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Using your City of Birth rather than the Country on Passport

Using your City of Birth rather than the Country on Passport

Old Apr 14, 2012, 1:25 am
  #16  
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Originally Posted by ajax
I was born in the US. My US passport lists only the state and country. My UK passport lists only the city. Very odd.
Yes, I born in the US and I born in Skokie, IL. I never have any problem at all. I never violated the immigration laws. I never was. I am very good person. I have US passport and I have to get renewal the passport a years ago when my old passport is expired.
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Old Apr 15, 2012, 7:01 am
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Dutch passports always lists the city rather than the country so far as I know. Mine at least does, but I was born outside of the Netherlands.
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Old Apr 15, 2012, 5:00 pm
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I think passports should not even have a place of birth field to begin with as I see it to be irrelevant.

Take the US passport as an example: Does this mean that if a US citizen is not born in the US is considered to be second class citizen?

In most countries, the country of citizenship has nothing to do with where you are born but on your parents citizenship at the time of your birth.

Note: Japanese passports list "place of domicile" which is not necessarily your place of birth. Swiss passports list "place of origin".
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Old Apr 15, 2012, 11:57 pm
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Originally Posted by daniellam
I think passports should not even have a place of birth field to begin with as I see it to be irrelevant.

Take the US passport as an example: Does this mean that if a US citizen is not born in the US is considered to be second class citizen?

In most countries, the country of citizenship has nothing to do with where you are born but on your parents citizenship at the time of your birth.

Note: Japanese passports list "place of domicile" which is not necessarily your place of birth. Swiss passports list "place of origin".
I don't think immigration lawyers would agree that in which country you are born is an irrelevant piece of information.

This is because there is not only the ius sanguinae but also the ius terrae, as main identifier of nationality.

The place of domicile just means where your main domicile is. It might not even be in the country your passport is from.

The city of birth is listed in German passports, too. When it is a German passport and German city, it is assumed that this city is in Germany. So it will only say "Berlin" for example under birthplace. But what they mean is, of course, Berlin, Germany ... not any of the NINE Berlins in the USA.

Till
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Old Apr 16, 2012, 2:25 am
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Originally Posted by daniellam
I think passports should not even have a place of birth field to begin with as I see it to be irrelevant.

Take the US passport as an example: Does this mean that if a US citizen is not born in the US is considered to be second class citizen?

In most countries, the country of citizenship has nothing to do with where you are born but on your parents citizenship at the time of your birth.

Note: Japanese passports list "place of domicile" which is not necessarily your place of birth. Swiss passports list "place of origin".
At least the Swiss use place of origin rather than place of birth and systematically entering false information in the field.

Swedish passports list place of birth (and the field title is "place of birth" in three languages, SV/FR/EN); but in fact at least 20% of Swedish citizens born in Sweden have Swedish passports with an incorrect place of birth in them. The false information is recorded in the Swedish passports and (before that) the national (tax) register because Sweden uses a sort of parish-based locality system that uses the domicile locality of the child's mother as recorded in the national register as at the time of the child's birth. This and some asinine name rules are a continuing legacy of an anti-egalitarian system propped up by what was the (still-)state-backed national religion. [The proportion of ethnic majority Swedes with this issue in their passports is higher than the national average in Sweden, with foreign-born Swedish citizens not having this issue as regularly.]

This dynamic may involve some adjustments when State Department and DHS are dealing with US citizens and others born in Sweden.
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Old Apr 16, 2012, 5:09 am
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Tell me about it. I'm born in 'X Hel. Trefald' according to my passport. Try find that on a map.

For normal countries I've used the real place of birth when applying for visas but am not sure the DHS or whoever American official would approve of such a move.
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Old Apr 16, 2012, 8:23 am
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Originally Posted by Fredrik74
Tell me about it. I'm born in 'X Hel. Trefald' according to my passport. Try find that on a map.

For normal countries I've used the real place of birth when applying for visas but am not sure the DHS or whoever American official would approve of such a move.
I'm just waiting to see if the US tries to boot out naturalized US citizens of Swedish heritage and perhaps the children of such persons born abroad who were accepted (at least once, but often more, by the US Government) as being natural-born US citizens born abroad to at least one US citizen parent -- and doing the booting on the basis of the person or their parent providing false information on US government documents related to place of birth.

Unlike some other countries (Sweden included), the US Government is not so kind in accepting that favorable administrative decisions (made in good faith by US government employees) are not to be normally subjected to being rescinded years -- even decades later -- by the same or other US Government employees on any given matter even in the absence of being able to demonstrate fraud/corruption. [Stare decisis for administrative determinations doesn't exist in the US like it does in Sweden, which is a pity for reasons that will become increasingly apparent to more people over time.]

The way the USG deals with registering US citizens born in Sweden is to rely upon the hospital addresses for the place of birth even as it means ignoring what is listed in the government (Skatteverket Personbevis)) paperwork. However, when it comes to US passports for such persons, the practice is most frequently that of just listing the country of birth. So there are a lot more US citizens with a place of birth in Danderyd whose US passports list place of birth as Sweden; while the US CRBA (sort of a USG birth certificate for births abroad) lists Danderyd; while Sweden's government has the place of birth as who knows what -- sometimes even Kiruna for such births!
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Old Apr 16, 2012, 1:03 pm
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I used to work with a co-worker several years ago whose US Passport said “Okinawa, USCAR” or that sort.

He was born in Okinawa a year before it was transferred back to Japan. His birth was recorded by the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands.
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Old Apr 17, 2012, 4:27 pm
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Originally Posted by tfar
The city of birth is listed in German passports, too. When it is a German passport and German city, it is assumed that this city is in Germany. So it will only say "Berlin" for example under birthplace. But what they mean is, of course, Berlin, Germany ... not any of the NINE Berlins in the USA.
As a resident of one of those Berlins (probably the smallest) I'm amused. (Fun fact: during World War I, we decided to declare we were different from the enemy capital... by changing the pronunciation of the town's name. It's BER-lin, not Ber-LIN.)

What has always intrigued me (and I'm doing this from memory, so I could be wrong, but I don't think so) is that my son's US passport lists his place of birth as MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A. and his British passport lists it as FRAMINGHAM. As if any Brit knows where Framingham is.

(Actually, for a while in 1997, most Brits had heard of Framingham, but that's another story. I remember wondering where it was and looking it up on a map, never thinking that three years later I'd be living in a neighboring town.)
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Old Aug 2, 2019, 9:29 am
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Originally Posted by SQ421
The Australian passport application lets the applicant choose whether their place of birth will be displayed on the passport.
Hi, how do you do that? I don't see that option anywhere in the passport application form?
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Old Aug 2, 2019, 9:30 am
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Hi, how do you do that? I don't see that option anywhere in the passport application form?
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Old Aug 2, 2019, 2:27 pm
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Canada allows omitting place of birth listing on the passports:

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration...ace-birth.html

Austria did too, but Im not sure if it still does. Austria still allows for passport applicants academics degrees (from EU/Schengen educational institutions) to be noted in Austrian passports if the applicant wants it.

Australia may have some place of birth omission history too, but I dont know about that and I have never seen that. I dont see as many Australian passports.

Originally Posted by marlborobell
As a resident of one of those Berlins (probably the smallest) I'm amused. (Fun fact: during World War I, we decided to declare we were different from the enemy capital... by changing the pronunciation of the town's name. It's BER-lin, not Ber-LIN.)

What has always intrigued me (and I'm doing this from memory, so I could be wrong, but I don't think so) is that my son's US passport lists his place of birth as MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A. and his British passport lists it as FRAMINGHAM. As if any Brit knows where Framingham is.

(Actually, for a while in 1997, most Brits had heard of Framingham, but that's another story. I remember wondering where it was and looking it up on a map, never thinking that three years later I'd be living in a neighboring town.)
The pronunciation changes in the US took place in an era where there were a couple of US internment camps for German-Americans and people who grew up knowing German became afraid of speaking German publicly. By the Second World War, the German-American population was so large that most German-Americans werent concerned that they or someone they knew would end up treated by the USG the same way as Japanese-Americans were during WW2.

Some countries list a misleading place of birth, as the place of birth field is used to list the city where the child was first considered to be domiciled/reside with the location of the birth hospital/delivery being ignored by the national authorities when it comes to what shows up in the passport.

Older US passports listed US city of birth too. But then it mainly became US state of birth and country in that field for people born in the US. For people born outside of the US, its a bit different history in the US passports.

Omitting it from US passports had been looked at previously in the Reagan-Bush years:

https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=307

Last edited by GUWonder; Aug 2, 2019 at 2:57 pm
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Old Aug 2, 2019, 6:04 pm
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FWIW I checked my oldest US passport, issued in 1976 on the special Bicentennial paper, and it lists place of birth as San Francisco, USA. At least one or two others issued since then do, too. I know I never specified how I wanted my place of birth listed.
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Old Aug 3, 2019, 12:39 am
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Originally Posted by amsp42
Hi, how do you do that? I don't see that option anywhere in the passport application form?
The post was made well over 7 years ago so things may have changed slightly.
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