The Daily Kos, a leftish news site, wonders: “Is George Santos a Citizen?”
Santos was a surprise GOP winner of a seat in the House of Representatives in November; the district includes part of the New York City borough of Queens and Nassau County, on Long Island.
He has received tons of negative press recently, on the grounds that he made a number of claims about his background that have been impossible to prove.
For example, the New York Times reported: “George Santos ... said he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither firm had records of his employment.”
It continued:
Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.
Santos, according to Daily Kos, has variously described himself as the son of Brazilian immigrants, and as a native of Brazil. (One could, honestly, describe oneself as the child of immigrants while being an immigrant oneself). He has also said that he was born in New York’s Flushing Hospital on July 22, 1988. (There is a hospital by that name, and it was in business in 1988, but its media relations phone is never answered.)
If he was born abroad to alien parents, he could qualify for the House, according to the Constitution, if he has been naturalized at least seven years prior to his election.
The Daily Kos points out that lying about one’s citizenship can lead to deportation. To my knowledge, no member of the House or the Senate has ever experienced deportation.
Other media, which have paid extensive attention to Santos’ numerous lies and questioned where he, a two-time evictee for non-payment of rent, got the $700,000 he said he lent to his own campaign, have not paid attention to the place of his birth. He could solve this matter by simply producing a birth certificate, which I have not seen reported.
Checking on a birth certificate for someone else is impossible in the City of New York; if you want to know about a New York birth, you are told that you must apply for a birth certificate; as you move in that direction you discover that only if you are the former baby in question, or a member of that ex-baby’s family, can you apply. Data sources like Ancestry provide birth certificate information, but only for some states (e.g., Texas), but not for New York and others.