Hey @Lain,
That’s great to hear 蕭美琴 or at least a staffer on her team did something. I’m actually pretty happy to hear that. I’m sorry to hear you’re still having difficulty with this.
I suppose you could try other politicians related to that legislation, but it might produce the same result.
I think it would be good to better understand the details of NIA’s reasoning (although it sounds like maybe they weren’t explaining it in clear detail).
To summarize my understanding:
The main significant differences in our two cases are: (1) my ROC parent is not alive, but yours is; (2) my ROC parent never renounced citizenship, but your ROC parent did (and this had a subsequent effect on your ROC parent’s HHR).
In a sense, you don’t currently have an ROC parent because your mom is not an ROC national. I would try pointing that out to them, so therefore the requirement that your ROC parent have an HHR in Taiwan maybe should be irrelevant since you don’t have an ROC parent. This might seem counter-intuitive, but to me this logically might work. Even if your mom passed away, would you even currently have a way to register that with the ROC? For all they know, she could be passed away overseas as a foreign national (not saying you should fake it, but my point is they’re no longer tracking her as an ROC citizen and not tracking her status of alive or deceased, so how can they apply that information in their decision about your rights?). It can’t even be added to the old HHR, right?
So if you can get them to accept the above, then the other part is your ROC parent renouncing ROC nationality. To me, this applies to your ROC parent only, and you never renounced. They seem to accept this since you have an active, valid ROC passport. Based on what I’ve read about HHR and NWOHR, what we’ve all been told is that AF384 applies if your parent had HHR at the time you were born overseas. Were you born overseas before your mom renounced her citizenship and the HHR was revoked? If so, that seems like AF384 should apply to you. Then, if they bring up AF353, I think they can’t apply that to you based on the above point that you don’t have an ROC parent right now.
To me this would seem like the strongest case based on my own personal opinions and experience.
However, that act of renouncing citizenship had a legal effect on the HHR, so that needs to be explored to build a stronger case.
That said, I need to heavily disclaim that I am not a lawyer nor a legal expert and at this point you’ve probably read more legal documents than I have. The above writing is just my personal opinion.
I think we should also recognize that laws in any country or legal system are very complicated and while NIA’s explanation that the law can’t be written clearly is disappointing, many laws are truncated when described on 2-page forms or have related influencing laws that impact how the law is implemented. For example, in the United States there is the right to bear arms, which basically means weapons and originally I believe guns. So in the U.S. citizens have the right to own arms/guns, so we can all acquire arms/guns whenever we want, right? Well, not quite, there are restrictions described in the full law and subsequent laws which change the way this is implemented. You can’t have stockpiles of nuclear weapons, a private army of fighter jets, ICBMs, etc., and various regions have their own local laws restricting automatic rifles, etc. I guess my point is simply: we can read something about a law in isolation in one document, but it’s hard to know the full range of possible documents and text we need to know to understand all of the variables involved. Maybe another place to start researching is nationality law related to when people renounce citizenship – what does that mean for the person and their family? What rights are lost? How does this influence the way other laws are applied to a person? What exactly does this do to a HHR?
Also we should clarify with those in charge of HHR: what are the specific statuses of HHR? On the internet and casually in conversation, people throw around ‘active’ and ‘inactive’, but what does that actually mean? When we looked at what was written on the HHRs our families had, the terminology doesn’t seem to necessarily line up so simply into the buckets ‘active’ and ‘inactive’. Maybe there are other statuses. Which of these qualifies as 設有戶籍?
Since our cases only differ in a significant way related to (1) deceased/living ROC parent and (2) ROC parent did/didn’t renounce citizenship (and subsequent effect on HHR), I would think that those would be the fuller set of laws that could influence the nationality and immigration laws you have been looking at. Fully knowing those might cover all or most of the remaining legal variables (I’m not sure – maybe there could be more). Most of us on these forums haven’t read those, so we could be running in circles just saying what we think sounds right without checking all possible factors. We’re just voices on the internet who could give you horrible advice even if we have good intentions.
I would also check the ROC constitution to see if there are fundamental constitutional rights that the highest court would need to uphold. I’m not familiar with ROC constitutional law and previous cases though.
The constitution in the ROC, like other countries, is also possible to amend. For example, in U.S. history the legal voting age was changed because people could be conscripted into war at age 18 but couldn’t vote, so they reduced the voting age to match.
The only counterargument that I can think of from the NIA’s perspective is if renouncing citizenship means you basically lose some or all legal statuses retroactively, including HHR. Like the whole HHR is null and void in all aspects and can’t be used again for anything legally ever. That’s why I suggest looking into those laws. That way you could see if anything like that exists, or prove to them that nothing like that exists.
That said, if they told you the main issue is that your mom is alive so you should use that method for NWOHRs who have a living ROC parent, I think that doesn’t make any sense to me since your parent is no longer an ROC national. That said, maybe those people you talked to are saying that based on what their typical work process that they are accustomed to is (i.e. Standard Operating Procedure manual instructions), rather than the actual legal aspects of your case.
Other ideas off the top of my head would be:
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See if there are any famous or notable people who had a similar situation. You can look for celebrities or public figures with parents from different nationalities, particular from countries that require renouncing ROC citizenship to gain local citizenship. If those people found a way, you should also have a way. You only need to find 1 successful example.
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Ask around the community of that non-ROC country and see if there are Taiwanese people who went through a similar experience and now it was handled.
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Try to connect with professors or lawyer alumni groups for schools like 台大 or lawyer professional groups. At one point in my life I had to use a lawyer in Taiwan to go after someone for something. The first recommendation I got was horrible, but the next one I got from an ex-girlfriend was really good, but it was her friend who helped me find someone in her network of contacts, so it was a really distant connection in a specific region of Taiwan. You could check Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Your case is pretty interesting so maybe they’ll pass it around their community and it’ll land in front of the right person.
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Talk to immigration lawyers in Taiwan. I think many of them might not be good and might give you bad info, but it’s a numbers game. I would go to them with the facts of your case first without your rationale, and see what they say. If they say things that show they really don’t understand the law, move on. Try a bunch. If you try 10, and 1 out of 10 is good, that’s still good enough to get you the person you need. It might sound like a lot of work, but you’ve already gone this far so clearly you care about this a lot, and it’s probably still less work than getting your mom to get ROC citizenship again and establish a new HHR.
That’s all I can think of at the moment. I’ll post again if I can think of anything else. I’m open to questions, criticism, or anything else.