There’s something heart-warming about hearing one’s mother tongue on the radio. During a news story on Mexican Mennonites, I heard some Low German being spoken in the background. The rest of the story was less heart-warming.

In the wake of new security measures, whereby Canadians flying into the US need to have valid passports, some Canadians are finding out that they do not have valid Canadian citizenship, and thus cannot receive new passports. Among this group are Mexican Mennonites, and their decendents living in Canada.

Citizenship issues are not new to “my people.” As an historical summary, Mexican Mennonites are generally defined as the group of people who migrated to Mexico and Paraguay from Canada (mostly Manitoba and Saskatchewan) in the 1920’s seeking a place where they could live out their religious convictions more freely. So before coming to Canada the most recent time (in the 1950s), my ancestors have lived in from Mexico (1920s-1950s), Canada (1870s-1920s), Russia (present day Ukraine, 1780s-1870s) and before that, what is now Holland, Belgium and northern Germany. Until recently, religious persecution has always been given as the primary reason behind their migrations. The more recent move to Canada was more economic in nature. With drought, land shortages, and repressive church leadership structures, Mennonites, like my grandparents began to move “back” to Canada, where they still had valid citizenship through their Canadian born parents and grandparents. That movement has continued to this day. A recent rule change by Canadian Immigration officials added more regulations and paperwork to the process or removed loopholes, depending on how you look at it. It was something about requiring those eligible for Canadian citizenship (mostly people whose parents or grandparents have Canadian citizenship), but living abroad, need to apply for it and move to Canada or else lose their eligibility. This affected those living in Mexico still.

Now, thanks to increased security measures from the US, more and more people need to apply for passports, and as a result of that process, all sorts of people are realizing other loopholes that exist because of old laws. The one that relates to Mexican Mennonites is that children of Canadian citizens born abroad out of wedlock are not eligible for Canadian citizenship. This is not as scandalous as you might think. Some of the Mennonites in Mexico failed to register their proper church weddings with the Mexican government, and subsequently, children borne of those unions are viewed as having been born “out of wedlock”.

See relevant article.

While the Mexico experience is far removed from my lifetime, my grandparents, all born in Canada, were married in Mexico, so if neither of those marriages were registered with the Mexcian authorities, I could be a citizen of no country. Weird. Rest assured, I do own a valid Canadian passport, so I assume everything happened correctly in Mexico. It probably helps too that I was born in Canada. That was close. For a second this morning, I thought I might not have been a Canadian citizen anymore.