Surrogate Mothers and Citizens of the World

I am happy to report the passport saga has come to a happy ending.

For those of you who don’t know: I have been working on getting my three children German passports for 14 months now.  They entered Germany with their US passports. Ruby and Rory are scheduled to leave and spend the summer in Silver City on July 10.  If they were to exit Germany with the US passports, and no proof of German citizenship,  they would get arrested for overstaying their visas. And not be able to return to Germany.

So we needed the German passports. This was not even an immigration or citizenship issue: The kids have German citizenship by being children of a German mother. No, I thought, it was a bureaucracy issue.  Or was it?

The sequence of emails between myself, the consulate in Houston and the Buergeramt (citizen’s service office) in Berlin-Steglitz spans a year, and if printed would circumvent the globe. The main hurdle: before issuing documents to Germans born in a foreign country, the issuing office has to receive the ok from the German consulate in the country of birth. I did not understand why until the very end of the ordeal. The reason is creepy.

I don’t want to bore the reader with details, but the barriers to receiving passports where a mix of bureaucracy and incompetence, and included

• No response to the letter of inquiry from Steglitz to Houston
• Steglitz refusal to follow-up with looking into why there was no response
• No response for a month from Houston to my phone and email messages
• Steglitz resending the inquiry via email to a mistyped email Houston email address
• Houston requesting “long” birth certificates, stating the town of birth (which Texas issues upon request, and NM doesn’t issue unless you bribe someone)
• Benny’s midwife’s basement having flooded a few years back, turning all records into pulp
•  City of Austin demanding a utility bill to verify identity of me requesting my kids’ birth certificates

Once we received the long birth certificates in the mail, mailed them to Berlin, pdf-ed them back to Houston, and after another nail biting ten days passed (the day of the kids’ departure now three weeks away) because the head of the passport office was on vacation, she finally sent this email to Steglitz:

Anhand des Schreibens der Hebamme für Ben Alfero und des Wohnsitzes der Eltern im Ort der Geburt laut der Geburtsurkunden für Rory Gregory und Ruby Zeuner, ist eine Leihmutterschaft hier  unwahrscheinlich. Hinweise auf eine Leihmutterschaft oder ähnliches kann ich hier nicht erkennen.

Ein positives Votum gemäß den vorläufigen Durchführungshinweisen des Bundesministeriums des Innern wird hiermit abgegeben.

Non-German speakers, this says: you can give these kids passports now, because there is no evidence of them being born to a surrogate mother... What????

So this is what this bureaucratic nightmare was about. Since surrogate mother deals are less regulated in the US, the German state needs to make sure my kids are actually, genetically, heretically, biologically, (to not say racially) German and not the product of a fertilized non-German egg planted into my German womb.  And this is what caused a year of trouble, hundreds of dollars in fees and mailing costs, and a bunch of gray hair. It had to be German blood in their veins. Creepy.

Whatever. My kids now have EU Passports and dual citizenship (or rather, they had it all along, but now the bureaucrats had to admit it).

So meanwhile, the block my dad lives on in Berlin Kreuzberg erupts in chaos. 40 asylum-seeking refugees from Africa have refused to leave the school on Ohlauer Strasse they had been occupying for over a year. Their asylum applications are not looking promising, and they are facing deportation back to war zones. These guys are on the roof of the building, threatening to jump. They have very little to lose.  1000 police have blocked the entire area, to prevent more people from joining them. Then the Kreuzberg authorities order the school to be cleared. But the police is smarter than the politicians and waits. Many people, including my parents and my sister, sign this petition, supporters are doing sit-ins and demonstrations in the streets right outside of my dad’s balcony.  He can only get into his building showing his ID.  The #ohlauer tweets come 3-4 a minute.

On Wednesday, my dad escapes to our quiet Steglitz and has dinner with us at the Greek place on the corner. He seems harrowed and tired, discouraged by the constant violence he sees outside his window. I offer him political asylum in Steglitz for a few nights. But that night as he gets home, an agreement is reached between the occupiers and the Kreuzberg government. The barricades are removed and everyone goes home. The refugees get to stay in the school, and their other demands will be looked at later. The agreement seems really non-committal, badly written, and anti-climactic, after this week of trauma and violence.

This shitstorm showed once again:  German asylum law, and the bureaucratic system it has created, are not working as a whole and are not doing justice to the individuals stuck in the process.  The whole thing is completely dysfunctional, outdated, designed for a world in which war, political prosecution and human rights violations that happen elsewhere did not concern us in the rich countries. “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar”, untouchable human dignity, says Article 1 of the German constitution. That should define the German nation.  Not blood. Yet that antiquated notion of nationality is at the heart of what keeps us from reforming our asylum process.

Meanwhile on the other side of the fence, it’s the Fourth of July, which President Obama marks by attending a naturalization ceremony, …. and taking the opportunity to remind the nation that US immigration reform has still not happened. The American notion of citizenship, based on shared values, in the President’s words, “adherence to a set of beliefs, and unalienable rights, and obligations to each other, to look after each other and serve one another” makes a lot more sense than the Germans’ in today’s ethnically intermixed world.

Yet the US Congress cannot or is not willing to pass reforms that assure human dignity, keep families together and create a system that works for people and the economy. 50,000 unaccompanied children from Central America have crossed into Texas alone (of all places) since October. Fifty Thousand.  A few hundred were sent to California for processing, and met by angry protesters, shouting “Send them back!”

My children are privileged. Even though it was a pain in the ass, they now have two passports. Through pure luck they are citizens of a country that grants citizenship based on blood and of another country that grants it based on place of birth. But does that really make them citizens of the world? Both passports were issued by wealthy nations with democratic political systems and lots of opportunity. Both nations are democracies that have not figured out how to change policy and how to address the incoming tide of the poor, prosecuted, opportunity-seeking humans that surround us – address it politically, economically, legally and humanely.  It’s the next big challenge for us.  When we figure it out we’ll be true citizens of the world.

Dispatch from Queens - The Immigrant Lens

We made it to New York, and are awaiting our international flight later today in a somewhat dumpy hotel near JFK. Lucy is tired but unfazed. The kids have settled into their travelling mode, as if that's all they ever do.

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I don't drink coffee I take tea my dear
I like my toast done on one side
And you can hear it in my accent when I talk
I'm an Englishman in New York
Sting

When I first began thinking and writing about my 20-year experience as a permanent alien in the US, I realized this: For an immigrant, life could be viewed as a series of cultural choices, small and big, on the continuum between assimilation and rejection.

In my case that looks like this: No, I won’t shave my legs all the time, yes I will let my son get a driver’s license at 16 (kicking and screaming, albeit). But I won’t buy him a car. I’ll joyfully eat burgers and Mexican food, but I’ll buy German “brick bread”, never that spongy stuff in plastic bags they call bread here.

I happily lose the antiquated, formal 2nd person pronoun “Sie” (Usted, Vous, Lei) to address people.* I smile at or greet everyone in the street and do my best to learn small talk.

But I continue to be annoyed with the idling SUVs at my children’s elementary school. And I don’t pretend to understand why forced air heating systems, hot water tanks and top loader washers persist....Neanderthal behavior and technology.

I tip all wait staff generously, and refrain from complaining about stuff at the restaurant (and am embarrassed when my visiting parents do, in that stern, unadorned-by-politeness German tone). I proudly serve on the board of a local nonprofit, volunteer at my children’s school, and make donations to charity and to NPR. I just don’t like it when my husband donates to a political campaign. I’ll stand up for the pledge of allegiance at the Rotary Club meeting, I just skip the “under God” part. And I will move around my house naked and insist that my children speak more than one language. And on and on. Choosing where to draw the line, every day.

So why would this stuff matter to anyone but me? While the US undoubtedly is a multi-cultural society, it somehow suffers from cultural and political isolation, and from a lack in diversity of perspectives. Many people are bilingual and bicultural thanks to their ethnic heritage. But that’s not celebrated, let alone leveraged by the schools.

Increasingly, each discussion ends up in a black and white dead-end. You either believe that government should stay out of people’s lives, or you’re a socialist. Really? We have two political parties, currently producing … nothing: A month ago, the US Senate failed to pass a law requiring background checks for gun buyers, even though the majority of the US population supports this middle of the road policy. Despite all the information available to people, political and cultural polarization grows, reinforced by social media - the dipstick of polarized viewpoints.

The immigrant perspective provides a cultural, political and social lens on US society, different for each immigrant, colored by where he or she came from. Wouldn’t it be interesting to read a series of essays by immigrants from all over the world, describing what the US and their life here looks like? And what the view back at their home country looks like now, through each of their changing lenses. You'll hear about that one from me over the coming 12 months.

I’ll provide my very personal and subjective view to the readers of this blog, and hope that it shows some of the very colorful and intricate areas between the black and the white. The readers, I hope, will be provoked into some new thinking, conversation, and productive controversy.

Ultimately we all make our value-based choices every day, immigrant or not. May the immigrant lens make your choices more interesting!

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*Losing the "Sie", is actually not a choice, since the informal singular “thou” has been lost to the English language, and the former plural “you”, never took as the polite form as in other languages, and since has become the universal English pronoun.

It's Better Over Where?

I am reposting a facebook note from almost two years ago. We had not decided to leave the US yet, at that point. But the thoughts completely still apply today, as we are leaving.....

September 2010

As I am reading the late great Tony Judt’s “Ill Fares the Land” (jumping up and shouting YES! every couple of pages…) , out comes another book comparing European social welfare states with the American model: Tom Geoghegan’s “Were you born on the wrong continent?”

Based on Geoghegan, I was born on the right continent, but must have temporarily lost my mind and moved to the wrong one. How could I leave a place providing guaranteed vacation time, free education, free child care, free nursing home care and generous unemployment payments?

I have lived in the United States for many years now and “the country” has been good to me. I have been able to pursue a diverse career of my choice, changing jobs and locations in a way that would have made me an outcast on the German labor market. I have been able to make a decent living (in large parts thanks to that free German education putting me ahead of Americans, financially and in terms of basic skills), raise a family and live in a beautiful place of my choice.  Working in the nonprofit sector, my work has made real change in local communities, people and policies in a way that would not have been possible in the more static German welfare and political system.

The country has been good to me. So I will not join too loudly the choir of people on all the social media networks and the press who took the publishing of Geoghegan’s book as another opportunity to complain about how terrible this country is. I feel more at home in Tony Judt’s camp: Looking at the welfare systems through his vast historical perspective (a European who lived in the US by choice, like myself) many of the paradoxes on both sides of the ocean make more sense.  For example, he reminds the reader that neoliberalism hasn’t always ruled American political thought and decision making: “ …, much that was best in American legislation and social policy over the course of the 20th century – and that we are now urged to dismantle in the name of efficiency and “less government” – corresponds in practice to what Europeans have called ‘social democracy’.”  He explains why even in countries like Germany, middle-class support for the social democratic model is now waning. And he chastises our generation with having missed a great opportunity:  After the fall of communism, “we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.” Thirty years of erosion of social policies in the US have made the country more unequal  “ … - in incomes, wealth, health, education and life chances - than at any time since the 1920s.”

And here’s a big point (one of several) on which Judt and Geoghegan “agree”: Poverty (Geoghegan) and inequality (Judt) corrupt society, endanger democracy,  and ultimately undermine the economy: “Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.” Judt explains the emergence of the social democratic systems after two world wars in Europe partially as a way to avoid another catastrophe. Geoghegan shows that poverty carries a tremendous cost to US society and economy.

Here's a West-German Cold War quote a fellow German expatriate reminded me of “ Geh doch nach drüben!” which is what German conservatives used to say if someone in post-war West-Germany was too lefty, meaning, go to Communist East Germany. The reviewers  that have praised Geoghegan’s little book are now getting the same comment: “go there, if you like it so much better than the home of the brave and the land of the free….”

Meanwhile, I am running out of the benefits my European free education provided me: A large portion of my salary goes towards the private education of my younger children, because where we live, school districts are too underfunded to provide a solid public education. Our teenagers go to the local college to make up for what high school does not offer. This means, I am putting away no money for my retirement, let alone a graduate education for our children. The secondary education they get here does not adequately prepare them for the (free) higher education programs in Europe. So, is it  “Geh doch nach drüben” time? should we move our family back to Europe?

We have not made that decision. Maybe the question is not, where is it better, or,  where would we be happier. One of the challenges for us 21st century homeless cosmopolitans might be to find a way to be at home in both worlds. Not only from an individual perspective, taking advantage of the best of both worlds and avoiding the worst. But also from the perspective of ambassador between the worlds, showing our fellow citizens on both sides of the Atlantic what is dear to us and worth transferring to the other side. The freedom of making creative choices in one’s life and one’s community from the US, and the solidarity of social democracy that affords everyone the chance to do so, from Europe. Judt the European and Geoghegan the American do a good job bridging the Atlantic for this discussion. Everyone should read their books.