South Africa's one million invisible children without birth certificates
55 comments
·October 14, 2025stroebs
bloak
Do you know why the British authorities wanted a birth certificate? Did his ZA passport show date and place of birth? Did the ZA birth certificate have some other information that the British authorities specifically wanted, like the names of the parents? Or were the authorities just following some standard procedure with no obvious purpose?
stroebs
One of the basic requirements for an ancestry visa.
Antifa4HN
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hangonhn
China didn't issue birth certificates until 1996. Because I was born there before 1996, I do not have a birth certificate. In addition, I was also birthed at home instead of a hospital. That said, it's never been a hindrance. My parents managed to obtain Hong Kong permanent residency for all of us and I guess that sort of rooted my birthday and birth place and it's been a continuous line of documentation since then -- green card and finally US passport. I think this was helped by the fact HK probably dealt with this issue a lot during the latter half of the 20th century.
bombcar
For reference, the US has procedures for this: https://www.usa.gov/citizenship-no-birth-certificate because people without birth certificates are still somewhat common, even children.
Vermont didn't require it until 1955!
nostrademons
My dad was born in the Philippines in 1939. He came over to the U.S. on a Taiwanese passport in 1959, part of a group of students that MIT imported from the Philippines based on letters of recommendation from their Atomic Energy Commission, and then bounced around on various visas for a decade. Finally got citizenship upon marrying my mom in 1971.
When McCain was running for president, there was a big court case about whether being born in the Canal Zone (a U.S. territory) qualified as being a "natural born citizen". And I made the connection - "Wait. The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?"
Moot point by then, he'd already been a citizen for ~40 years, and died the next year. But it was wild to think that the 10+ years of immigration hassles were basically due to an administrative fuck-up, and that legally, he should have had citizenship all along. The process you link wouldn't work for him, either, because the Philippines is not a U.S. territory now.
blululu
This is getting off topic but I do not believe that the Commonwealth of the Philippines was legally/formally a US territory in 1939. It was a protectorate whose foreign affairs were administered by the United States, but it had its own government/constitution that was formally independent and administered by Filipinos. It was more like Cuba than Puerto Rico in the context of the Spanish American war.
mothballed
Being a territory doesn't mean you become a citizen in any case. American Samoans are not citizens, nor are they entitled to bypass the naturalization process if they wish to become one.
bluGill
When the US took the Philippines the plans started soon after to make them an independent country.
khuey
> The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?
No. Filipinos as a group were never US citizens. They were non-citizen US nationals during the American colonial period. When the Philippines became independent in 1946 the status of Filipinos as non-citizen nationals was terminated and they became citizens of the Philippines only.
https://fam.state.gov/fam/08fam/08fam030806.html
tl;dr your dad really did have to go through all that trouble.
NoMoreNicksLeft
>And I made the connection - "Wait. The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?"
Unless your dad was part of the elite ruling class which gets to skip and ignore all the rules, the answer is an emphatic no. However, if he was the son of an admiral from a long line of important people who had been in the Senate for years and finally wanted to run for president, well, then Congress might just decide that he's good enough and give their stamp of approval to all of it.
Was your dad the son of an admiral who had been in the Senate for years and finally wanted to run for president?
Besides, the thing with McCain wasn't about whether he was a citizen or not... this was 100% the case. The trouble was that McCain didn't become a citizen until 3 years old. And "natural born citizen" can't happen for a kid who's already 3, nor can Congress pass laws that are ex post facto, meaning they couldn't retroactively declare him natural born. He was absolutely disqualified from running, and if he had had an ounce of decency he would have accepted that and quit pressing his claims.
wbl
McCain was the child of two citizen parents and thus a citizen at birth.
throwaway48476
The Amish have a social security exemption.
thatguy27
So does South Africa. However, capable administrators are severely lacking.
mothballed
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afavour
If I was looking to cite evidence that South Africa has a racist past I'm not sure stadium chants would be my _first_ example...
tartuffe78
I feel like there is some other racism South Africa might be infamous for...
MSFT_Edging
Actual race-based apartheid ended 9 years after the first Windows release.
The Boer in question were the people enforcing apartheid for generations. They're also still the majority land-owners in South Africa due to the apartheid system. As of 2017 it was around 73% of Agricultural land owned by the beneficiaries of Apartheid.
I'm sorry but you can't just cry foul when your racism record setting attempt falls apart in the age of the internet and the victims hold a grudge.
afavour
> South Africans coming forward are being treated with suspicion that they are an illegal immigrant
I can't help but wonder if similar concerns will appear in the US, if they haven't already.
wat10000
It's already worse than that. There are multiple stories of US citizens being detained just because they look Hispanic, which the authorities have decided means they look like illegal immigrants, and then accused of presenting fake IDs when they try to prove otherwise.
null
e40
For now. I'm not being snarky or hyperbolic. Today's Daily pod is related. I'm half way through and no mention of voting yet, but it takes no imagination to see where this is going. Remember the whole "Obama wasn't a citizen" thing? Remember the "illegal aliens elected Joe Biden?" The best way to disenfranchise a segment of the population is to give them difficulty proving they are citizens, so they cannot vote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/podcasts/trump-civil-righ...
The guest of this pod is the creator of the 1619 project and she is against DEI.
shrubble
This is seen in many countries, that the bureaucracy is set up to serve its own needs. They will run normal office hours, yet the people working subsistence jobs are not able to take a day off to handle paperwork when each day they only earn enough to pay for their food and shelter.
toenail
And western KYC/AML laws that are forced upon all countries exclude those people from having bank accounts.
mothballed
KYC/AML is largely there to increase profits for corrupt politicians and bankers at the expense of the honest segment of poor. Criminals and the dishonest can bypass that stuff easily enough through corruption if they are large, and by slipping through the cracks with "dark" IDs if they are small.
tiku
This is why crypto has so much potential, to give them access to a form of digital money.
cdmckay
Crypto doesn't solve any of the actual problems here.
These kids can't access any services because they don't legally exist in government systems. No birth certificate means no school enrollment, no healthcare, no social grants.
You think a 15-year-old footballer who can't play in tournaments because he has no birth certificate is going to be helped by Bitcoin?
What school is letting them enroll because they have a hardware wallet?
This is a civil administration problem that needs government solutions: streamlined processes, digital systems, reduced fees, and political will.
add-sub-mul-div
Feels excessive. Keeping South Africans out of our economy feels like closing the barn door after the cows have left.
hdb385
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NDizzle
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throwaway48476
Haiti failed to develop, south africa is developing in reverse.
MSFT_Edging
Haiti was in debt to france over freeing themselves from slavery, with a debt structure designed to never be paid off.
throwaway48476
Haiti and the DR only diverged economically after the debt ended. It's not a convincing argument.
logicchains
Wouldn't Zimbabwe be a closer example?
NDizzle
Sure. What do all of these events have in common?
null
pessimizer
White people reminiscing about the beauty of segregation and subjugation, and pretending to wonder why a dog raised in a tiny box with no room to move and no fresh air to breathe for its entire life doesn't win the Westminster dog show when you let it out.
Instead, they want to be congratulated for eventually being forced to open the box.
ryandv
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tomhow
We've asked you only a few weeks ago to avoid posting flamebait to HN, and it's specifically against the guidelines for comments to introduce generic tangents. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines if you want to keep participating here. We have to ban accounts that break the guidelines repeatedly.
My father (born in ZA) had to re-register his birth at 65 when emigrating to the UK on a visa. The ZA government had no record of his birth, despite him having a drivers license, passport, tax returns for 40+ years…
This is the least bit surprising coming from a country that is in steady decline.