It's certainly far from common! Birth and marriage aren't the only ways, either. Used to be (not sure if it still is) that you could earn temporary citizenship in certain countries (Britain being one of them) if you'd been working & living in the country for a certain length of time. I think it was mostly related to "you've been paying taxes while you live here, so you should get some of the benefits, too" -- and having earned that quasi-citizenship, you could then travel through the EU as a Brit citizen. A'course, it was also something you were expected to immediately surrender upon returning to the US (though I don't know if all countries require that).
Then again, the US is notorious at being very stringent when it comes to multiple citizenships. What they don't know, they'll often let pass, but once they do know... or so I've been told.
And then you have situations like Japan, which refuses to recognize dual citizenship. If you have duality with Japan, you're required to either declare your citizenship by the age of, hm, 22, I think, or you lose it altogether. Thing is, when I checked, this really only means you tell the Japanese govt that you're ditching your other citizenships, and that's the extent of it. The US policy is that as long as you were not required -- in the course of 'ditching' -- to then, and I quote, "swear an oath against the United States and its territories", you have not forfeited your US citizenship. So you could still walk your ass into an embassy and get a passport... it's just that as far as Japan is concerned, you're a citizen only of Japan, while the US will have you down as US-and-Japan.
Every government has its own idiosyncrasies. It's actually a pretty fascinating field, and too bad I only learned this stuff in the past few years, because this is the kind of law I would've really enjoyed practicing.
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Date: 16 May 2010 04:20 pm (UTC)It's certainly far from common! Birth and marriage aren't the only ways, either. Used to be (not sure if it still is) that you could earn temporary citizenship in certain countries (Britain being one of them) if you'd been working & living in the country for a certain length of time. I think it was mostly related to "you've been paying taxes while you live here, so you should get some of the benefits, too" -- and having earned that quasi-citizenship, you could then travel through the EU as a Brit citizen. A'course, it was also something you were expected to immediately surrender upon returning to the US (though I don't know if all countries require that).
Then again, the US is notorious at being very stringent when it comes to multiple citizenships. What they don't know, they'll often let pass, but once they do know... or so I've been told.
And then you have situations like Japan, which refuses to recognize dual citizenship. If you have duality with Japan, you're required to either declare your citizenship by the age of, hm, 22, I think, or you lose it altogether. Thing is, when I checked, this really only means you tell the Japanese govt that you're ditching your other citizenships, and that's the extent of it. The US policy is that as long as you were not required -- in the course of 'ditching' -- to then, and I quote, "swear an oath against the United States and its territories", you have not forfeited your US citizenship. So you could still walk your ass into an embassy and get a passport... it's just that as far as Japan is concerned, you're a citizen only of Japan, while the US will have you down as US-and-Japan.
Every government has its own idiosyncrasies. It's actually a pretty fascinating field, and too bad I only learned this stuff in the past few years, because this is the kind of law I would've really enjoyed practicing.