Is This 95-Year-Old WWII Vet an Anchor Baby? (Video)

Screenshot courtesy KOMO-TV

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


If this won’t make a birther’s head explode, nothing will.

Meet Leeland Davidson, 95, of Centralia, Washington. He was a cracker-jack sailor for Uncle Sam’s Navy in the big one, Double-You Double-You Eye-Eye. He’s made his home in the Pacific Northwest forever. He’s on Social Security. And he recently looked into getting an “enhanced driver’s license” so he could trek over the border to visit a Canadian cousin, who’s the same age, according to KOMO-TV and Yahoo.

Davidson didn’t get the license. Because he’s not a US citizen. And the old man’s been told that if he presses the point, he could be deported…to Canada.

See, it turns out he was born in British Columbia in 1916. As in the year of the Easter Rebellion and the Battle of the Somme. Sure, Davidson’s parents were “American,” as in “born in apple-pie locales like Nebraska (mom) and Iowa (dad).” But in terms of keeping up on paperwork, his folks might as well have been godless Huns in the service of the kaiser, since they couldn’t be bothered to file any documents with Uncle Sam on young Leeland’s situation. It’s like some strange reverse-anchor-baby deal: Make your debut on the wrong side of the border, and lose your shot at Americanness, no matter how many Japanese subs you sink or Toby Keith songs you listen to.

Of course, once the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the Navy didn’t care about his birthin’:

He checked up on his citizenship before joining the Navy and was told by an inspector at the U.S. Department of Labor Immigration and Naturalization Service he had nothing to worry about. Now he worries that he won’t be able to prove his citizenship, because his parents were born in Iowa before local governments started keeping records of birth certificates in 1880. “I want it squared away before I pass away,” he says.

But wait for the best part! Davidson’s daughter kinda wishes he’d drop the whole thing, because: “Employees at the local passport office scared them, telling her father ‘If he pursued it, (he could) possibly be deported or [be] at risk of losing Social Security.'”

Let that one sink in. Better yet, just watch the video below. The good news is, some section of the federal government is hip to the Kafkaesque absurdity going down here, and has assured Davidson he can join the ranks of les Américains with signatures on a few form letters. We’re sure the intercession of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) didn’t hurt. But for Davidson’s sake, he’s lucky the Evergreen State’s pols are a little more enlightened than Louie Gohmert, Steve King, and Russell Pearce. Where’s the longform “certificate of citizenship”, dammit?!

“I’m an American citizen,” Davidson told KOMO. “Why should I have to fill out these forms, that’s what irks me.”

How rude and presumptuous. He must be a foreigner!

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate