I have several US friends who got European citizenship through ancestry. They found a great grandmother or something from "the old country" and by proving their relation to them could get a passport.
That got me to googling around since my grandfather was born in Germany and came to the US when he was 5 (circa 1920). But from what I'm finding it sounds like when he became a US citizen that tie to German citizenship was broken. Also, prior to 1975 the citizenship only passed down through the father - it was my maternal grandfather so it wouldn't pass down, apparently. Well, it was fun to think about the possibilities for a few minutes, anyway.
Your case sounds complicated so I'm not sure, but two things to note:
1. US is one of only a few countries where children emigrating with parents don't officially declare intent to immigrate, they do it automatically with their parents. This means that your grandfather (whether he was aware or not) was still German, since German law says you only give it up if you "take action to immigrate" or something like that. Likewise every child since then (your mother and you) were born as US citizens "involuntarily" (as in you didn't choose) so you also retained your citizenship.
2. In 2021 Section 5 of the StAG law was updated to say that people born to German mothers between 1949-1975 are now eligible, it was updated since male only was seen as discriminatory. So theoretically say grandfather -> mother (born to male) -> you (post 1949). Not an expert so double check this.
Im not an expert but my understanding of your case would be that you are not even needing to apply for status, you are literally German now, and just need to request a passport (check this with the resources on Reddit I mention below).
I'd recommend checking Reddit "German Citizenship by Descent" resources. There's a couple profile names you will see there really frequently who are German citizens who can help you in finding paperwork from German government resources if needed (old birth certificates, etc.) for a small fee.
It's very hard to get a UK work visa normally (and getting a lot harder each year, like in the US), but if you are a HN type with a good tech, start-up, investor, or researcher career, they roll out the red carpet for you.
If you qualify, you get a 'Tier 1' visa where you can work at any company without sponsorship, change jobs at any time just like a citizen, or start your own company with no fear of your visa being tied to a job. You can become a citizen yourself in 5 years.
Source: Am now UK citizen
Various other European countries have similar programs with different requirements. Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain are common places that a lot of US people go depending on what options they have to qualify and where they want to be. Spain has a digital nomad visa right now that is easy to get.
> monetary requirements, which are actually quite low
Technically, yes - you are required to hold only €4,500 as an "investment" in the business you create. In reality you will need a lot more. My wife and I spent about €40k to move over which is inline with what others on the DAFT program have said they spent.
I have quite a bit of family in Germany, and have had several friends move from the US to Europe. Europe absolutely knows that they have an opportunity to capture a ton of talent right now. If you have skills that are in demand, basically any country in the Schengen zone will find a way to get you a visa. For example, if you’re a trans researcher, you will find open arms at academic institutions in Europe.
You could also lie and claim your address as a US address, and then just live in another country. This is obviously illegal, but I’ve met a few people who made it work for a while. But I’m also speaking abstractly on the internet, so maybe I’m just making all this up.
> It's not like people can just decide to move to another country and they will say "sure, come on in!"
Many countries actively try to attract skilled migrants with simple, points-based immigration systems and fast processing times.
Simply having a bachelor's degree, 5+ years of work experience, and fluency in the local language will get you on the fast-track to a permanent working visa in many countries.
If you're a doctor or nurse Canada is definitely saying "sure, come on in!" - they're actively recruiting in the US for healthcare workers. But that's because like most other countries they've got a shortage of health care workers. They're not likely to tell us software engineers that we can com on in.
According to an LLM I asked, about 80 countries have a way in for $$$.
I was superprized it was as high as 80, assuming I can beleive the answer. I knew though that the USA is one of them. Also Singapore, since it was big news when the co-founder of Facebook did it.
There are a few dozen countries that one can buy citizenship. Some require investing in something or starting their own business. Search for "countries that offer citizenship for money". Some places will pay for people to move their under certain conditions and lack of criminal history.
If you are in Spain on a tourist visa, and apply for the equivalent of a digital nomad visa while in country, you get three years as a temporary resident. At three years, you re-apply for another two years, and after those five years you can apply for permanent residency. 80% of your income must come from outside of Spain. They’ll even take a letter from a US W2 employer as income verification. One example of an exit strategy you can move on almost immediately, depending on your circumstances.
Yeah my first thought was "of course an LLM can do that, we didn't need a paper to tell us". I would be more impressed if it could do it without that information, such as by analyzing writing styles and other cues that aren't direct PII.
It’s the same thing as theft and locks. Any motivated attacker will overcome any rudimentary obstacle. We still use locks because most opportunistic attackers are the most prevalent.
Even the paper on improved phishing showed that LLMs reduce the cost to run phishing attacks, which made previously unprofitable targets (lower income groups), profitable.
The most common deterrent is inconvenience, not impossibility.
I agree that these accounts probably on average still contain more information than the average pseudonymous account. I think we could try to use the LLM to increasingly ablate more information and see how it performance decays – to be clear we already heavily remove such information, see Table 2 appendix. But I don't expect that to change the basic conclusions.
I also wonder how well the LLM would do with less direction e.g. just ask it to analyze someone's posts and "figure out what city they live in based on everything you know about how to identify someone from online posts".
Over a large enough timeframe (often a couple years at most), almost everyone online gives too much information about themselves. A seemingly innocuous statement can pin you to an exact city and so on.
You don't have to prove a negative, but if you want real trust from actually paranoid people, you will have to give up keys to the kingdom and work hard for it.
All your software/hardware would need to be open source, you would need to be regularly audited by neutral third-parties, actively work with the community to provide paranoia-level ongoing transparency reports and continuous improvements that the community wants to see, be willing to adopt many suggestions given by smart people, and just in general stop using your words to tell people you're serious, and use your actions to show it.
If someone says they are skeptical of XYZ, ask them what they would accept as proof, and then provide it.
Japan has a long history of simply not reporting things (including serious crimes) because it makes their stats look bad.
Go read some of the japan-related subreddits and they are all full of stories of people getting harassed/assaulted/etc. (or worse) and the police just absolutely refuse to do anything about it. Getting them to file a report for any reason is extremely difficult.
And if someone does end up getting arrested for any reason, the entire judicial system is unfair and unnecessarily cruel and inhumane. They can hold you for up to 23 days with zero reason and zero outside contact. Many innocent people's lives have been completely ruined due to this for no good reason. They viciously interrogate people trying to demand confessions no matter how innocent you might seem, because again, it makes their conviction numbers look good.
Don't get me wrong, I've been to Japan many times and I thoroughly enjoy all the good things about it, but just like every country, there are a number of quite bad things as well.
> Freenom’s terms of service allowed them to “cancel” a free domain at any time without warning. Users reported for years that as soon as their free site started getting significant traffic (and becoming valuable), Freenom would reclaim the domain and fill it with ads, effectively hijacking the user’s hard work.
At least for the last few years of Freenom, you could only get a domain for up to a year. Once that lapsed, they parked it and you had to pay to extend it further.
One time I bought a .dev domain, which is/was run by Google, and after missing the renewal deadline by less than 24 hours, the renewal price jumped from less than $30, to $800.
No idea, but it would cost me more to fight it than it's worth. And other people have reported similar issues but people refused to believe them, so I doubt I would get much sympathy.
Are they getting visas from work or a spouse or something? Surely that does not account for a vast majority of cases?
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