Citizenship Denied Childlike Vijai

Vijai Rajan is a player in a drama she can’t understand--a debate over what it means to be an American.

Late last year, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service sent a letter informing the 24-year-old Anaheim woman that her petition for citizenship had been denied.

Though it was a bitter defeat for family members, who had all become citizens themselves, Rajan remained unperturbed. She has the mind of an infant--and that’s at the heart of the issue.

Under federal law, disabled applicants may be allowed to skip the English, U.S. history and government tests. But everyone must pledge his or her allegiance to the country, and that Rajan cannot do. Disabled by cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and Crohn’s disease, she not only cannot say the oath, she cannot even understand it, her family acknowledges.

A discrimination lawsuit filed by the Rajan family--immigrants from India--against the INS raises a complex legal and political question: Must naturalized citizens understand what it means to be a citizen?

INS officials who turned down Rajan for citizenship say the law does not allow them to grant citizenship to someone who cannot understand the loyalty oath.

“You have to understand what you’re pledging to. It’s a federal law,” said Sharon Gavin, an INS spokeswoman. “This is one of those heart-wrenching, very emotional stories, but our job is to uphold the laws in place, not to pick and choose them.”

One expert said the family may be caught by an unintentional omission in the law.

“There’s thousands of examples where Congress passes a law to solve a problem, but then shows they don’t have a comprehensive view about what goes into immigration law,” said Carl Shusterman, a former INS prosecutor who now practices private immigration law in Los Angeles.

“Congress may have made a conscious decision to exempt the oath of allegiance from waivers, but just as likely, they forgot it could be an issue.”

Through a spokesman, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she found it “deeply troubling” that a person who otherwise would be eligible for citizenship would be rejected because of a “debilitating illness.”

“I have asked my staff to explore ways, administratively or legislatively, to address this problem--both in this particular instance and on a broader basis,” Feinstein said.

Rajan’s mother said she and her husband filed the suit to ensure their daughter has the protection of citizenship after they die.

“If something happened to me or my husband, she cannot defend herself, she cannot talk,” said Shawn Rajan, a part-time library assistant in Yorba Linda.

“The message for us is: She’s one of us; why should she be any different?” said Sunder Rajan, 55, an engineer at Hughes Aircraft.

Born in India, Rajan has lived in the United States since she was 4 months old. Her father became a citizen in 1980. Her older sister was born in Cincinnati. Her mother became a citizen in 1994 just after Vijai’s 18th birthday. Had both parents become citizens before Rajan turned 18, she would have automatically qualified for citizenship.

Ironically, Vijai Rajan--sweet-tempered, cheerful and childlike before strangers as well as her parents--would have been born in the United States except for “a purely emotional, spur-of-the-moment decision” 24 years ago, said Sunder Rajan.

Because the Rajans had lost a second child during birth, Shawn Rajan’s mother wanted to be with her daughter through the latter stages of her pregnancy. So Shawn Rajan returned to India, where Vijai Rajan was born. The husband said it never occurred to the couple then that the decision would yield trouble later on.

The Technical Corrections Act of 1994 originally stated that physical, developmental and mental impairments could lead to exemption from the citizenship exam requirement. About two years later, another law elaborated on those impairments, and just last year the INS implemented new guidelines to deal with the disability exceptions.

After these laws went into effect, experts say most of the people filing for the medical exemptions were older immigrants who often had language problems as well as medical ailments. People being sworn in from nursing homes became a more common sight, experts say.

However, people like Vijai Rajan present an especially tough dilemma because they don’t have the wherewithal to even pretend they know how to swear allegiance. The result is laws that allow applicants for citizenship to stumble at the very end of the process, said Philip Abramowitz, who filed the lawsuit April 7 on behalf of the Rajans in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

Few precedents for such cases exist. In Utah, a federal judge last year ordered a severely mentally and physically disabled man with Downs syndrome be granted citizenship without taking the oath of allegiance. In Hawaii, however, a federal judge upheld the law’s oath requirement.

In the Utah case, the government argued that the oath is essential to becoming a citizen, according to court records. But Abramowitz argues that children are routinely exempted from taking the oath when they are unable to understand its meaning--a point that was made in the Utah case.

“If in fact . . . oath requirements were essential, children would not be naturalized until they were old enough to fulfill these requirements,” plaintiffs argued in that case.

Every morning Shawn Rajan washes and feeds her daughter just as she has since she was a baby 24 years ago, then puts her on a bus bound for a special school in Santa Ana.

The couple’s friends have asked them why citizenship is so important for their daughter. Often, the Rajans find the words elude them.

“For us, it’s a very emotional thing, Shawn Rajan said. “We don’t want her to be a burden on anybody, but at least the government can say ‘She’s American.’ ”