No. 383.
Mr. Bayard
to Mr. McLane.
Washington, May 7, 1888.
Sir: The question of American citizenship and the correspondent duties of support and allegiance of the citizen on the one side and protection by this Government on the other is one of great importance, and demands careful consideration, especially in such cases as that of Henry Asché, mentioned in your dispatch No. 589.
I have therefore to request that you will transmit a statement of the qualifications attached to the passport issued by you to Henry Asché, as it is not understood how he can be so certified to be a citizen of the United States and yet be subject to any claims of a like nature by the Government of Turkey.
Section 4076 of the Revised Statutes expressly limits the grant or issue of passports to citizens of the United States, who must be held to be actual citizens only, so that there is no authority for the issue of passports certifying a qualified or restricted citizenship.
According to the facts recited in your dispatch, the individual in question, being of full age and sui juris in 1888, having been born in Bassorah in 1866, and resided there, and also in Germany and France, but never having been in the United States, and having no intention of ever coming here, applied to you in Paris for a passport.
His claim is through his father, who was a native of Germany, and emigrated to the United States and was here naturalized in 1854, in which year he obtained a passport, and a few years later left the United States and settled at Bassorah, in Turkey, where he continued to live, apparently without intention to return to the United States, and died in 1870.
It is to be doubted whether the father, under these circumstances of such continuous abandonment of his American residence and all the duties and responsibilities of American citizenship, could have been entitled to a passport without having a well-established intention on his part of returning to the country whose protection he so sought, and for [Page 535] which he proposed to render no equivalent. But the son of such a person born abroad, always living abroad, in Turkey, in Germany, and in France, never having been in the United States, and having no intention ever to come here, being of full age, is not entitled to receive the certification of the citizenship of a country towards whom he sustains none of the relations of a citizen. (The principles above stated will be found in the case of Landau in the second volume of Wharton’s Int. Dig., page 370, etc.)
Whatever might have been the right of the Aschés, father and son, if their continuous residence in Turkey as American citizens had been alleged and established, is not necessary to be here considered because no such case is shown, but on the contrary the voluntary residence of the son in Germany (the country of his father’s origin) and in France coupled by his election when upwards of twenty-two years of age there to reside, without any intention ever to come to the United States, proves abundantly his abandonment of American citizenship.
I regret, therefore, that a passport should under the circumstances have been issued to Henry Asché, and if it were practicable it is desirable that it should be recalled and canceled.
It is advisable that in doubtful cases of citizenship the questions should be submitted to the Department before passports are issued.
I am, etc.,