moving to Puerto Rico from USA

[anson2995]

@KarlGrenze

anson2995, don’t tell someone who would like one day to have an official, recognized PR passport that there is a current one. There is not one, what the PR citizen is is nothing more than establishing residency. It is not a passport in the same sense as passports from other independent nations are.

I didn’t say a single word on the subject of passports, nor did the OP.

The OP asked about residency requirements for voting in Puerto Rico. In order to vote in local elections there, one would have to establish residency… just as you would in moving to one of the 50 US states. My point was that, while folks born in Puerto Rico automatically have US citizenship, an immigrant to PR can become a Puerto Rican citizen without necessarily also becoming a US citizen.

[alphaboi867]

@KarlGrenze

Have to obtain a US passport, as we have US citizenship. I have a US passport.

You can get a US passport without being a US citizen, but you must still be a US national. Only inhabitants of American Samoa hold US nationality without holding US citizenship.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@alphaboi867

You can get a US passport without being a US citizen, but you must still be a US national. Only inhabitants of American Samoa hold US nationality without holding US citizenship.

That’s not true at all. Anyone who is a US citizen by right of birth and later renounces their citizenship is still a US national.

[KarlGrenze]

@anson2995

I didn’t say a single word on the subject of passports, nor did the OP.

The OP asked about residency requirements for voting in Puerto Rico. In order to vote in local elections there, one would have to establish residency… just as you would in moving to one of the 50 US states. My point was that, while folks born in Puerto Rico automatically have US citizenship, an immigrant to PR can become a Puerto Rican citizen without necessarily also becoming a US citizen.

It is not a Puerto Rican citizen in the sense that citizenship doesn’t work the same way it does in other independent nations.

What they’re doing is establishing residency, the same as in the states. That, in my mind, does not equate to US citizenship. That is what I was addressing. The PR citizenship that you talk about is NOT equivalent to US citizenship, it is more like a state residency (which you’ve said yourself).

[JRDelirious]

Back to OP:

1. You register to vote in PR by going to the Election registration Board in your precinct and proving identity, citizenship/nationality (more on that later) and residency.
2. Identity is proven through government authorized ID (e.g. Driver license), citizenship/nationality through birth certificate or (real, US) passport, residency is proved through PR-issued ID or documentation such as a utility or rent bill in your name.
3. PR Driver license requires you to pass the written test, surrender your US license (almost all states have reciprocity so you would not be likely to get field tested), and provide proof of identity and residency. Since we are now under REAL-ID, that means that for your first-time issue PR DL you must show up with passport or birth cert, your old state ID, and proof of street address in the form of a utility or rent bill.
4. So, essentially by the end of the first month, when you get your first bills in your name, you can go with your stateside ID and passport/birth cert to get the DL, and from there you can go to the elections board and register (if it’s more than 60 days from the nearest election). From there, all you have to meet to run for any office are the length-of-residency and age requirements.
   And as KG accurately states, there is no “Puerto Rico Passport”. For legal purposes, Citizen of Puerto Rico is, like Citizen of Utah or Citizen of Kentucky, a mere designator of jurisdictional residency. There is that “certificate of citizenship” mentioned earlier, that is the token result of the whole renunciation rigmarole that was the subject of the correspondence between Cecil and I in the 2d and 3d update installments of the Cecil column article that RNATB linked, but it’s basically just a certificate of *“waaah, I want a piece of paper that says I’m a Puerto Rican” *and which were I a nationalist I’d find it insultingly condescending (a pro-Commonwealth administration created it as their answer to the Mari Bras case and not entirely incidentally as a way to aggravate the statehooders).