Thanks for the story! I might have thought that unless he were at least an officer, or the US were at war with the foreign country, that they might let it go as inconsequential, but apparently not.
That’s basically how it works now:
The Supreme Court severely constrained the federal government’s ability to revoke people’s citizenship in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s probably not impossible now but there are so many hurdles that AFAIK the government gave up on it decades ago, except in cases of naturalization fraud.
Wouldn’t they be eligible for Indian citizenship as the mother is an Indian citizen? Looking online, it appears Indian citizenship can be applied for children born abroad, with certain restrictions.
My own children have US citizenship through me but because they are growing up in Asia, any children they may have would not be eligible unless they moved to America and lived for five years at some point, or said children were born in the US.
I suppose any children with both parents in the same situation could be stateless.
I know it doesn’t for children of foreign diplomates. My wife’s friend had a baby while he was stationed in the US and that child was not eligible. Are there other cases you are a familiar with, but I believe it is generally the case that if you are born in the US, that confers citizenship.
In Switzerland, the state bank (Post), must provide an account to any resident, regardless of citizenship. Other banks can, and do, deny accounts to U.S. citizens and green-card holders, who are resident in Switzerland.
Non-residents have no rights to have bank accounts in Switzerland. U.S. citizens who leave Switzerland have to take their money with them, more or less.
FATCA is a pain. And the U.S. forces other countries, such as Switzerland and Canada, sign agreements supporting it. So we had to provide IRS forms to our Swiss bank to make sure they report our accounts. Not all banks in Switzerland want to deal with the extra paperwork.
I didn’t know that about Postfinance. The more we look into this, the more we think it would make sense for her to relinquish early while she’s still a student and doesn’t have an income.
So far in FY2022, 1.3 Million people have tried.
Southwest Land Border Encounters | U.S. Customs and Border Protection (cbp.gov)
Leaving only 664 million* who haven’t.
Population of Latin America and the Caribbean (2023) - Worldometer.
*assuming we’re only talking about people in the Americas who are south of that border.
India doesn’t allow dual citizenship. This comes up for me at work all the time when Indian clients have children born in the U.S. and want to get them Indian passports so they don’t need to get visas for them to visit the family in India. Last time this came up, India’s position was that they would have to renounce the children’s U.S. citizenship. However, the U.S. government position is that U.S. citizenship cannot be renounced on behalf of a minor. I am honestly not sure what would happen if the parents told the Indian government that they had renounced their children’s U.S. citizenship to allow them to be Indian citizens. I imagine the U.S. would happily issue the kids U.S. passports later anyway.
Things got less complicated once India started issuing alternative documentation to people of Indian origin that would allow them to travel to and live/work in India.
Yep, many generations of Tom Scud’s family are in that boat, including him, his siblings, and both of his parents. The family is from 200+ years of missionaries. However, they all come back to the U.S. (if one can even consider it “back” in many cases!) for college and the occasional stateside leave, which is enough U.S. physical presence to keep up the chain of U.S. citizenship transmission for their children.
@Orville_mogul was proposing a hypothetical in which one parent had US citizenship but had lived for less in the five years in the US so their children would not have be eligible for citizenship.
However, in their hypothetical, the other parent is an Indian national, so the child should be eligible for Indian citizenship.
In actuality, @Orville_mogul 's children were US citizens so your answer applies to their actual case but not to the proposed hypothetical.
To be honest, we never considered that. I guess we would have had the stateless thing actually happened.
It was never really a question whether the kids would be able to get the US citizenship. It was just that the process of accounting for all of those dates was a royal pain in the butt. I was fortunate that I still had emails with travel details etc for a large part of the period, but nothing before 2000. I actually had to reach out to previous employers’ HR departments to ask if they had records of my work travels. Major pain.
At one point I called the State Dept people to ask whether it was important for me to have the dates exactly correct. Their response was, well, is it important to you that your daughter gets her US citizenship? 
Yeah, the kids and I have OCI cards. When we travel to India as a family the pile of documents gets really messy. Between my wife’s Indian passport/our OCI cards (to enter India), the US passports (which are linked to the OCI cards and therefore required), the Swiss passports (to get back into Europe), and my wife’s Swiss carte de legitimation (same), we have eleven travel documents. And that isn’t counting covid documentation!
I think this just goes to show how arbitrary the process is. I had lived in America until I was 20, then spent 16 months in Japan, back to America, back to Japan again, back and forth a few more times then moved to Asia for good when I was 29.
When my kids were born, they accepted my story and didn’t require any documentation, IIRC. My youngest is 11 now so it’s been a while, but the process wasn’t difficult in my situation.
I did have enough years to prove at least five years in the States after I was 20, and I had my passport, so maybe I just used that. I don’t remember.
Portugal has a huge expat population, mostly in the Algarve area. I have friends who are retired and who finally became disgusted enough with America’s problems to move to Portugal from their home in Texas. They’re presently renting, but will be working to obtain citizenship. They are at least familiar with the country, as we were posted together at the embassy in Lisbon many years ago.
I suspect that it’s less a matter of being arbitrary and more a matter of different situations being more or less difficult to prove and the precision of the dates needed depending on how close you are or might be to the minimum requirement. @Orville_mogul 's description of needing work travel details suggest that he is in a very different situation than someone who attended in-person high school and college in the US and never left the US except for a yearly two week vacation until they were 30 and moved to another country.
I mean, depending on which time period we are talking about , I think the most you would have ever had to prove was ten years in the US with five of them after age 14 - if you lived in the US until you were twenty, that would have been more than enough except possibly if you spent twelve months outside the US between 14 and 20. Which will of course be an issue for some people, but not for many others.
I’ve known a couple of cases where they basically just took the parent’s word for it: one client, and then my college roommate, who married a Brit and whose kids were born in England. In both cases they had gone to high school and college in the U.S. and then stayed for a couple of years after that, and I don’t think the consular officials even asked for any documentation beyond that. (In the case of my college roommate, she was born abroad and got her U.S. citizenship because she was under 18 when her parents naturalized, and she had lived in the U.S. continuously from age 11 until her mid-20s. If they looked into her immigration records at all, it would have been pretty clear what the chain of events was.)
I coached my roomie through getting her kids’ U.S. passports, and it was only a couple of years ago. (Yes, I know, don’t start me - they are now both in college in the UK and I had been on her to do it since they were born! I’m glad she finally did.) I am sure there are cases where the consular officials are more nitpicky, though.
so in my case (for both kids) I had to fill out form DS-2029 application for the Consular Report of Birth Abroad (the one with the detailed residence dates) AND provide proof for five years of residence. That part wasn’t hard because I had my college and grad school transcripts, but the DS-2029 was quite a nuisance. Fortunately it was easier for the second kid.
Yes, but what I am saying is that the DS-2029 being a nuisance for you suggests you were in a very different situation than I would have been - it would have been very easy for me to fill out that form when my daughter was born. I was in the US from the day I was born until the day after my wedding, at which point I left for 5 days and once I returned, I didn’t leave again until after my kids were born , which gave me over 10 years physical presence after the age of 14. And because I was physically present in the US for so long over the minimum requirement, I wouldn’t have needed to be as perfect about the dates as I would have if I moved from the US ten days after I met the requirement . With that small a buffer, making mistakes about the dates of a couple of trips could result in not being able to pass on citizenship - but in my situation , whether that vacation was five days or ten wouldn’t matter in terms of meeting the requirements.
actually, I had only left the US once before the age of 25, so the school transcripts made it easy to meet the minimum requirements.
And that’s why I called State, hoping that since I wasn’t a borderline case, they wouldn’t be that strict about the DS-2029. Nope. But in hindsight, it might have been better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
Coming back on topic, I have fantasized about giving up my US citizenship, but I tend to be risk averse, so don’t want to close doors that I may someday need to open. But we will have to think about our kids’ options in a few years as discussed upthread.
by the way, I am surprised that no one has mentioned the Phantom Mortgage Income tax. 