Britdrinker

Beer, people, let's not forget the beer ...

Elvira

flat tyre rocks

Duncan Roberts

I was under the impression that USA was one of the countries that reserves the right to revoke US citizenship if a born US citizen takes citizenship of another country. If they do that sort of thing is another thing altogether though.

CitySimon

I've heard this one myself.

When my wife came over to live in England, she made a few enquiries into getting herself British citizenship. Nearly everyone she asked over here about it suggested that she'd have to renounce her US citizenship first.

In the same way that they make immigrants renounce our other nationalities (although that doesn't hold any water back in Britain) they expect US citizens to renouce there citizenship before taking another countries citizenship. Apparently.

Elvira

Nonsense!!!!

"suggested"?

"apparently"?

The only countries that I know of (there *may* be others, but the US and the UK, and most European countries, are not among them!) that do not allow dual citizenship are India and China.

Bob

OP request.

Bob

Aye, some countries are like that, though to a certain extent you can protect yourself as long as you apply for permits for new citizenship in advance like with Germany and Japan, and with India, you lose citizenship, but I think you still have a right to abode there or something along those lines.

Bob

and the motorway, boring as it is, it is the most lit motorway in the world *lol*

Bob

You have to show that you are abandoning it for you to lose it, so sodding off and not paying US tax would get you in bother, as would moving to Cuba....

Jerseygirl

That's what I was told.

Jerseygirl

Thanks Bob.....was it a case of 'if you can't stand the heat.....' ?

Bob

somin' like that, and it getting a bit silly, and I couldn't be arsed to keep up while watching the footie

Jerseygirl

Sorry if our posts are interfering with your footie Bob.

meauxna

hiya sb

I highly recommend Rich Wales' Dual Citz FAQ (the whol doc is great actually):
http://www.richw.org/dualcit/faq.html
(original doc has all the links intact)

2. But I thought US law didn't permit one to be a dual citizen -- that if you were (by birth or otherwise), you either had to give up the other citizenship when you came of age, or else you'd lose your US status. And that if you became a citizen of another country, you'd automatically lose your US citizenship. So what's all this talk about dual citizenship?

It indeed used to be the case in the US that you couldn't hold dual citizenship (except in certain cases if you had dual citizenship from birth or childhood, in which case some Supreme Court rulings -- Perkins v. Elg (1939), Mandoli v. Acheson (1952), and Kawakita v. U.S. (1952) -- permitted you to keep both).

However, most of the laws forbidding dual citizenship were struck down in 1967 by the US Supreme Court. The court's decision in this case, Afroyim v. Rusk, as well as a second case in 1980, Vance v. Terrazas, eventually made its way explicitly into the statute books in 1986; up till that time, the old laws were still on the books, but the State Department was effectively under court order to ignore them.

Rules against dual citizenship still apply to some extent to people who wish to become US citizens via naturalization. The Supreme Court chose to leave in place the requirement that new citizens must renounce their old citizenship during US naturalization. However, in practice, the State Department is no longer doing anything in the vast majority of situations where a new citizen's "old country" refuses to recognize the US renunciation.

The official US State Department policy on dual citizenship today is that the United States does not favor it as a matter of policy because of various problems they feel it may cause, but the existence of dual citizenship is recognized in individual cases. That is, if you ask them if you ought to become a dual citizen, they will recommend against doing it; but if you tell them you are a dual citizen, they'll usually say it's OK.

Ray

Thanks Mo .. I was just looking for Rich's site ....