I was born in Switzerland. I was smuggled to France when I was a few days old so my parents could take me home. I got a passport a few months later, with a baby photo. I went to school in Switzerland, 20 minutes from the house. I had to take my passport to school, though we had a "frontalier" card that we'd show in the car windscreen so we'd rarely be stopped by border guards. It was a Schengen external border until 2007, though!
There are many stories of people getting stuck at that border for forgetting their ID, or phones connecting to the wrong transmitter causing people to get 3000 EUR phone bills for roaming data. My first kiss was on that border though, so I have quite fond memories of it!
The problem of growing up there is that I can't be Swiss - my parents weren't resident. I can't be French either - I wasn't born there. So my passport is British by descent. Children cannot be British from me, because I wasn't born in the UK. If I wanted to continue living in Geneva, children would be stateless.
That started me on a long journey of trying to find a new country. I went off to university, and proceeded to live in the UK, USA, Switzerland, Taiwan, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Austria, Netherlands, China, and India. In 2013 I decided that I wanted to move to New Zealand, but the process of moving here has been so slow (getting work experience in Taiwan, waiting 2 years for a case officer to evaluate my SMC visa, finding a new job that pays enough to satisfy Immigration), means that I only just got residency at age 31. (Children born in NZ can now be citizens, which will allow me to get married in future). Hopefully by age 36 I'll finally have a passport and a country to really call home.
