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In this lesson, we’re going to cover the basics of acquiring another citizenship and passport.
This is probably the way of acquiring citizenship that most people are familiar with.
Jus Soli is Latin for “Right of Soil”, which means you only need to be born on land within the borders of a country to be granted citizenship there: the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and Costa Rica are examples that all grant citizenship this way.
I for example was granted Australian citizenship by jus soli, at a time when all a person needed to do was be born on Australian territory to become a citizen. This changed in 1986 however, and Australia now requires at least one parent to be a citizen or resident of the country. As we spoke about previously, laws like this can change over time.
Realistically, you can only be granted citizenship via jus soli once in your lifetime—because you can only be born in one place, and you can’t be born a second time. So if you missed out on a passport via jus soli already, you can’t go back and change that.
However, some parents are planning where their children are born today, in order to ensure they are granted another passport.
There is a significant rise in “birth tourism” today for parents who want their children to be given another, or different, passport at birth. Many Russians are giving birth to children in South America today due to the weakened global outlook on the Russian passport, and sanctions levied against the country.
Jus Sanguinis is likely the most common way that citizenship is transferred to a person when they are born today. In Latin, Jus Sanguinis means “Right of Blood,” and describes when a child inherits a citizenship because of the citizenship or citizenships held by its parents.
Most European countries have some form of transferring citizenship by blood, or combining it with jus soli.
For example, if you have a Polish, British, Czech, Irish, or Hungarian parent, you are likely eligible to claim citizenship solely by blood. No time in the country is required: it’s your right simply due to who you are descended from.
In many cases, people can be granted multiple passports at birth by blood. For example, if you had one Polish and one Icelandic parent at birth, you would be entitled to both citizenships.
What a lot of people aren’t aware of however, is that right by blood doesn’t always stop at your parents. In some cases, if you had a grandparent, great-grandparent, or even beyond from certain countries, you can still today claim citizenship from that nation.
For example, if you have a grandparent who was a citizen from Poland or the Czech Republic, you can likely claim citizenship and a passport from one of those nations. But if you had an ancestor from Hungary—regardless of how many generations ago—you are entitled to citizenship, providing you can prove lineage to that ancestor (among other details). It doesn’t matter in most cases if that ancestor is no longer alive, as long as you can prove that lineage with documents (birth certificates, etc), which can usually be acquired from the national archives or “hall of records” of that country.
For many, jus sanguinis is one of the easiest and most realistic ways to get another citizenship fast—but you have to be lucky to have ancestors who can grant you citizenship in this way.
It’s important to know your ancestry. But chances are, if you have an ancestor in the last 1-3+ generations from somewhere in Europe, it’s likely you could possibly claim another passport. A passport you possibly didn’t even know you could get.