by Paul Carleton Seymour, Global Wealth Protection
The passport as a travel license instead of travel document, and state granted privileges vs. inalienable basic rights
My main man, Bobby Casey, has asked me to write about why citizens of the United States of America might want to seriously consider becoming the citizens of more freedom-respecting countries. He did that because I was recently intimating to him a story about why I became absolutely obsessed with becoming the citizen of such a country myself. It’s not something I did lightly, and if I spelled out the sum total of the sacrifices I’ve had to make in order to become the citizen of another country, you might well have difficulty in believing it.
As I started to recall the whole situation, and the various circumstances surrounding why I did so, I realized that the almost 2-decade (or more) experience probably warranted a series of articles on the subject, and therefore here we have the first installment.
I first started thinking about the reality of packing my bags and moving to another country as far back as 1993, at least. This long journey requires some background information in order to be understood in context. First of all, in addition to loving personal freedom above almost all else, I’ve also had a life-long fascination with far away people and places. But the factor actually driving me to pack up and leave had more to do with an ever-increasing feeling of suffocation which, obviously was only going to continue getting worse. I could go on and on about the multitude of seemingly minor specific reasons. It was the accumulation of them which was ultimately suffocating. The final straw was when I apparently could no longer feed my family due to direct governmental intervention in my life.
Some more background to provide context is necessary, so bear with me. I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s in upstate New York. My parents happened to be racing fanatics, and were both corner marshals with the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA). As a result, I spent many a weekend during my youth at places like Watkins Glen, Pocono, Lime Rock, Daytona, etc. My mom was most likely the first female corner marshal in the world to work a Formula One race back at the US Grand Prix of 1973.
I’ve let you in on this to help you understand, 1) why I felt quite familiar with foreigners at a young age. There’s nothing like seeing guys speaking Italian, or Swedish, etc., putting a beautiful young girl into his Ferrari, or Lotus Europa, or Pantera, while speaking a foreign language, to get a young boy dreaming of world travel. And 2) fast cars, and putting them through their paces, was just the way to go.
So when my Grandpa took me to the DMV on the morning of my 16th birthday to get my driver’s license, it had been a long time coming. I don’t think I made it 2 weeks before getting ticket number one. That would be the first of countless. Even I would cringe at the thought of what my DMV print-out would look like, but for those of you out there who go and look it up, I defy you to find mention of a single accident. Not even a parking lot scratch on the door.
This all, however, at a very early age started meaning suspensions of my “privileges” for months, and by the time I was 20 or so, suspended for 5 years. Therefore, while I was putting myself through college, my wife was driving my hot 280-Z with bored/stroked motor…..and taking me to class, and work, etc. I suppose there’re some nanny types out there saying “I guess he didn’t learn his lesson”. But actually I was. I was just starting to learn the very important lesson that if a guy wanted to be really free, he’d have to leave the so-called “Land of the Free”.
During this same period I also distinctly recall watching an interview with William F Buckley (this is 1983 or so) very eloquently and logically arguing that all drugs should be legal. His arguments ring true even louder today. Point being, I was also learning the absurdity of victimless “crimes”, and the damage that throwing people in jail for committing such acts has on society. So yes, I learned many valuable lessons during this time, but dropping to my knees before my masters certainly wasn’t one of them. Rather, if I wanted to secure my own freedom to live as I chose, I’d also have to be willing to defend the rights of others to do the same. What do I care as a beer and wine drinker, if someone else wants to smoke pot?
I finally got through those 5 years of being chauferred around during college. After graduation, and while as a reasonably respectable and gainfully employed Big 4 CPA, homeowner, taxpayer, husband and father, a few years later I was told again that I no longer had the “privilege” of feeding my family. At that point I was backed into the proverbial corner. Now leaving the country was no longer an exotic dream, but rather a practical necessity. Therefore off to Saudi Arabia I went, albeit without my wife and 9 year-old daughter, as after 13 years of marriage, we were divorced (one of the aforementioned sacrifices, and certainly the biggest regarding my daughter). But now I was about to start learning some more really important lessons about the land of the free versus the rest of the world, and I’d never look back.
Over in Saudi, if you’re not a skilled driver, your dead pretty quickly. Of course I loved that aspect. It was the personal responsibility and freedom that I’d been craving. Drive fast or get out of the way. No problem with the license. I learned many other valuable lessons from living in that society, but they don’t belong in the scope of this little article. One being the lack of 5th Avenue brainwashing, and the almost immediate reduction of one’s desires to buy stuff they don’t need with money they don’t have.
Also, as I’ve been very forthright about my problems in the good ol’ US of A, I’d also like to point out that since 1997, and without any changes to my lifestyle, I’ve driven in Saudi Arabia, France, the UAE, Thailand, Australia, Vietnam, Colombia and Peru. Over that second 15 year period I’ve not received a single ticket for a moving violation, nor had any legal problems whatsoever. Coincidence? Probably not.
Now, after all of the background information, I’d like to get to my real point regarding second citizenships. By the way, the whole driver’s license issue isn’t what caused my obsession with changing citizenship. I promise to follow up with that horrific story in the next week or two. I fully accepted responsibility for the fact that I’d fractured numerous statutes regarding victimless traffic offenses, and just accepted the fact that I needed to leave the country that my ancestors had founded in the name of personal freedom, and instead live in Saudi Arabia in order to send child support payments back home to the daughter I could no longer father, etc.
No direct blame at this point, but certainly some growing resentment. I was even starting to question the morality and Constitutional legality of such treatment of a citizen by that government which confiscates money in order to fund its undesired services in the theoretical name of “protection and service”. Of course there’s the lame old support for such treatment in the form of statements to the effect of–“well maybe you drove for 15 years and never hurt anyone, but you certainly might have”. This supposedly then justifies the destruction of a family in the name of protecting “society”, whatever that is. I warn you, that’s a very slippery slope. Following that logic might even one day lead to the invasion of sovereign nations based on the weakly supported accusations and beliefs of certain bureaucrats, who have theorized about what the government of that nation might possibly do in the future.
My current point, though, is the fairly recent and frightening trend by Big Brother to lead the sheeple down the path to swallowing the concept that a passport is now a travel license. As you can see from the above explained concept of “privilege”, that means that a growing force of bureaucrats has the power to decide if you can leave the country or not. In my case, that meant once again having the privilege of working and supporting my former family and myself. This time, I’m not so willing to accept it. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if I have valid grounds to seek asylum, but of course prefer to just legally become the citizen of a country where concepts such as self-reliance and basic personal freedom are still considered inalienable rights.
A law professor at SMU, Jeffrey Kahn, has written a very interesting paper on the subject entitled International Freedom and the Constitution, and I encourage anyone who cares at all about personal freedom, and the accelerating erosion of it in the former America, to read it here . Note that this is just an abstract, and there’s a button near the top to download the entire 80-page article. I’ll give you some salient quotes from it right now.
“This Article makes the case for the fundamental right of U.S. citizens to leave their country and return home again. Surprisingly, Americans do not enjoy such a fundamental right. Under current U.S. Supreme Court precedents, the right to travel abroad is merely an aspect of liberty that may be restricted within the bounds of due process. The controversial No Fly List is one such result. Anyone whose name appears on this government-run database (or one of several variations on it) may find his or her air travel prohibited or subject to varying levels of restriction. Although the so-called War on Terror raises new concerns about a right-to-travel case law developed during the Cold War, no one has yet made the case for stronger constitutional protection for international travel.”
“The Article begins with an in-depth case study (based on interviews and primary sources) of two citizens who were recently denied permission to return to the United States for more than five months. The Article proceeds to explain the origins of weak support for foreign travel and then advances an unconventional source for its heightened protection. Whereas most unenumerated fundamental rights seek their foundation in the substantive due process guarantees of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, I advance a more straightforward textual source: the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. After developing the historical and theoretical support for my argument, I examine the policy implications of strict judicial scrutiny of travel restrictions, including the No Fly List, which are intended to combat terrorism in a globalized world.”
There’s the foreword which should pique your interest. The article goes on to make strong arguments which should not only frighten the sheeple, but send them running for the door before it’s too late. Following are a few more quotes:
“Even the traveler whose name is not on any list now journeys abroad at the pleasure of the U.S. government, as if on parole from ordinary residence in the United States. Under a new Department of Homeland Security rule, all travelers now require the federal government’s express prior permission to board any aircraft or maritime vessel that will enter or leave the United States.”
“With few clear exceptions, weighing the citizen’s travel interest against foreign policy interests lacks constitutional legitimacy because it equates the citizen of a democratic republic with the subject of a monarchy or an undemocratic dictatorship.”
“So long as the citizen’s actions are not treasonous, immediately dangerous, or contrary to some contractual obligation made to the state, a citizen’s travel (like a citizen’s speech) is none of the state’s business.”
“The passport, for example, began as a temporary travel restriction limited to the worst crises of wartime, but gradually grew into a permanent peacetime restriction. At the height of the Red Scare, a period comparable in many ways to the current so-called War on Terror, the passport could be used as a form of house arrest to keep suspect citizens under watch at home. This tendency toward mission creep, as new threats manifest themselves and new technologies emerge, is examined in the present day.”
“Indeed, restriction of freedom of movement was one of the “injuries and usurpations” listed in the Declaration of Independence.”
“American citizens have a fundamental right to interstate travel that is based on its importance to the life of the individual and the life of the nation. One might expect similar defenses of the right to travel abroad. As the Supreme Court explained in its first substantial case on the question: Travel abroad, like travel within the country, may be necessary for a livelihood. It may be as close to the heart of the individual as the choice of what he eats, or wears, or reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values.”
“As I argue in Part III, the right to international travel is not really a reciprocal right at all, but one that citizens qua citizens need to keep their status from descending into something less than citizenship—to become a subject or, worse, an object of the state’s hegemony.”
Match in the tinderbox theory
“Thus, when the D.C. Circuit was called to consider the appeal of a journalist whose application to renew his passport had been rejected on grounds of his repeated disregard for area restrictions placed on its use, the Court began its opinion by noting that refusal of the passport rested in no part upon Worthy’s personal beliefs, writings or character. It was an application of the Secretary of State’s general policy of refusing Government sanction to travel by United States citizens in certain areas of the world, presently under Communist control and deemed by him to be trouble spots. The appellant had traveled extensively in China and Hungary, both of which were under area restrictions. The Court did not even consider that by lodging in the Secretary of State a power to waive those restrictions for reasons of urgency, exigency, or other exceptions to the rule, it was impossible to say whether a refusal to exercise that discretion was a function of a general policy about dangerous areas or an individualized assessment of this particular journalist’s “personal beliefs, writings or character.”
The D.C. Circuit in Worthy also fell prey to the conflation of the state’s discretion to refrain from issuing travel documents that adversely affected its foreign policy (such as undesired recognition of a foreign state or unwillingness to extend the state’s protection to travelers there) with the state’s power to prohibit citizens from traveling to such places of their own accord. The appellate court did not avoid hyperbole in assessing the government’s interests in denying a passport to visit Communist China or Warsaw Pact Hungary: Unless almost the whole of our foreign policy and the titanic domestic burdens being presently borne by our people are devoid of factual foundation, there is presently in the world a deadlock of antagonistic forces, susceptible of erupting into a fatal cataclysm. The capacity of incidents arising from the conduct of individuals to ignite that conflagration is well proven. Worthy says the reasons averred by or available to the Secretary are insufficient to support the restriction of his passport. We hold they are ample.
By “ample,” the court meant an ample demonstration of the executive branch power to conduct foreign affairs. A travel restriction was at least “an instrument of foreign policy” if not a foreign policy “in and of itself.”
The court also evoked the Hostage Act, 22 U.S.C. § 1732, as grounds to keep citizens out of “trouble spots” or “danger zones” in which the President would be pressed to come to their rescue. The court then held that the “refusal of the Executive to accord Government approval for a citizen to travel in such a designated area [was] also a foreign affair.” The court reasoned:
“History establishes that either the behavior or the predicament of an individual citizen in a foreign country can bring into clash, peaceful or violent, the powers of his own government and those of the foreign power. This is a fact, not a theory. The nub of the problem at bar revolves about a fact, not a suppositious theorem. The acts of individuals do cause clashes; the prevention of such acts does prevent clashes. Such clashes, whether diplomatic or military, involve ‘foreign affairs’ . . . In foreign affairs, especially in the intimate posture of today’s world of jets, radio, and atomic power, an individual’s uninhibited yen to go and to inquire may be circumscribed. A blustering inquisitor avowing his own freedom to go and do as he pleases can throw the whole international neighborhood into turmoil. The court was confident that the President possessed the power to act in loco parentis for American citizens willing to risk danger abroad. 191 What is more, as the court had previously explained, citizens are “potential matches” in an “international tinderbox.”
Wow. Here the US Supreme court seems to be warning US citizens that Washington’s desire to stick its finger in everyone else’s pie gives the Secretary of State (or more likely some other government-paid moron working under her authority) the legal right to deny a US citizen the ability to travel, when they merely consider it possible that such citizen might damage Washington’s ability to do whatever it wants in any corner of the globe. A very good reason to be the citizen of a country with less global ambitions in my opinion.
“Finally, in 1978, all conditional language on the imposition of travel controls was struck out.
Neither a state of war nor a presidentially proclaimed national emergency were necessary to initiate temporary travel controls. The controls were permanently installed for all peacetime travel: Except as otherwise provided by the President and subject to such limitations and exceptions as the President may authorize and prescribe, it shall be unlawful for any citizen of the United States to depart from or enter, or attempt to depart from or enter, the United States unless he bears a valid passport.
The passport was no longer merely a document that provided evidence of the bearer’s identity and a request from either the bearer’s government or, in the case of enemy aliens or foreign diplomats, from the host government for safe passage through a sovereign jurisdiction. The passport became a license issued by a government permitting its own citizens to travel abroad: The passport ceased to be a document of identification and comity; it emerged as a device to restrict liberty to travel out of one’s own country and to monitor one’s citizens in foreign lands.”
The Cold War policy was summarized by Louis Jaffe in terms that resonate today:
“Nearly every passport denial has been a decision to keep the citizen here within the high-walled fortress where he can be isolated, neutralized, kept, let us say, to his accustomed and observable routines of malefaction. It has been simply one facet of our tactic of domestic security, and only incidentally a matter of foreign policy.”
Jeffrey Kahn’s article was based largely on the assumptions that Americans have Constitutional rights in general, and specifically regarding the right to due process. When he wrote the article just 4 or 5 years ago, those rights seemed to actually exist. As demonstrated by the passage of Congress, and the signing by the President, of the Indefinite Detention clause of NDAA over a year ago, in conjunction with many other similar actions, the Constitution in general, and due process specifically, have apparently been thrown under the bus.
In just a few short years since this article was written and published, the Executive Branch has gone a very long ways toward creating Executive powers that continually look like tyranny at best, and totalitarianism at worst while skirting the Constitutionally provided separation of powers. If you read this, and Kahn’s article in its entirety, and still see no reason why a current US citizen might want to become the citizen of just about any other nation, I’ll share with you soon some very personal, and painful experiences, which might push those of you who are still unsure, over the fence.
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