I'm from Afghanistan but I was born in Saudi Arabia. My goal is to immigrate to U.S someday but:
I have an interesting name issue, for which I will use "Name A" and "Name B" to refer to the name records I had.
My dad had Name A in Afghanistan and when he was in Pakistan he had Name B in his Pakistani records and then eventually moved to Saudi Arabia where I was later born.
Now my birth certificate has his name B as my last name (in our culture surnames are usually the dad's first name instead of one family name)
Later we came back to Afghanistan where we are currently.
Turns out my dad still has his really old Afghan national ID that had his first Name A and started using that again and made me a national ID derived from it.
Now my last name has his Name A instead of the Name B. My Birth certificate still has my Name B so there's a mismatch.
I have no idea how to explain this and provide evidence of name change for immigration purposes.
It feels like we have two seperate identities that are completely disconnected from the other. The name changes happened as a result of moving countries, so we don't really have any proof of name change documents. Just our documents suddenly changed names as we moved countries since my dad already had his old national ID to return to his past Afghan identity.
Any ideas on how to proceed with this?
I was thinking of changing our names back to Name B but then that's an extra name change record. I believe the U.S immigration requires me to submit all past names and this only creates an extra record without explaining how I had it in the first place so it looks like as if I changed name to commit fraud. But is it possible to simply not mention Name A? How are they gonna find out? I've never been fingerprinted under this ID.
Otherwise is there any other way to connect the two identities together?
Extra information: I still have expired passports that were issued under Name B, which may help. And some exit papers from Saudi Arabia. Since our identities are so disconnected we could get new passports without returning the old ones.
This issue really makes me so frustrated so appreciate any advice or hints that can guide me to the right direction.
TL;DR: Dad (includes me due to last name inheritance) changed name in a different country; home country does not recognize his name change since he decided to return to his old ID which he kept. Now I'm not sure how to prove the other name is mine for U.S immigration.
also as far as I know I don't think my dad has any proof of name change documents, not sure how he changed it exactly.
I'm sorry if I explained this badly, feel free to ask any questions if more info is needed.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/immigration/comments/r7cyi0/how_do_i_deal_with_this_name_change_situation/