CNN reports that Mikhail Sebastian, an ethnic Armenian, who is stateless, got in a situation which we could have seen In the movie “The Terminal” .
As already mentioned, Sebastian is an ethnic Armenian, born in Azerbaijan in what was the Soviet Union. He was forced to flee when the Soviet bloc began to crumble in the 1990s. He tried to take refuge in Armenia but eventually wound up in the newly independent nation of Turkmenistan. But Sebastian is gay and homosexuality is illegal there.
So once again, he had to search for a home. He came to the United States and was allowed to stay as a “stateless person.” There was only one catch: Since he still held the passport from the Soviet Union, a place that no longer existed, he could not travel outside the United States – a tough reality for a man who loves to travel. So Sebastian set out from his home in Los Angeles to too many parts of the United States, including the American territories of Guam and Puerto Rico.
Last December, he was allowed to fly to American Samoa – a U.S. territory in the South Pacific – for a brief vacation.
But while Sebastian was there, he took a short side trip to Western Samoa, not realizing that it is a separate and independent nation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deemed that self-deportation and so for the past year, Sebastian’s been trapped in limbo, unable to leave American Samoa and return to the United States.
Sebastian says his only wish this Christmas is to get back home to Los Angeles.
