The mother or the father, and it depends on circumstances. The rules are more strict when the father is the US citizen.
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Geodad@lemm.ee 23 hours agoUS citizenship comes from the mother, if born abroad. The baby would automatically be a US citizen, possibly have dual citizenship.
LyD@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
Geodad@lemm.ee 19 hours ago
If the father is a citizen, the mother is not, and the baby is born outside the US, citizenship does not transfer from father to child.
If the status of the parents is reversed, citizenship does transfer to the child.
LyD@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
Not to be rude, but where did you get that info? It isn’t correct. Doesn’t it sound a little too oversimplified for something like birthright citizenship laws in the US?
Geodad@lemm.ee 17 hours ago
I looked into it when people were talking about Ted Cruz being born in Canada. His mother is a US citizen, so he’s actually a birthright citizen.
Takumidesh@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Most countries don’t have birthright citizenship.
Geodad@lemm.ee 19 hours ago
Yes, I’m just saying that the baby of a US woman would not be a stateless person if born in a country that doesn’t have it.
WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
That is technically true, while missing a key fact. Birthright citizenship is the norm for countries in the Western Hemisphere. The vast majority of countries in the Americas have birthright citizenship. The USA is not some rare outlier here.
Chemo@discuss.tchncs.de 20 hours ago
I don’t think any european country has it…
WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
Most European countries actually do in a limited fashion. Countries that have signed the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness grant automatic citizenship at birth to people that would otherwise be born stateless.
More countries should adopt birthright citizenship. It has a lot of utility to it. It prevents the formation of a multigenerational undocumented underclass and greatly assists in the assimilation of immigrants into the broader culture. It’s simply a fact of life that some immigrants will enter a country illegally. And while it is bad enough that they may live the rest of their lives in hiding, it’s even worse when people are born into that condition. You can end up with generation after generation, people with little to no ties to their “homeland,” living as a permanent underclass because they lack citizenship.
It’s also a protection against some forms of tyranny and oppression. A favorite tool of tyrants is to strip citizenship from their victims. They’ll sometimes go back generations and declare decades-old immigration cases as fraudulent or invalid. Look at the Rohingya genocide, where the Myanmar government declared an entire minority group to be illegal immigrants. Having a hard rule that says, “if you were born here, you have citizenship,” prevents these tactics from being used on anyone except actual immigrants. Tyrants can still target immigrants, but their children are protected.