Study in US and PR card expired

resan --
Then, resan, the question (again) is why, when you say you were still connected to Canada with the intent to permanently live in Canada, did you become a U.S. citizen? Why did you take an oath of allegiance to the U.S.?

I did not try to answer that question for you. I specifically discussed how it "appears" and made no judgment beyond the appearance. The appearance speaks for itself. Just like taking the oath to become a citizen of the U.S. while really harboring an intent to live permanently in a different country, speaks for itself.

I do try to contribute to this forum and have been doing so (including its previous rendition) for well over two years. Information here helped me considerably and I appreciated it, and I have tried to pay it forward, as the cliche goes.

But you if spent much time reviewing the forum you will also see that there are many here who do not abide much the gaming of the system, let alone fraud against the system, and those interested in obtaining advice to advance fraudulent purposes will usually not find much welcome. For good reasons. Not the least of which it is of course illegal to advise someone on how to commit fraud, even if the advice is "legal" in substance.

I do not really know all your circumstances. I make no judgments about you . . . but offered some observation about the appearance of things, and I also explained why I have recently become sensitive about these things. One recent looming example: The recent story in CBC about the Canadian woman whose heart has been broken, whose life has been seriously damaged, by someone who engaged in a long term scheme, first to seduce her into believing he was in love with her, then defrauded her into marying him and then sponsoring his PR application, but once he had the visa affixed in his passport he made no further pretense, simply dropped all contact with her and came to Canada without even telling her he had done so, leaving her devasated. Unfortunately that is not an uncommon story. Neither are the stories of both PR and passport fraud. These are not victimless crimes. Oft times there is indeed a direct victim. Other times the victims are the thousands of innocents whose applications get delayed, who are required to go through the process of RQ in obtaining citizenship, and some of whom are even wrongfully refused because of the more strenuous degrees of scrutiny that must be implemented to deal with escalating fraud. Then there is the cost to the taxpayers generally because of the increased paperwork, increased scrutiny and person-hours that must be expended, and eventually the costs and harm imposed in related crime, since fraud is one of the avenues through which a significant number of the criminal class get into Canada.

I am not saying this about anyone in particular (including not you). I am explaining why the problem itself is significant, why a Canadian should be sensitive to it, and why I am, particularly more so of late, more sensitive about it.

Today is Canada Day. A day which reminds us of what it is about this country, its vast size and varied geography, the vast diversity of its people and cultures, that makes it the place so many of really appreciate being able to call home, to call our country. I am not a citizen yet. I very much look forward to the day I become a citizen, and I will take the oath very much to heart, very much honestly and sincerely. Three days from now the Americans celebrate the birth of their country, and of course millions of them are just as proud of their country as most Canadians are of theirs. While some circumstances may explain an exception, on the surface of things, it sure looks like some degree of dishonesty would be involved in giving an oath of allegiance to two different countries within a period of a few years. That is how it appears.

    

Edited by dpenabill - 01 Jul 2010 at 7:53pm

To a significant extent, I will be distancing myself from the U.S. when I take the oath of citizenship in Canada. I understand that. If I was to run for public office in the future in the U.S., my having become a Canadian citizen would be a major issue, and I understand why it would be, and I do not disagree with it. While it took me a long time to "settle" in Canada, I largely left the U.S. in 2001, not long after Bush took office, recognizing the underlying message in what had been shouted at me at times going back four decades or so: "love it or leave it." I thought, for decades, "love it or change it." Not America the Empire though. Not happening. Not enough so anyway. I got the message. I left. And more recently I settled in Canada, realizing that way back when, when I briefly entertained the idea of avoiding the draft and coming to Canada in the early 70s, perhaps that would have been the right choice (my father's threat to kill me if I did that had some influence over me at the time . . . not that I thought he would actually kill me, I did not, but . . . well, anyway, I took another path, the long way home (as in to Canada) it turns out).

I am not a Canadian citizen, but I am a "Canadian" now. I am a PR. Thus I am no longer a foreign national when in Canada but a Canadian. I had a different impression when I landed and thought it odd when the CBSA officer who processed my landing said "congratulations, you are now a Canadian." I thought he was wrong. I thought it took citizenship to be a Canadian. I was wrong. But as I try to do when confronting conflicting accounts of things, I did the research. He was right. I am a Canadian.

I very much like being a Canadian.

In the meantime I will continue to be a U.S. citizen as well. By birth. By compulsion to a large extent -- they would take away my right to social security, for example, if I renounced my U.S. citizenship, even though I invested thousands of dollars into that every year for many decades (and it was indeed me who was investing, since I have been self-employed for more than half of my adult life), but beyond that, they are highly resistant to allowing American citizens to renounce their citizenship because they insist on us filing a U.S. tax return every year for the rest of our lives no matter where in the world we live. One basically has to obtain permission to effectively renounce their U.S. citizenship.