Birth Certificate Or Passport: Fill & Download for Free

You are not Scottish, Irish or English.You are American.In the future, whenever you are confused about your nationality, look at your birth certificate or passport.

Something that has worked well both for my daughter, and for my brother’s daughter (both born and raised in Japan), is the little loophole that the Japanese language allows. Give your child(ren) two names, one Japanese and one from your first language. On the Japan birth certificate, there is no space between names, but when you register a birth in a Western country, you can separate out the two names with a space, capitalizing the “middle name”.The most generic name combination I can think of would be “Mary Hanako” or “Hanako Mary”, as these names would appear on a non-Japanese birth certificate or passport. It is advisable to register your child’s birth in your home country. And it is quite legal until age 22 for bicultural children to hold 2 passports. You can write this on the Japan birth certificate, later on the Japan passport, as メアリー花子 or 花子メアリー. (Alternate kana spelling for “Mary” is also permitted, of course.) My daughter is known by her Japanese name among her Japanese friends and family, and by her English name among her English-speaking friends and family. Her Japanese name has a complicated kanji, so when read vertically, from a distance, her name looks like a huge exclamation mark!Another option that might be a bit trendier is to give a child a name that “works” in both languages. Talk to your husband about this- there are books in every large bookstore with long lists of possible names for both boys and girls. “Ken” is immediately recognizable as both English and Japanese. Other names are not quite so obvious. And please consider how the rest of the world will have to remember his/her kanji. Many of these names’ kanji spellings are quite impossible to read without help from a family member.

When you were born, a doctor filled out two birth certificates. One was given to your parents. The other was given to the state records office.If you should ever lose your birth certificate, you can apply to the state records office, pay a small fee, and a new birth certificate will be issued to you.But if your family is poor, with no car and no phone, living in a rural area with no ambulance service and no hospital or clinic within twenty miles, it is very likely you were born in a bedroom of your apartment. No doctor in attendance. NO BIRTH CERTIFICATE ISSUED OR FILED WITH THE STATE.Without a birth certificate, you cannot get a Voter ID. You could use your driver’s license, but you cannot get a driver’s license without a birth certificate. You could use your passport, but you cannot get a passport without a birth certificate. In some states, you can use your Social Security card. But guess what. You cannot get a Social Security card without a birth certificate.To obtain a birth certificate, years after the fact, requires lawyers and a judge. It requires sworn affidavits from family. In an increasing number of cases, it requires several DNA tests. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to get a birth certificate if one was never issued. If you’re poor, you cannot afford that money, nor the time off work.It is estimated that 11% of American citizens do not have the documentation necessary to get a Voter ID. Most of them are poor. Many are minority. Voter ID laws are preventing American citizens from voting.Voter ID laws combat in-person voting fraud. It is the least common, and least effective form of voting fraud. Less than 0.001% of votes are even suspected to be the result of in-person voting fraud.Voter ID laws solve a problem that barely exists. But they prevent 11% of the population from exercising their rights as American citizens. If a law is not solving any real problems, but is, in fact, causing a significant problem, that is a matter of concern for many, many people.Conservative political groups have spent millions of dollars trying to push Voter ID laws. Is it just a coincidence that the people prevented from voting by these laws usually vote for Democrats? There are other forms of voter fraud that are much more prevalent. Conservatives don’t seem concerned about actual voter fraud. Voter ID laws do nothing about those other forms. Conservatives are not proposing a single law to combat any of the more prevalent forms of voter fraud. What could be the point of pushing for laws that are ineffective in their stated purpose, but directly impact the voting rights of poor minority voters?