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Comment by avianlyric | Hacker News Reader

> Your primary citizenship gained via by birth or by descent cannot be taken away from you almost anywhere.

I’m sorry but you’re badly misinformed here. There is no concept of “primary citizenship”, you’re either a citizen or you’re not. If your government has a right to strip your citizenship, then mechanism by which you acquired citizenship is relevant. The whole point of citizenship is to declare that everyone with citizenship has identical rights and protections from their government.

There has been one person in the UK who had her citizenship revoked for joining ISIS. She was a born in UK, and was a British citizen from birth by right of decency. She is now stateless, a citizen of no country. These are the actual laws you’re defending, the hypothetical laws that only apply to naturalised citizens don’t exist, and aren’t being proposed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamima_Begum

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No, it is you who are misinformed. According to your Wikipedia link she was a dual citizen so the UK had the legal rights to strip her of her British one and she was left with her Bangladeshi citizenship, so not stateless.

>However, the UK government contended that Begum was a dual national, also holding citizenship of Bangladesh, and was not therefore made stateless by the decision.

>However, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission found that as a matter of the Bangladeshi nationality law, Begum also holds Bangladeshi citizenship through her parents, under section 5 of the Citizenship Act, 1951.

She was born in the UK as a UK citizens to parents that were naturalised UK citizens. By your definition her “primary” citizenship was British. That was where she was born, that was where she grew up, that was the first citizenship she gained.

Due to her parent Bangladeshi origins, she had a separate right to claim Bangladeshi citizenship, but at the point she lost her British citizenship had not claim that right. She has also never lived in Bangladesh, and has never held a Bangladeshi passport.

At the time UK was going to remove her citizenship, Bangladesh said the following:

> The Government of Bangladesh stated that Begum did not currently hold Bangladeshi citizenship and, without it, would not be allowed to enter Bangladesh.

You’ve made some pretty silly claims about countries not removing people’s “primary” citizenship. Begum is quite clearly a case where their “primary” citizenship based on the parameters you provided, was her British citizenship, and the UK has quite clearly stripped her of that citizenship. Bangladesh has also refused to acknowledge her as a citizen, which seems a lot fair that the UKs stance, given she’s never lived, worked, or paid taxes in Bangladesh, so it not clear why they should be responsible for her, rather than the country where she was born and raised.

>She was born in the UK as a UK citizens to parents that were naturalised UK citizens.

Her parents were not UK citizens, they were Bangladeshi citizens making her Bangladeshi first. Her parents had "settled" status in the UK granting her UK citizenship but her parents were not UK citizens. It's literally in the wiki link you shared.

"Begum was born in London to immigrant parents of Bangladeshi Muslim origin and citizenship"

Oh sorry I didn’t realise your definition of “primary citizenship” required your parents to also be born in the country. How many generations back do we have to go before someone is allowed to have parents not born in the same country as them?

I naively assumed that given she was born in the UK to legally settled parents, given British citizenship in the UK at birth, grew up in the UK, was educated in the UK, radicalised in the UK. That would make her “primary citizenship” British. But obviously not, she’s obviously secretly a citizen of a country she’s never visited, just hiding in the UK until she could show her true colours.

What’s your view of people with mixed heritage? If one of her parents was born in the UK so she’s “50% British”, does that make her primary citizenship British? What if she was 25% or 75% how about 90%? Where do you draw the line?

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