Officially, the US does not allow dual-citizenship. I naturalized as a citizen about 4 years ago and part of the oath that everyone needs to take includes the phrase: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” Basically, this means that dual-citizenship doesn’t fit in with US law. However, since you aren’t required to give up your passport or anything like that, as long as your country of origin recognizes dual-citizenship, you won’t have a problem. That’s why I get to enter and leave the country as a US citizen, but when I’m travelling, I’m just your basic, nice, friendly, wouldn’t hurt a fly Canadian
Not 100% true. A native born U.S. citizen does not automatically lose his or her citizenship upon accepting citizenship of another country. My cite. I had to look into this before I applied for the Canadian citizenship for which I am eligible.
His country is a bit unstable these days and the rules may change by the time he is eligible for citizenship so I’d like to leave the discussion purposely vague for the time being.
Canada does allow dual citizenship so he won’t have to ‘renounce’ anything to get his passport. I’m wondering what countries that don’t allow dual citizenship (eg his country of origin) do when one of their citizens gets another passport, and if, for instance, he and I would be treated equally by his home country if we both entered on Canadian passports. (In fact I as a white Canadian-born person would probably be treated better than he if we both entered on Canadian passports!)
Ahh…but i was going from the other side: Naturalizing as a US citizen. That, officially, the US makes you give up your citizenship in your native country. But, unofficially, they don’t enforce it and as long as your native country doesn’t require you to pick one or the other (or specifically allows dual-citizenship) then you can keep citizenship in your native country (or countries, i went to school with a girl who had US, Canadian, and Swiss passports) and are therefore a “dual-citizen.”
It’s a common misconception (not that this has anything to do with the OP) that the U.S. does not allow dual citizenship. Without going into some really long and boring case law, from the horse’s mouth:
This totally leaves aside the issue that in most cases, the U.S. has no way of knowing whether a naturalized U.S. citizen retains the citizenship of the country of birth, or whether a U.S. citizen (either by birth or naturalization) acquires an additional citizenship. For example, my college roommate is Salvadoran by birth, U.S. citizen by naturalization, and a permanent resident of the U.K., and will soon be eligible to naturalize in the U.K. As a matter of practice, she uses whichever passport makes the most sense: if you were going to El Salvador, wouldn’t you rather do it on a Salvadoran passport than a U.S. passport?
However, U.S. citizens are supposed to leave and enter the U.S. using their U.S. passports, which sometimes becomes a factor in a loss of nationality case if one doesn’t.
Can I hijack this back to me for a minute? I’m feeling a bit self-centred today. Neither my husband nor I have any intention of ever coming any closer to the United States than Niagara Falls, Ontario.
But am I to assume that his home country wouldn’t ever know that he had a Canadian passport? (Eva’s point about “whether a U.S. citizen (either by birth or naturalization) acquires an additional citizenship” is analogous to what I’m talking about.)
And, if he did surrender his passport (akin to a US citizen giving up their US passport), would he be treated like any other ‘visitor’ when he returned to the country?
Sorry for the hijack; I just wanted to correct that misconception, but as you mention a lot of the information is probably analogous in your case.
This really does depend quite a lot on the country of origin. Another anecdotal example: a friend of mine is from Belarus, and left as a refugee (actually, as the spouse of a refugee) when it was still part of the Soviet Union and Soviet citizens had to officially renounce their citizenship in order to emigrate. He did indeed have to apply for a Belarusian visitor visa in order to go back and visit his family.
I don’t know whether he could regain citizenship if he wanted to, but as a practical mater, Lukashenka, the President, is a complete nutcase who doesn’t respect human rights. And given that dual citizens are generally subject to the laws of whatever country they are in at the time, if Belarus decided not to let him leave, there might not be a hell of a lot the U.S. could do about it. So you may want to keep that in mind, too.
P.S. On preview: how would your husband’s native country even know he’s acquired another nationality unless he traveled there using his new passport? AFAIK there’s no reciprocal information exchange going on between countries unless the issue comes up, say in a law enforcement context.
Or, as another example, I remember an issue a few years back in which it was discovered that U.S. green cards (I don’t know whether the Canadians do the same) had a numeric code on the back that indicated how the person had acquired permanent residence, and some foreign countries’ immigration authorities were hip to that. I think it involved an Iranian who had gotten permanent residence as a refugee, but wanted to have it switched on his card after marrying a U.S. citizen so he could go back to Iran without the government know that he’d been granted refugee status in the U.S., which would mean that the U.S. had judged that he had been persecuted in Iran.
The problem here is that what Country X does in particular situations has absolutely no bearing on what Country Y will do. Every country can make its own rules on these matters and knowing how someone was treated in Germany after giving up their German citizenship will be of very little use to you in learning how your husband will be treated on his visits home if he is from, say, Ecuador.
I’m originally from the US, but I live in Canada now. If I were to apply for Canadian citizenship, would I be able to also keep my American citizenship too? Would this cause any problems for me if I decided to move back to the US? Are there any problems that could arise from this?
IANAL (thus the “paralegal” title), but I’d say that unless you do something defined as an expatriating act, like running for government office in Canada (Valdas Adamkus had to renounce his U.S. citizenship when he was elected President of Lithuania, as one famous example) or officially renouncing your U.S. citizenship, a straightforward naturalization in Canada should not cause you to lose your U.S. citizenship.
Of course, case law on this issue has flip-flopped a number of times over the past 100 years or so – there was a time when a U.S. citizen woman automatically lost her U.S. citizenship by marrying a noncitizen – but that’s the current state of affairs as I understand it.
I was told point-blank when I received my Adjustment of Status that the US will not recognize dual citizenships. I have since learned that I will not have to give up my Canadian citizenship if I chose to get American citizenship.
Cowgirl, Canada doesn’t make you give up your previous country’s citizenship, to the best of my knowledge. I wish you and your husband luck.
