing similar charges in Canada.
Maleksabet Ebrahimi denies the charges against him and says he complied at all times with Iranian and Cypriot laws.
‘Cyprus should be ashamed’
In response to questions from Al Jazeera, Cypriot Member of Parliament Eleni Mavrou said: “The way the programme was implemented the last few years was obviously a procedure that allowed cases for which the Republic of Cyprus should be ashamed.”
“I believe that the new regulations will not leave room for foul play or for stepping over the boundaries that a state should respect,” she added.
The Minister of the Interior, Nicos Nouris told Al Jazeera: “No citizenship was granted in violation of the regulations in force at the given time.”
