• eric@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    A foreign national is anyone that is a citizen of a foreign nation. If an American is renouncing their US citizenship, they must already have gained citizenship of another nation, which makes them a foreign national once they no longer have US citizenship.

    If they had no legal rights in the United States, there would be zero tourism or business travel from foreigners to the US because any American could do whatever they want to that foreign person (steal from them, con them, murder them, you name it) without fear of legal repercussions.

    So yes, foreigners have the right to use American courts if the injustice they are alleging happened on American soil.

    • stifle867@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      Yes that makes sense now, thank you!

      I have a few weird questions if you have time to answer them. How does it work in the case where the person was outside of the USA at the time, seeing as they were not on USA “soil” at the time? It’s just that one of the parties (in this case the federal government) has to be on USA soil?

      And how does that work if, say, you’re standing on the USA side of the Mexican border and you throw a brick at someone on the Mexican side? Could the Mexican citizen in this case file a lawsuit in a USA court?

      • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Court jurisdiction can become a really complicated question, but citizenship of the parties has nothing to do with it. If a court has jurisdiction, doesn’t matter if the plaintiffs reside on Mars.