Word: citizenship
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After spending two years in the Czech Republic--a former Communist country where people are "so excited" about the right to vote for a party and a candidate--Trevor D. Dryer '02 realized "how often we as Americans take our citizenship [and voting rights] for granted...
...Speight has demanded that Fiji be ruled exclusively by indigenous Fijians, while the country's Indian community - the 49 percent of the 800,000 inhabitants whose ancestors were brought to Fiji by the British 100 years ago to pick sugar - must accept second-class citizenship. The gunman's toppling of the country's first ethnic-Indian leader appears to have captured the imagination of many indigenous Fijians, and prompted the Fijian army to seize power and nix the constitution. Still, Speight refuses to free his hostages until he and his cronies are given a direct role in ruling the country...
...over the state, and legal experts were left befuddled. After all, there is no legal precedent for O'Connor's decision. And, says TIME senior reporter Alain Sanders, "there is no right answer to this dilemma." On the one hand, Sanders explains, the right to privacy is critical to citizenship, and most birth mothers give up their children with the understanding that their identity will be fiercely and permanently protected. On the other hand, adoptees have an undeniable right to know their medical background. Would adoptees be willing to accept medical records without a name attached? Would birth mothers agree...
...sobering thought recently when I heard that the citizens of Emmen, Switzerland (pop. 27,000), had been permitted to decide which of the 56 immigrants living among them should be granted citizenship--voting in an election that had some characteristics of fraternity rush week. It occurred to me that if the citizens of St. Joseph, Mo., had been given similar power in 1910 or so, my family would probably have lost in a landslide...
...face it: my people weren't even all that popular back where they came from. That's why they left in the first place. No, my grandparents would never have made the cut, and under the Swiss system of not granting automatic citizenship to native-born descendants of immigrants, I might still be standing in line trying to get my green card renewed...