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Darn those illegal aliens.
If not "birthright" citizenship, what?
- Thread starter Bob001
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Darn those illegal aliens.
"Birthright" citizenship has been a constitutional guarantee in the U.S. for 150 years, and before that it had been the custom for everyone except slaves since the country's founding. Changing that would require a fundamental cultural shift that would be much more disruptive and controversial than you seem to think.
Here's a question: In the countries where they do NOT have birthright citizenship -- including the UK, France and Germany -- immigrant communities, particularly but not only Muslims, are often isolated from the mainstream and do not assimilate easily. Would immigrants become part of the larger society more quickly and easily if their children WERE automatically considered citizens of the countries where they were born? And would those countries benefit from smoother assimilation?
Went pretty smoothly here in the UK when it was put into place in the 1980s.
"Birthright" citizenship had been in place for centuries in the UK.
For such an advanced and dynamic society, the U.S. is curiously reactionary in a few small ways ("Birthright" citizenship, the death penalty, the dollar bill, pennies are a few examples that puzzle the rest of the world).
Doubtful. Children born to immigrants who have settled in the UK (i.e. those who aren't naturalised but have been given indefinite leave to remain) are given UK citizenship at birth and these account for the vast majority of those in immigrant communities.
As I read it, "birthright" citizenship only affects those children born to parents with temporary right to remain.
Ladewig
I lost an avatar bet.
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You forgot an irrational hatred of the metric system.
So in the UK, when a child is born are his parents (or a parent) required to prove their own citizenship or legal status? To whom? Do pregnant women take their own birth certificates to the hospital with them, or what? One factor to consider is that there is no national identity card in the U.S., and many people across the political spectrum strongly oppose the idea. How does it work in practice in the U.K.? Who registers the births (in the U.S., it's done at the city or county level), and who assesses qualifications for citizenship?
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At least we don't drive on the wrong side of the road.
It's part of the birth registration process.
It's not necessary, the registering of births is separate from giving birth. The birth can either be registered in the hospital or within 42 days at the local registry office.
Neither is there one in the UK and there is equally strong opposition to it, although it tends to be moreso on the left.
https://www.gov.uk/register-birth/overview
The details are in the link above (for England and Wales) there are further links in there for Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The links are interesting. It looks like the UK puts more of a burden on the parents to register the births themselves than in the U.S., where the hospital does it automatically. But the parents registering the birth don't seem to be required to prove their own citizenship or legal residence. They are only required to produce one item of ID, which may be a driver's license or utility bill. So how does the baby -- when he is older of course -- prove his UK citizenship? Does he have to provide his own parents' birth certificates or immigration papers? If birth registration is not proof of citizenship, what is?
In the U.S., any question about a person's citizenship would end when he produces his U.S. birth certificate (unless you happen to be the President, but that's a different thread). But it sounds like that's not the case in the UK.
I'm not an expert on these matters being neither a parent nor a naturalised or non-resident alien but I understand that the registrar will validate that the information provided is accurate.
Citizenship is automatically granted if:
...and there's no need to register.
I honestly do not know. Aside from applying for a passport when I was 18, I have never needed to do it and IIRC my birth certificate was sufficient at that time - then again that was a long time ago and the rules may have changed since that time.
What I'm getting at is that if a person's UK citizenship depends on the citizenship or legal status of a parent, someone somewhere in the government has to be satisfied that the person is the child of a citizen or legal immigrant, which would seem to me to mean that he or his parents have to show THEIR documents to an official somewhere. The birth registration itself doesn't appear to require proof of the parents' citizenship or legal residence. So when a Brit applies for a passport or some other benefit requiring citizenship, how does he prove he's a citizen if his birth certificate alone isn't enough?
I'm really trying to understand how this could work in the U.S., and it's hard to see any way except a vast federal bureaucracy that would retain generations of cross-referenced birth certificates and immigration records.
All I needed to do to get my passport was send off my birth certificate. My mother was British, at the time my Father was a U.S. citizen with indefinite leave to remain (he's now a citizen). I presume some behind-the-scenes checking was done by the passport office staff but I'm not clear on what that is.
There is a database somewhere which stores the nationality of people in the U.K because when I was being positively vetted for a defence contractor role, I was denied because my father was foreign-born. I have no idea whether that same database would be referenced by the passport office.
Here's an article that describes some of the checks that non-residents would go through.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics...laxes-application-checks-overseas-home-office
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