What is the craziest US immigration experience ever?

This goes back a few years… I’ve been a dual citizen of the United States and Canada since birth, having been born in the US to Canadian parents. It has caused a fair number of problems from time to time, culminating in my being detained while in transit from Toronto to Tokyo (where my father was working in the Canadian embassy) in Seattle on my Canadian passport, which contained my multiple-entry Japanese visa. The US authorities determined that I was obliged to travel on my (non-existent) US passport, since in their eyes I was a US citizen (even though I hadn’t lived in the country since I was six months old and had spent perhaps two weeks there in total in the following 19 years) and they didn’t recognize my Canadian citizenship, or so the US embassy in Ottawa subsequently informed me. In any event, I was detained for five hours, and missed my connecting flight to Tokyo, back in an era when there was no Internet. My parents had no idea what had happened to me, and it took a while to sort out the mess.

So, after that, I avoided traveling to or through the US — until my father was posted to the Canadian embassy in Washington. At which point I went in to discuss the matter with the US authorities in Canada. Option one would have been to relinquish my US citizenship altogether. The consular official (this was the 1980s) told me he’d had two people do this: one, he said, was a “flaming Communist,” the other, “a flaming homosexual.” Which, he asked, was I? Besides, he warned me, if I relinquished my US citizenship, there was a high probability that I’d end up on a list of people banned from entering the country altogether, and still face problems, since passports show birthplaces. As several high profile Canadians had recently ended up on just such a list, I reconsidered this option, and opted for Door B: obtaining a US passport (which came along with the responsibility of filing tax returns for the previous seven years…)

Now, the immigration experience… The first time I used the new US passport was to travel to Washington DC to spend Christmas with my parents. I show up at the US customs and immigration checkpoint, hand it over and wait for the questions.

“Where are you going?”

I explain.

“Where do you live?”

In Ottawa.

“Why doesn’t your US passport have a Canadian visa in it, then?

Because the Canadians think I’m a Canadian.

“That’s not possible.”

Actually, it is.

We go back and forth, and back and forth on that front. I have my registration of birth abroad form, my Canadian citizenship ID card.

“You could have had any little store in Ottawa put these together.”

But — I didn’t. (This guy lives and works in Canada — immigration from Canada into the US is handled as pre-clearance at the airports in Canada, so it’s not as if we’re talking about documents issued in Equatorial Guinea that he might never have encountered before. He likely sees many of these every single day.)

Finally, after his supervisor is called over, he accepts that the Canadians might consider me a Canadian, and that it’s acceptable that I don’t have a visa in my passport. 15 minutes have elapsed. We move on to the reason for my trip, that I’m going to spend the holidays with my parents.

“But they are Canadian.”

Yes.

“So why are you going to the United States?”

Because that’s where they are living?

Cue another struggle to comprehend that it was possible — or even legal — for the parents of a US citizen to be Canadian AND to represent Canada in a diplomatic mission overseas.

“Isn’t it illegal for your father, as the parent of an American citizen, to be a Canadian diplomat? Isn’t it a conflict of interest?”

Erm, nope. In fact, diplomats even marry citizens of other countries. (Though I didn’t go as far as to challenge him on that…)

“So let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You, an American, are living in Canada, and you’re traveling to the United States to visit your Canadian parents, who are living there, for the holidays?”

Bingo! And to think it only took 35 minutes to get us to that stage.

“I don’t know what the world is coming to.”

Disapproving glare. But my passport got stamped. The first stamp in the new US passport. Welcome to the wonderful world of dual citizenship, globalization, etc.

After that trip, I learned to just say that I was “visiting friends.” And yes, I still have to do the two-passport routine, though Canada really doesn’t care which passport I travel on. They just say “welcome/bienvenue.”