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Regardless of the specificity of her mixed ethnic background, what are ICA guidelines for such situations (especially since they have happily granted PR/Citizenship to Indians/Pinoys/PRCS et. al who in various instances have been proven to have questionable contributions to society and economic wellbeing of Sing Inc.):
Nadirah, a young teenage girl who was born 19 years ago in Singapore, had stayed in Singapore for the entire 19 years and lived like how all her friends did, but will soon be asked to leave from Singapore to a country which she does not know anyone nor able to speak the native language.
A close look at Nadirah, you would find her as Singaporean as anyone could be, in terms of manner and speech. Classmates of Nadirah might find it hard to accept that she actually holds a Filipino citizenship despite staying in Singapore for practically her entire life.
Nadirah was born out of wedlock in Singapore and given a Filipino citizenship, as her mother was a Filipino. Along with her five siblings, two other siblings are also non-citizens while the other three siblings were given citizenship as her parents got officially married in Philippine before they were born.
Due to family issues, the six siblings were referred to Ministry of Social & Family (MSF what was known as MCYS till recently) in 2006. Apart from housing Nadirah and her five siblings at Jamiyah Children’s Home (JCH), the ministry had tried its best to assist her in applying for citizenship within its means.
Since 2010, her family has been trying to apply for her permanent residency but in vain with no clear indication of the reason behind the rejection.
In 2012, Nadirah tried to apply for her citizenship with Immigration and Checkpoint Authority (ICA) stating in its reply,
“We have considered your appeals carefully. We regret to inform you that the appeals have not been successful. Nevertheless, you can continue to study and reside here on your valid Student’s Pass”.
Given the open-ended replies from ICA, Nadirah can only guess that her applications were probably rejected due to her father’s frequent brush with the law.
For all these years, Nadirah’s education fees are of a foreigner due to her citizenship ever since primary one, which gave her family tremendous financial burden. At one point, she worried for her tertiary education, she had no money to pay for the school fees, and as she is a non-citizen, she is not eligible for any bursaries. But fortunately a NGO, Akaraka assisted her in paying for her school fees putting her through ITE.
Nadirah’s childhood has not been pleasant and neither did it change for the better for years as a teenager. She had been placed in the care of JCH since young and later stayed with her grandparents to care for them. Her mother currently maintain minimum contact with her and her father has severed ties with Nadirah and her siblings
Even with such a troubling family background, she never gave up on herself to excel. Nadirah had been active in her school’s extra curriculum activities as well as being an exemplary student in her school where she managed to clinch a position of top 14th in her school for ’N’ levels during her secondary education.
Apart from MSF’s assistance for her predicament, she has sought the assistance from Members of Parliament such as K Shanmugam, Wong Kan Seng, Zainudin Nordin, Hri Kumar and Josephine Teo.
In view of her dire situation, MP K.Shanmugam, MP Wong Kan Seng and MP Josephine Teo have all specially helped Nadirah to write a letter to ICA to appeal for her citizenship. But ICA still rejected her applications nevertheless with no apparent reason given.
As Nadirah graduates from ITE, she will soon be asked to return to Philippine once her student visa expires in a month’s time. To be relying on relatives whom she never spoken to for years and a country where she has no memory of, the situation looks utmost depressing for this young lady with a uncertain future.
“All I have ever wanted was to be called a Singaporean because this is where I grew up and have lived so far and I can only see a good future for me and my family in this wonderful land I call home.” said Nadirah.
What she could do now apart from hoping that ICA will re-look at her citizenship appeal or to find a company that could employ her as a staff so that she could stay in Singapore with a work permit.
It is sad to see a home grown ‘Singaporean’ sent overseas to fend for herself simply because there is some unknown reason that deters citizenship to be given. Things could be clearer for people like Nadirah if the reasons are given for the rejection. And one is to wonder how many more such cases, which are similar to Nadirah out there.
Now that her grandmother has just passed away, Nadirah is now staying in her friend’s home. As the days go by closer to her day of departure, she grows desperate for any faint hope to stay in Singapore where she still calls it home.
Update – A number of companies have written in to us to offer employment to Nadirah. Thank you for your kind support and Nadirah would like to thank all as well. Singaporeans are indeed a helpful lot of people.
from: http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2013/03/born-bred-singaporean-asked-leave-foreigner/
I assume these are not very unusual/rare cases over the years - I know that some male folk had the option to qualify post-NS when they are stateless but as the girls do not have such an avenue it would appear a dead-end.
On a side-note, such immigration/citizenshiip woes are not unique and can crop up in the most bizzare circumstances:
July 7 survivor faces deportation from Britain
A university lecturer injured in the 7/7 bombings faces being expelled from the UK even though he was born to British parents in a British colony.
"In the frightening days after 7/7, John Tulloch was the face of Britain’s resistance to terror: bloodied, dazed, clothes in shreds, his picture appeared on newspaper front pages around the world.
Sitting opposite a suicide bomber on a Circle Line train, he had been saved from death by his own luggage. He was visited in hospital by the Prince of Wales, who proclaimed him an example of the “resilience of the British people”.
Prof Tulloch, 70, who traces his ancestry here back to the 14th century, was born to British parents in a British colony. He has a British wife, children and brother. He was raised and educated in Britain from the age of three, has substantial assets and property here and has lived or worked in the UK for most of his life, holding a series of posts at British universities. He even held a British passport.
But now, his passport has been confiscated and he faces expulsion from Britain in the latest bizarre twist in this country’s “Kafkaesque” immigration laws.
“I am totally gobsmacked by this,” said Prof Tulloch. “I’ve got a huge attachment to Britain. My family has served Britain for three generations. I’ve been banging my head against a wall trying to get this sorted out, but I’ve never before encountered so much frustration. It’s like Kafka.”
Prof Tulloch, who still suffers post-traumatic stress disorder, said the problems with his citizenship had worsened the “sense of uncertainty he had suffered since the bombing.
“7/7 is not hard to go back to,” he said. “I can talk about that. What’s hard to go back to is that I am about to be thrown out of the country.
“There I was, hailed as an example of British courage, British pluck and the British spirit, an iconic image of British resistance. I get blown up in the media as a British patriot, then I get kicked out.”
What makes Prof Tulloch’s plight so hurtful to him is that it is a direct consequence of his family’s very service to this country.
He was born to a British Army officer in pre-independence India. Unknown to him, this conferred a lesser form of British nationality known as a “British subject without citizenship”.
He was, he says, never told about this status and was issued with a British passport in the normal way.
“Neither I nor my parents ever received information from the Government that this was somehow an inferior passport,” he said. “In particular, the passport itself explicitly said that you could take out dual nationality without risking your British nationality.”
After a degree at Cambridge, postgraduate study at Sussex and a career in UK academia, Prof Tulloch took a job in Australia and was granted Australian citizenship.
Unlike with a full British citizen, and again unknown to him, this automatically cancelled both his British nationality and his right to live in Britain. When he applied to renew his British passport, it was confiscated.
He was able to return to the UK, where he has held a professorship of communications at Brunel and was head of the School of Journalism at Cardiff University, under a work permit and has spent the majority of his time in recent years in this country.
But as he moves into semi-retirement, he has now been told that he can no longer permanently remain here and can only visit for brief periods as a tourist. The Home Office has also told him that he cannot apply for naturalisation.
“It is getting to crisis point now,” he said. “When I came back from a trip to Vienna, two or three months ago, I got a really hard time at Heathrow. I am worried that if I leave again, I might not be let back in.”
There is no question of Prof Tulloch being a burden on the country. He owns a flat in Penarth, near Cardiff, and has tens of thousands of pounds in savings here. He has always been treated as British for taxation purposes, if not for immigration purposes.
His brother, who does have full British citizenship, is unwell and needs looking after. As even the immigration officer at Heathrow told him, he is exactly the kind of person the country should be welcoming.
But, to him, it is the insult to the generations of his forebears who served Britain that is most troubling. At his home, he shows us the pictures of his father, a major in the Gurkha Rifles who was fighting the Japanese in Burma at the time of his birth.
His grandfather was one of the Empire’s first foresters, his great-grandfather served in the Indian Civil Service, too. “I look back now, on the verge of being thrown out of residence in the UK, at something like 120 years of my family’s distinguished service to Britain in India,” Prof Tulloch said.
“This isn’t simply an insult to me, but to generations of my family, and beyond them to the thousands and thousands of people in India and other colonies who believed that they could call Britain home.”
In July, this newspaper exposed the extraordinary story of Lance Corporal Bale Baleiwai, the soldier British enough to risk his life for this country in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, but now facing deportation for a technicality that no civilian would be caught by.
Just as with L/Cpl Baleiwai, the Tulloch family’s service to the country might seem to qualify them for special treatment. In fact, it causes them to be treated worse than anyone else.
Indeed, as British immigration law stands, Prof Tulloch would almost certainly have more chance of staying here if he had been a perpetrator, rather than a victim, of terrorism.
Last year, Ismail Abdurahman, a Somali convicted of providing a safe house for the would-be 21/7 bomber, Hussain Osman, was excused deportation after serving his prison sentence on the grounds that his human rights would be at risk if he was returned to Somalia.
Abdurahman is one of at least 11 convicted foreign-born terrorists allowed to remain in the UK under such provisions.
A UK Border Authority spokesman said: “It is the responsibility of an individual to check that they will not lose a previously acquired nationality or citizenship on acquiring an additional one.”
However, Home Office sources said that it was still open to Prof Tulloch to apply for leave to remain in the country if he wished.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...r-faces-deportation-from-Britain.html#mm_hash
Nadirah, a young teenage girl who was born 19 years ago in Singapore, had stayed in Singapore for the entire 19 years and lived like how all her friends did, but will soon be asked to leave from Singapore to a country which she does not know anyone nor able to speak the native language.
A close look at Nadirah, you would find her as Singaporean as anyone could be, in terms of manner and speech. Classmates of Nadirah might find it hard to accept that she actually holds a Filipino citizenship despite staying in Singapore for practically her entire life.
Nadirah was born out of wedlock in Singapore and given a Filipino citizenship, as her mother was a Filipino. Along with her five siblings, two other siblings are also non-citizens while the other three siblings were given citizenship as her parents got officially married in Philippine before they were born.
Due to family issues, the six siblings were referred to Ministry of Social & Family (MSF what was known as MCYS till recently) in 2006. Apart from housing Nadirah and her five siblings at Jamiyah Children’s Home (JCH), the ministry had tried its best to assist her in applying for citizenship within its means.
Since 2010, her family has been trying to apply for her permanent residency but in vain with no clear indication of the reason behind the rejection.
In 2012, Nadirah tried to apply for her citizenship with Immigration and Checkpoint Authority (ICA) stating in its reply,
“We have considered your appeals carefully. We regret to inform you that the appeals have not been successful. Nevertheless, you can continue to study and reside here on your valid Student’s Pass”.
Given the open-ended replies from ICA, Nadirah can only guess that her applications were probably rejected due to her father’s frequent brush with the law.
For all these years, Nadirah’s education fees are of a foreigner due to her citizenship ever since primary one, which gave her family tremendous financial burden. At one point, she worried for her tertiary education, she had no money to pay for the school fees, and as she is a non-citizen, she is not eligible for any bursaries. But fortunately a NGO, Akaraka assisted her in paying for her school fees putting her through ITE.
Nadirah’s childhood has not been pleasant and neither did it change for the better for years as a teenager. She had been placed in the care of JCH since young and later stayed with her grandparents to care for them. Her mother currently maintain minimum contact with her and her father has severed ties with Nadirah and her siblings
Even with such a troubling family background, she never gave up on herself to excel. Nadirah had been active in her school’s extra curriculum activities as well as being an exemplary student in her school where she managed to clinch a position of top 14th in her school for ’N’ levels during her secondary education.
Apart from MSF’s assistance for her predicament, she has sought the assistance from Members of Parliament such as K Shanmugam, Wong Kan Seng, Zainudin Nordin, Hri Kumar and Josephine Teo.
In view of her dire situation, MP K.Shanmugam, MP Wong Kan Seng and MP Josephine Teo have all specially helped Nadirah to write a letter to ICA to appeal for her citizenship. But ICA still rejected her applications nevertheless with no apparent reason given.
As Nadirah graduates from ITE, she will soon be asked to return to Philippine once her student visa expires in a month’s time. To be relying on relatives whom she never spoken to for years and a country where she has no memory of, the situation looks utmost depressing for this young lady with a uncertain future.
“All I have ever wanted was to be called a Singaporean because this is where I grew up and have lived so far and I can only see a good future for me and my family in this wonderful land I call home.” said Nadirah.
What she could do now apart from hoping that ICA will re-look at her citizenship appeal or to find a company that could employ her as a staff so that she could stay in Singapore with a work permit.
It is sad to see a home grown ‘Singaporean’ sent overseas to fend for herself simply because there is some unknown reason that deters citizenship to be given. Things could be clearer for people like Nadirah if the reasons are given for the rejection. And one is to wonder how many more such cases, which are similar to Nadirah out there.
Now that her grandmother has just passed away, Nadirah is now staying in her friend’s home. As the days go by closer to her day of departure, she grows desperate for any faint hope to stay in Singapore where she still calls it home.
Update – A number of companies have written in to us to offer employment to Nadirah. Thank you for your kind support and Nadirah would like to thank all as well. Singaporeans are indeed a helpful lot of people.
from: http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2013/03/born-bred-singaporean-asked-leave-foreigner/
I assume these are not very unusual/rare cases over the years - I know that some male folk had the option to qualify post-NS when they are stateless but as the girls do not have such an avenue it would appear a dead-end.
On a side-note, such immigration/citizenshiip woes are not unique and can crop up in the most bizzare circumstances:
July 7 survivor faces deportation from Britain
A university lecturer injured in the 7/7 bombings faces being expelled from the UK even though he was born to British parents in a British colony.
"In the frightening days after 7/7, John Tulloch was the face of Britain’s resistance to terror: bloodied, dazed, clothes in shreds, his picture appeared on newspaper front pages around the world.
Sitting opposite a suicide bomber on a Circle Line train, he had been saved from death by his own luggage. He was visited in hospital by the Prince of Wales, who proclaimed him an example of the “resilience of the British people”.
Prof Tulloch, 70, who traces his ancestry here back to the 14th century, was born to British parents in a British colony. He has a British wife, children and brother. He was raised and educated in Britain from the age of three, has substantial assets and property here and has lived or worked in the UK for most of his life, holding a series of posts at British universities. He even held a British passport.
But now, his passport has been confiscated and he faces expulsion from Britain in the latest bizarre twist in this country’s “Kafkaesque” immigration laws.
“I am totally gobsmacked by this,” said Prof Tulloch. “I’ve got a huge attachment to Britain. My family has served Britain for three generations. I’ve been banging my head against a wall trying to get this sorted out, but I’ve never before encountered so much frustration. It’s like Kafka.”
Prof Tulloch, who still suffers post-traumatic stress disorder, said the problems with his citizenship had worsened the “sense of uncertainty he had suffered since the bombing.
“7/7 is not hard to go back to,” he said. “I can talk about that. What’s hard to go back to is that I am about to be thrown out of the country.
“There I was, hailed as an example of British courage, British pluck and the British spirit, an iconic image of British resistance. I get blown up in the media as a British patriot, then I get kicked out.”
What makes Prof Tulloch’s plight so hurtful to him is that it is a direct consequence of his family’s very service to this country.
He was born to a British Army officer in pre-independence India. Unknown to him, this conferred a lesser form of British nationality known as a “British subject without citizenship”.
He was, he says, never told about this status and was issued with a British passport in the normal way.
“Neither I nor my parents ever received information from the Government that this was somehow an inferior passport,” he said. “In particular, the passport itself explicitly said that you could take out dual nationality without risking your British nationality.”
After a degree at Cambridge, postgraduate study at Sussex and a career in UK academia, Prof Tulloch took a job in Australia and was granted Australian citizenship.
Unlike with a full British citizen, and again unknown to him, this automatically cancelled both his British nationality and his right to live in Britain. When he applied to renew his British passport, it was confiscated.
He was able to return to the UK, where he has held a professorship of communications at Brunel and was head of the School of Journalism at Cardiff University, under a work permit and has spent the majority of his time in recent years in this country.
But as he moves into semi-retirement, he has now been told that he can no longer permanently remain here and can only visit for brief periods as a tourist. The Home Office has also told him that he cannot apply for naturalisation.
“It is getting to crisis point now,” he said. “When I came back from a trip to Vienna, two or three months ago, I got a really hard time at Heathrow. I am worried that if I leave again, I might not be let back in.”
There is no question of Prof Tulloch being a burden on the country. He owns a flat in Penarth, near Cardiff, and has tens of thousands of pounds in savings here. He has always been treated as British for taxation purposes, if not for immigration purposes.
His brother, who does have full British citizenship, is unwell and needs looking after. As even the immigration officer at Heathrow told him, he is exactly the kind of person the country should be welcoming.
But, to him, it is the insult to the generations of his forebears who served Britain that is most troubling. At his home, he shows us the pictures of his father, a major in the Gurkha Rifles who was fighting the Japanese in Burma at the time of his birth.
His grandfather was one of the Empire’s first foresters, his great-grandfather served in the Indian Civil Service, too. “I look back now, on the verge of being thrown out of residence in the UK, at something like 120 years of my family’s distinguished service to Britain in India,” Prof Tulloch said.
“This isn’t simply an insult to me, but to generations of my family, and beyond them to the thousands and thousands of people in India and other colonies who believed that they could call Britain home.”
In July, this newspaper exposed the extraordinary story of Lance Corporal Bale Baleiwai, the soldier British enough to risk his life for this country in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, but now facing deportation for a technicality that no civilian would be caught by.
Just as with L/Cpl Baleiwai, the Tulloch family’s service to the country might seem to qualify them for special treatment. In fact, it causes them to be treated worse than anyone else.
Indeed, as British immigration law stands, Prof Tulloch would almost certainly have more chance of staying here if he had been a perpetrator, rather than a victim, of terrorism.
Last year, Ismail Abdurahman, a Somali convicted of providing a safe house for the would-be 21/7 bomber, Hussain Osman, was excused deportation after serving his prison sentence on the grounds that his human rights would be at risk if he was returned to Somalia.
Abdurahman is one of at least 11 convicted foreign-born terrorists allowed to remain in the UK under such provisions.
A UK Border Authority spokesman said: “It is the responsibility of an individual to check that they will not lose a previously acquired nationality or citizenship on acquiring an additional one.”
However, Home Office sources said that it was still open to Prof Tulloch to apply for leave to remain in the country if he wished.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...r-faces-deportation-from-Britain.html#mm_hash
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