Has there ever been a president with dual citizenship, Founding Fathers’ English citizenship aside?
I suppose an argument could be made for John Tyler. He was a Virginian who went with the Confederacy when it seceded (and was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives). But the US didn’t recognize Confederate independance, so he would still technically have been considered an American citizen.
Don’t the children of immigrants usually qualify for citizenship in the parents’ countries of origin? Andrew Jackson’s parents emigrated from Carrickfergus, Ireland. James Buchanan’s parents were Scotch-Irish immigrants.
My understanding is that a person’s default citizenship is considered to be whatever country they were born in, regardless of their parents’ citizenship. Although I imagine there must be some policy overriding this about parents who are in a country for travel, business, or military duty.
Every country has its own rules for citizenship. Some countries automatically grant citizenship to anyone born there, some don’t. Some automatically grant it to their citizens’ children wherever they may have been born, and some don’t. There is no such thing as a “default citizenship”. There is no international across-the-board rule.
Every now and then, you’ll see the claim made that Chester Alan Arthur was actually born in Canada (not in Vermont, his official birthplace). IF that’s true (I find it unlikely), Arthur would have been eligible for Canadian citizenship. But Arthur never tried to assert his rights to Canadian citizenship, and since Arthur’s parents were both U.S. citizens, his status as a U.S. citizen seems unassailable.
For example, foreign-born children of US citizens are not automatically US citizens. They have to be registered as such within 6 months of birth and the parents have to satisfy certain requirements of residency in the US, I have forgot the details. One of my children was born in Switzerland and had I not registered him he would have been stateless as the Swiss citizenship is entirely according to ancestry (except for a very people who manage to become naturalized Swiss, but that is a very long, expensive and uncertain affair). (It wasn’t always thus, as Albert Einstein was naturalized Swiss as an impecunious student within a few years of matriculating at the ETH–Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.)
Germany had no naturalization whatever until a few years ago, citizenship being entirely a matter of ancestry and many “Ostdeutsch” living in the Soviet Union had the unlimited right of return, while the Turkish, Italian and other “Gastarbeiter” some of whom were third generation had no possibility of becoming citizens. On the other hand, France, England, the US, Canada recognize as citizens anyone born on their soil, even if the parents were there illegally.
England is not a sovereign nation and, as such, does not recognise anybody as a citizen.
The United Kingdom does not recognise the children of illegal immigrants as citizens (British Nationality Act, 1981).
Are you sure about the registration requirement, Hari? Here’s a link to the relevant provision of the US Code: Title 8, § 1401. It’s too long to summarise easily (see sub-paras ©, (d), (e) & (g)), but it doesn’t mention any registration requirement. The key seems to be that at least one of the parents must be a U.S. citizen, with various types of residency requirement by the parent(s) in the U.S. prior to the birth.
Since Arthur was born in 1829, according to the official biography on the White House website, if he was born in Lower Canada he would have been a British subject, not a Canadian citizen. The dominion of Canada didn’t exist until 1867, and there was no separate Canadian citizenship until 1947.
Assuming he was born in Lower Canada, would that have automatically disqualified him? What was the applicable U.S. law at the time? Did it automatically confer citizenship on a child of U.S. parents who was born outside of the U.S., or was it only people born in the U.S. who were citizens?
Previous thread on this subject: