After International Living’s Go Overseas Bootcamp conference in September last year, I spent a week at my father’s house in Florida. While there I helped him sort out a problem with his internet. A helpful technician agreed with my diagnosis that the cable box on the outside of his house was worn out.
This technician was Ukrainian. I’d guess he was somewhere between 25 and 30. He was powerfully built. He had a younger brother living nearby.
I don’t know whether the brothers had US citizenship. If not, they face a big problem… one we can all learn from.
Last month the Ukrainian government announced it would no longer renew its citizens’ passports outside the country. They will only be issued in Ukraine itself.
The point is to force people like the Ukrainian technician and his brother to return to the country, where they will be drafted into the army to fight the Russians.
So, what happens if your passport expires while you are temporarily or permanently resident in a foreign country, and you can’t get your home country to issue a new one?
First of all, you won’t be able to travel internationally. Every country in the world requires a valid passport for you to enter. (For the brothers, the only exception would be traveling back to Ukraine.)
Second, depending on the permit type, you may be unable to renew your residency when the current one expires. Most countries stamp a person’s passport with their residence permit. You can’t stamp it into an expired passport. So even if you qualify in all other respects, you will still lose your residency rights.
Third, if you were hoping to upgrade your status to permanent residency, you won’t be able to do so until you have a valid passport.
Essentially, you would be either trapped in your foreign country of residence… or soon forced to leave it.
It’s not hard to see why the Ukrainian government is doing this. There are approximately 600,000 Ukrainians living outside the country. Assuming a normal gender and age distribution, 150,000 of them are of military age. They are desperately needed on the front lines.
Now, you might think that’s something you’ll never need to worry about. But there are at least a half-a-dozen reasons the US government can invalidate or even revoke your passport, including owing back taxes to the IRS or as little as $2,500 in back child support.
Although rarer, US citizens occasionally have their citizenship revoked for technical reasons. Last year a Virginia doctor applied for a new passport only to receive a letter informing him that he was in fact not a US citizen. His father, who was an Iranian military officer being trained in the US, was in the US temporarily on diplomatic duty when he was born, making him ineligible for citizenship by birth.
These might sound like outliers. But the world’s a funny place. Things we assume can never happen—say, the US shutting its borders to all incoming and outgoing travel, like happened during COVID—actually do.
As a holder of a second citizenship and passport, this is something I will never need to worry about.
How about you?
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