I’m a U.S. citizen. My husband is an Australian citizen. We live in the U.S. & we’re starting to think about having kids. We’ll be in the U.S. for another 26 months, then we’re moving to Australia for the long haul. We want our kids to be able to maintain dual citizenship at least until they’re 18 so that they have more options when they’re older for where they’ll be able to go to school, live, & work. Neither my husband nor I are planning on giving up our respective citizenships.
How do we do this? Where should we have them…here or in Australia? I’ve looked at the U.S. State Department’s website and couldn’t really find specific information about this kind of thing. Does anyone have any experience with this?
A friend of mine is Texan by birth but now lives permanently in South Australia. He met his Australian wife when she was visiting Texas. They married and settled for a while in Dallas-Forth Worth, where their daughter was born. A couple of years later they moved to Adelaide, South Australia. He kept his US citizenship (with permanent residency status in Australia), his wife remains an Australian citizen, but their daughter has dual citizenship of Australia and the US.
Hence, it can be done, but I have no idea how it is achieved.
What if the father is American, and the mother is say, Swedish, and the child is born in Sweden? Would the father’s U.S. citizenship pass on to the child?
And, what if said American and Swede had their child in say, Germany? Triple residency?
Montfort, from what I can gather from the State Dept website, if you’re an American citizen in a foreign country and you spit a kid, all you have to do is hie yourself down to the American embassy and have the kid “blessed” as an American citizen. It’s the dual part that has us befuddled. I’m not sure if the baby is born in the U.S. (which we’d prefer, so that my parents can have a bit of grandparenting time before we leave the country) and we take him/her to the Australian embassy, if we can get dual citizenship. Or, for that matter, if we can get the dual thing happening if the baby is born in Australia. We’re pretty sure it wouldn’t be difficult to get either American or Australian citizenship for the kid wherever it’s born. I think in your example, the baby would automatically be able to have either American or Swedish citizenship, but I’m pretty sure German citizenship would be out of the question. Not positive about this, though, because babies born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents automatically get American citizenship. And, of course, laws are different in every country.
DVous, if you happen to talk to your friend anytime soon, please get some details. That’s exactly our situation.
Ok, I’m a dual citizen and can explain some of this.
My examples will only refer to respective countries’ laws, however, and I know they vary quite a bit.
I was born in the U.S. to Norwegian parents. Being born on American soil makes me American, and having Norwegian citizens as parents made me Norwegian, thus dual. my parents aquired passports for me from both countries.
I lived in Norway for 1-1/2 years as a baby then we came back to the states and I have been here since.
Per American law, I was supposed to choose one or the other at age 18, I think. But Norwegian law gave me until age 23. And my Norwegian passport had been renewed at age 17, so I continued to travel on the Norwegian pass when in Europe, only using the US pass to come in and out of the US. At age 23, I did some paperwork with the Norwegian consulate here which allowed to maintain my Norwegian citizenship. This was allowed only because I had actually lived in Norway for a time as a baby.
Now, at age 29, I continue to maintain both citizenships. The US does not recognize dual citizenship, but Norway does. So I just use both and I don’t bother to let the US gov’t know about the other part.
I only vote in the US and consider myself American, I really only keep the other pass because it speeds up customs everywhere. No one bothers Norwegians in customs, but Americans can get hassled.
The Germany question is different. Germany does not automatically confer citizenship on a person just because they were born on German soil. In fact, Germany is notorious for deporting Turkish and Yugoslavian criminals “back home”, even though they were born in Germany, have lived there their whole lives, don’t speak the native tongue, but were born of immigrants. Once a turk, always a turk.
Now, this does not cover every situation.
I recommend you find an immigration lawyer, and have them spell out the facts.
My fiance was born in New York. Her mother is Canadian, and her father is American. By being born in the US, she automatically qualified for US citizenship. When she and her mother moved back to Canada when she was 4, she was able to claim Canadian citizenship without having to renounce her US citizenship. Had she been born in Canada, it would have been much more difficult to get her US passport, and she probably would not be able to claim dual citizenship. The US border guards get a little huffy when we tell them she has both, but that’s it.
It’s more difficult to get a US passport than Canadian, and I suspect the same holds true for Australia (but I don’t know). If you’re born in the US, AFIAK, you can always claim your citizenship by birthright. Our plain is to have our children born in the US to gain citizenship, and acquire their Canadian citizenship later on (it seems to be easiest that way).
My experience is very close to that of Ivar:
Born in the USA of swiss parents, so at birth I had dual citizenship (switzerland/USA) and I’ve kept both nationalities ever since grew up in Switzerland and moved to the USA as an adult.)
Since you’re planning on living in Australia, and the father is Australian, I would say have the kids in the USA to guarantee their USA citizenship. Since you’ll be living in Australia and the father is australian I imagine they will easily be able to acquire Australian citizenship if they don’t get it automatically at birth.
Ivar said:
According to this site, the US government doesn’t care if you have dual citizenship or not:
I actually have some experience here, having given birth to two bouncing baby American citizens while living on Norwegian soil. If you are an American citizen and your spouse is not, your biological children (there are other rules for adoption!) born outside the US can “inherit” your citizenship if you have lived in the US for at least five years, at least two of them after your fifteenth birthday. If you and your spouse are both American citizens I don’t think there’s any residency requirement anymore.
Be prepared for some paperwork; you’ll have to let them see several papers (child’s local birth certificate, your passport, marriage license if applicable, and so on) and have a photocopy ready to give them for their records. They will send you a certificate that tells the world your kid is an American citizen. You are encouraged to apply for a passport for the child at the same time, and I got the feeling they’d like it if you signed the kid up for a Social Security number while you’re at it.
You are not applying for citizenship for the child. The child gets US citizenship automatically at birth if the parent(s) qualifies. You are simply requesting formal recognition of that. I know that’s 99% hair-splitting semantics, but it’s still worth knowing.
Why not have the baby on a flight to Australia from the U.S. That way you’d automatically get dual-citizenship. 
LORD DERFEL!
Thanks for doing that bit of research for me. I was obviously mislead in the past and I’m glad to know where I stand in regards to these issues.
Way back when in the early 70s I took a course in International Law at the University of Oregon that spent a lot of time on the permutations of citizenship. Though many things may have changed since then, we learned that there are a lot of different opinions on what counts as being a natural citizen. Some countries automatically confer citizenship on newborns based on that of the father. Others pick that of the mother. Some will claim you if you’re born in their country, regardless of parentage and so on.
IIRC, there were so many countries with overlapping an contradictory ideas that it would be possible to claim as many as four citizenships for a single newborn (Father’s, Mothers, born on a ship sailing under a third country’s flag of origin while docked at port in a fourth country, or something similar.)
Contrariwise, it was also possible to work it backwards so that the kid would technically have no citizenship, because the mother’s country recognized the kid as inheriting his father’s citizenship and the father’s country recongnized the kid inheriting his mother’s citizenship, thus each country claiming the kid belongs to the other.
Sorry I can’t pull up the memory of which country was which from three decades ago, but no doubt the SD pros will be able to fill in.
I do remember being fascinated at the inclusion/exclusion possibilities like mad sets of Venn diagrams
I don’t know if this information is going to add anything, but I was born in Brazil to U.S. citizens, and was afforded dual citizenship (my parents did have to get another birth certificate from the state department). My parents told me at 18 I’d have to “choose” which country I wanted citizenship with, but when I recently applied for a passport I was told that I basically still retained dual citizenship. I’m not sure if the guy knew what he was talking about, but that’s the (rather spotty) information I’ve got.
Thanks for all the great information. At least we know now that the dual thing is possible…from here in it’s just a matter of details. Sounds like the easiest thing to do would be to have the kid(s) here.