chrisgtr4

Hello:

I am a British citizen by descent. My father was born in England, but I have lived my entire life in the US. I have dual-citizenship in the US and the UK and have my British passport. I have been seriously contemplating a move to Scotland in the coming years to work and live.

My question is: What will come of my citizenship, as my father was born in England, in the event of Scottish independence?

Could I possibly move to Scotland only to lose my citizenship because my citizenship by descent is English?

Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Jerseygirl

Whatever other citizenships you may have or get in the future...it will not affect your British or US citizenship.

Citizenship by descent means you cannot pass it onto your children. Although you can under some circumstances.

chrisgtr4

Sorry, to clarify, in the event of independence:

Would I lose my SCOTTISH (b/c it would be an independent country) citizenship, because I have descended from an Englishman?

Jerseygirl

I'm not with you...you are British and American.

rebs

I don't think anyone can answer this question as Scotland is not, at the moment, independent.

If they do gain independence, that would be when rules of citizenship would be defined.

robin1234

Exactly.. I assume the OP is jumping the gun a bit, since they are only just now talking about a referendum. There are a lot of details to work out if it ever comes to pass! One approach would be to research what happened in similar cases. The one that springs to mind is when the Czech Republic and Slovakia went their separate ways. What choices were Czechoslovak citizens offered? Could they get both citizenships? Did they have to make a choice and then live with it? Did they have to take the country that they happened to be living in at the time of separation? Was it based on ancestry?

I've thought along the same lines. I wouldn't mind living in Scotland but I certainly wouldn't want that to effect my British citizenship.

Hawk13

Yer off yer heid, they'd hurl ya oot!

robin1234

Also, there should not be too much to worry about in practice... no-one knows the details of the eventual break-up if it happens, but it is reasonable to suppose that both the UK (what remains of it) and the newly-independent Scotland will both be members of the EU. British or Scottish people will presumably be free to live, work, retire etc. in either country.

Editha

Actually, Scotland would have to re-apply for EU membership, and the outcome is by no means certain.

lf1

If the English can't stay in an independent Scotland there would be a lot of people that would have to move out, based on the many I have met during my travels in Scotland. That would include my OH (maybe that is not a bad thing) LOL. As we plan to be living close to the border it wont take me long to deport him.

OP as you can proably tell from my post, I am not in the least bit worried about OH being English and we are moving to Scotland.

Hawk13

The way things are going, not being part of the EU may not be a bad thing.

WestLondonWelshman

I can pretty much guarntee absolutely nothing. The chances of scotland becoming independent are in reality non-existent and even in the remotest realms of possibility that it did it would make not one bit of difference.

The republic of Ireland has been independednt for 90 years and Eire citizens have identikit rights to British citizens in the UK as vice versa. An Eire national can claim full benefits on arrival and vice versa etc which is not the case for other EU citizens. The same deal wold be struck with Scotland and i would imagine yuo would just get the choice of a Englishor Scottish passport, which in reality would be the same thing and prevent no barrier to where you wanted to live in the current UK or entire EU for that matter. Hpwever, as IO say its academic its is not going too happen

robin1234

But who is English and who Scottish? What objective criteria are there.. apart from where a person is resident on the stroke of midnight the day the countries separate or whatever? I was reading something recently (can't remember where) about genealogical research in Nazi Germany; apparently, for certain senior professional positions, or high party or government posts, people had to get full ancestry records of all forbears back to some key date, I think it was 1798 or thereabouts, proving that they were German and had no tainted blood. Presumably if you had a Jewish great-great-grandfather you had to pay the genealogical society even more money to tweak the results and come up clean. Maybe the Scots can put something like that in place, to stimulate the economy?

As far as I know my ancestry is English, my mother's side from Tyneside area and my father's from Teesside, Stockport, Redcar etc. However, my father served in a Scottish regiment from 1937 to 1947, and was wounded & decorated and so forth. So would that give me a special dispensation to become a Scottish citizen?

JAJ

As far as I am aware, separate Czech and Slovak nationalities had been established (on an internal level) within the former Czechoslovakia, as far back as 1968. This meant that establishing separate national citizenship in 1993 was relatively straightforward.

JAJ

It's a hypothetical question but you could expect that in an independence scenario, any British citizen becoming a Scottish citizen at the point of independence would lose British citizenship. There would probably be an exception to loss for those with ties of birth or descent to a place remaining part of the United Kingdom.

This was the approach used before whenever colonies became independent and left the United Kingdom & Colonies.