Not every country works that way. I had a client who was a U.S. citizen by birth, but hadn’t lived in the U.S. since he was a baby. He hadn’t lived long enough in the U.S. to transmit his citizenship to his children. His parents were stateless Palestinians (of which there are quite a few). His wife was Lebanese, and citizenship in Lebanon passes through the father, not through the mother.
They lived in a third country, one which does not grant birthright citizenship to children born there.
His kids were going to be born stateless. Luckily the family had money, and he paid out of pocket for health insurance that allowed them to be born in the U.S. at no cost to the government. But otherwise the poor kids literally would have been trapped - stateless, and with no way to obtain any kind of travel document.
There are many countries that do not grant citizenship to kids born outside the country.
Even among those that do, if you are born outside of the country and your parents do not bother to register you as a citizen of their home country, then you don’t get much there.
There are some people who are essentially stateless already, as they are leaving failed nations, and their children born into a nation without a birthright citizenship would be stateless.
For instance, France has a large stateless population, which has been the cause of some of their unrest problems.
There are quite a number of ways to be born stateless. We don’t think of them, because we live in a country that grants citizenship to anyone born on our soil, as well as anyone born to citizen parents, and so you might be mistaken in thinking that this is a universal thing, but this is a problem in other areas of the world.
Your suggestion would make it a problem in our area of the world as well.
It would seem that countries like Lebanon should get rid of their bigoted policies that citizenship is only granted patrilineally, which would have prevented the troubles with Eva Luna’s client.
I would like to note that the solutions provided in your cite on Statelessness are the following and that absolute birth citizenship are not among them:
Creating awareness of statelessness and identifying stateless populations
Universal birth registration and other forms of civil documentation
Increasing access to naturalization or citizenship by:
–Eliminating discrimination in nationality laws
–Building administrative capacity for civil registry
You kind of have to find yourself in that situation though, it can’t be all that common. I am a bit surprised that such a “loophole” exists at all, but I suppose it does make sense, or else you could ex-pat citizen families who have gone generations without anyone ever stepping foot in the country.
But yeah, if you are a typical US citizen, and not under one of those kinda uncommon situations, then your kids will get that citizenship, wherever they are born.
I would say that eliminating discrimination in nationality laws would qualify.
I would consider eliminating the birthright for being born here to be discriminatory. You are discriminating against the birthplace and citizenship of the child’s parents.
My husband, Tom Scud, is only a U.S. citizen thanks to that provision, and only because his parents, both descended from several generations of missionaries and both born abroad for that reason, returned to the U.S. for college. And yet he has ancestors who were in America when it was a British colony and signed the Articles of Confederation. I imagine the same goes for children of career diplomats, career military people, career expat employees of multinational corporations or international organizations…you might be surprised how common a situation it is.
I wasn’t contending that there would not be ill effects, just that the economy ‘wouldn’t go tits-up’ which was what seemed to be implied by BigT’s “those illegal immigrants that we apparently need to keep our economy functioning”.