US/UK dual citizenship - passport misery
The brother of a friend of mine just had a very upsetting experience, which I thought I'd pass on in case others are at risk.
He's a Brit who lives in America with his children, and he's recently got dual citizenship. Although he applied for a US passport as soon as he could, his local office is on a go-slow and is four months behind on processing applications. He wanted to come to London for Christmas, and flew in on his UK passport with the rest of the family.
On trying to leave after Christmas, though, US Air refused to let him on the plane. Although he'd checked with both the US Passport office and the airline before leaving the US, and both had told him that his UK passport would be fine, the airline at Gatwick disagreed. Two and a half hours of discussion didn't move them on this point, and he had to return to London together with his very confused and miserable children to camp out on a friend's floor until he could get an emergency US passport from the London embassy.
That took four days. The embassy says that it gets a couple of cases like this a day (it didn't help that they could't find his original application on the computer because it had been misfiled under Ukraine instead of Uk - that also happens a lot) and asked him to complain to the US Passport office when he got back. The embassy thinks that bad advice is being dispensed by that organisation, but their pleas have been ignored. (From what I know of US bureaucracy, I find this very easy to believe.)
Apparently, one of the problems is that his UK passport referred to his green card which had of course been surrendered when he got citizenship.
US Air weren't much help either - they initially refused to rebook him and his children and said they'd have to go standby, but eventually they were talked out of this.
No fun.
R