Can I get a passport from another country?

[matt_mcl]

dr_mom_mcl volunteers with Médecins sans frontières, where she met a doctor from Sri Lanka who resides in (but is not a citizen of) Germany. Now, Sri Lankans apparently require visas to get into many countries, which would have badly impeded his ability to be deployed in an emergency, so MSF was able to persuade the German government to issue him a passport so that he’d be able to travel more easily.

I note parenthetically that my passport has a field for nationality (“CANADIAN/CANADIENNE”) on the page with my photo, so presumably something else can go there if need be.

[clairobscur]

@bump

Serve 3 years in the French Foreign Legion or get wounded while in, and you can get French citizenship and a French passport.

That’s about the only way without close enough relatives for the country in question.

You can get french citizenship if you’ve been a legal resident for a number of years. Or sometimes if you were born in France, but this has become increasingly difficult.

[clairobscur]

@matt_mcl

I note parenthetically that my passport has a field for nationality (“CANADIAN/CANADIENNE”) on the page with my photo, so presumably something else can go there if need be.

Hmmm. Interesting, indeed. There’s a field for citizenship on my passport too, and I didn’t paid attention to this until now. That’s weird.

[GilaB]

My American passport also has a field for nationality, but ‘United States of America’ is printed in that space in the same blue ink as the title heading. In contrast, every other bit of personal information on the page, like my name, birth date, passport number, etc, is typed in black, in a different font and ink. To me, this implies that the only possible nationality on a US passport is American, as it comes preprinted that way, before they fill in anything else. (My passport was last renewed in 2000, before the most recent updates with RFID chips, so they may do things differently now.) Perhaps passports have to say the nationality of the issuing country on them?

[Schnitte]

It’s up to the state to decide whether they give someone a passport or not. There’s nothing in international law which obliges a state to issue passports to non-citizens, but there’s nothing which prohibits this either. Maybe the U.S. will not issue a passport to someone who is not a U.S. citizen; in this case, it makes sense to pre-print “United States of America” in the nationality field. OTOH, on my German passport, the nationality is not pre-printed; it has been filled in using the same black ink as all the other personalized data, so it’s conceivable that something else could come in there. After a short bout of googling, I came across this page of some Latvian government agency addressing the requirements of getting a Latvian passport as a non-citizen, so itseems to be done at least somewhere.

[bryanmaguire]

@EJsGirl

Yes- several of them are island nations or located in Central America. We looked into it at one point, actually, but never went ahead. Still might someday, though.

This was also possible in the Republic of Ireland up until 10 years ago under a Passports for Investment scheme.

[matt_mcl]

@GilaB

My American passport also has a field for nationality, but ‘United States of America’ is printed in that space in the same blue ink as the title heading.

I should specify that the nationality field on my passport has CANADIAN/CANADIENNE printed the same way as the other data (name, etc.) on the page.

However, the first page of the passport says “The bearer of this passport is a Canadian citizen” (printed on the page with the rest of the text).

Oh, here’s something interesting, from Passport Canada:

Travel documents are issued to residents of Canada who are:

* Convention Refugees
* Protected Persons
* Stateless Persons
* Permanent Residents for less than 3 years who are unable to obtain a national passport for a valid reason

[clairobscur]

@GilaB

My American passport also has a field for nationality, but ‘United States of America’ is printed in that space in the same blue ink as the title heading. In contrast, every other bit of personal information on the page, like my name, birth date, passport number, etc, is typed in black, in a different font and ink.

I looked again, it’s exactly the same for me, actually. Didn’t notice it, again. I would make a poor detective.

[psychonaut]

@Sunspace

psychonaut, what’s a “banking passport”?

I have no idea.

:: reads link ::

Wow, that reads like an advance-fee fraud scam. “We can’t tell you which countries they’re for, but send us the money anyways and they might issue you one.”

Well, it’s not like they can just print the names of the countries, and guarantee money in exchange for a diplomatic passport. A country found out that some country was essentially selling diplomatic passports, they would take a very dim view of this and probably refuse to honour any further diplomatic passports from that country.

[Stringer]

This is as good a thread as any to ask: If my parents obtain foreign citizenship due to their grandparent’s citizenship (Ireland, Greece, Denmark), can I receive the same citizenship? Anyone else have experience with this?

[GilaB]

I would think that it would vary by country. For example, in the US, until fairly recently, you could get US citizenship even if you’d never lived in the US as long as one of your parents had lived in the US for a certain number of years, a subset of which had to be above the age of 14. Now, that’s still true if you want to get a passport overseas, but if you come to the US, you can get American citizenship if your grandparents met those requirements. The fact that they could change the rules on this implies that it’s up to the individual country to legislate however it wants.

[Chotii]

Spouso is working on getting both an Irish and a British passport, based on his mother’s citizenship. Our children can allegedly also have these, if he has them (though our potential grandchildren won’t qualify). I’m dubious about the value, but anything is possible. The EU is changing rapidly, after all.