Does the United States Recognize Dual Citizenship?
Dual citizenship refers to a situation where an individual is a national of more than one country according to the legal requirements of each of the countries. These legal requirements are different for every country and citizenship can only be attained by meeting these requirements. The United States is one of the countries around the world that allows citizens to have duel-citizenship.
Attaining Dual Citizenship
The most common way of attaining citizenship is by process of naturalization; a person who has been living in a country since birth is a citizen of that country. You can also become a citizen of a country if your parents are citizens of that country. Dual citizenship occurs due to the migration of people from their homeland to new countries. People migrate to other countries for a host of reasons including employment and opportunities to further education; this is where dual citizenship comes into play. In practice, an individual who has met the requirements to attain citizenship in more than one country is said to possess dual citizenship. However, each of the countries, in this case, claims the individual as its national.
History of Dual Citizenship Laws in the US
Before 1967, dual citizenship was banned in the United States until the Supreme Court ruled to do away with most of the laws that banned dual citizenship. The views of the United States on dual citizenship have been a subject of debate in the past years. However, like any other major changes, it took quite a while for the US government to acknowledge dual citizenship as a practice that has since been allowed by law.
Naturalization
Citizens of other countries who have attained US citizenship are required or at least slightly forced to denounce their former nationality during the naturalization ceremony. Denouncing your former nationality to become a US citizen has become part of the oath ceremony and those who refuse to do so risk being denied US citizenship. Although the US imposes strict conditions in the process of becoming a citizen, this has not led to any apparent changes in citizenship regulations in other nations. However, children of individuals who take the oath are not necessarily required to participate in the oath which means they are still technically citizens of their parents’ former country. In the past, the US government through the State Department actively pursued cases of individuals who had been found to have maintained residency in their countries of origin but has since stopped doing this.
Documents for Application of Citizenship
The process of applying for citizenship in the US requires copies of particular documents. These documents include a birth certificate, marriage certificate if applicable, passports, and verified immigration papers. In some cases, an immigrant may be from a non-English speaking nation and his or he documents may, therefore, be in a different language. In such a case these documents require translation in order to be accepted for consideration. This process demands the services of a professional translation firm to ensure the most accurate and truthful interpretation of these documents in English.
