This is because his mother had a relationship with a G.I. based in Britain, and who then spirited his bride back to the States where the child was born and registered as an American. Eleven months later the marriage collapsed and mother and baby returned to her home in the West Midlands of England where the lad grew up, went to the local primary school, and thenceforth lived and worked in the area. Now OK technically I suspect the HO are right because the mother did not change her child's status but surely there is some flexibility and common sense, but it seems not - Civil Service rules cannot be bent, warped or twisted.
Now the man, Len Sutera, has to take a Home Office test which could be quite taxing. Two of the questions baffled me completely. "What % of Britons claim to have a religious belief?" I hadn't a clue - it turned out to be 75%. "Give the dates of all the National Days in the UK" - Huh???? - I got one right, St Patricks Day.
How poor old Len will fare I have no idea but I suspect his biggest challenge will come with the killer question:
"Demonstrate an adequate command of the English language" - Impossible if you hear his dialect! Len lives in Wednesbury!!!
1 comment:
I love it when a single wisecrack insults as many people as possible. Such as Mr. Sutera, when he returned to the West Midlands as a baby, raised the IQ of both countries.
This is a great post, and probably someone could do nothing but collect stories like this from all over the world. Not to be too self-promoting, but I have a similar instance of bureaucratic silliness on my blog, "The Nitty Gritty," a link to which appears on the right. The posting is titled "A New Definition of Eating Out."
I am shocked that one has to take a Britishness test. Seriously, it sounds like the impossible questions segregationist registrars asked blacks as a condition of letting them vote, back in the bad old days in the U.S.
In the United States, if they gave such a test of the native-born, it would probably have to be given in Spanish!
Of course, this is a place where the two American Idol finalists outdrew presidential elections in voter participation. It's an unfair comparison because the validity of the voting rules between the two elections are quite different. There is multiple voting by people who are underage, undereducated, swayed by looks and by race.
Then there is the American Idol method.
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