singapore eagle wrote:Your citizenship at birth is what it is. There's no automatic need for any bits of paper or further fanfare.
This is a good point to emphasize. I was about 50 years old when I did some digging around to see if I qualified as a British citizen. Navigating the UK citizenship pages was a nightmare at the time, and I concluded from what I read that I was indeed a citizen by descent.
I contacted a naturalization company in the UK to run my information by them. The person who responded at first said, "No, you don't qualify." This didn't make any sense to me since I had traced myself on a chart I found online.
A few days later, the managing director of the company called me to apologize... he said, "You certainly seem to know more about the naturalization process than the people working for me." He gave me some advice on applying for a passport, the documentation I would need to provide to prove up my assertions.
I had to supply my own birth certificate (Canadian), my father's birth certificate (Liverpool), my mother's birth certificate (Canadian), as well as my parent's marriage license. Because my father had been previously married, I had to prove up that he had been divorced from his first wife with the divorce decree. This was the toughest document to find as my father had never mentioned the name of his first wife, but the records people in British Columbia were most helpful, and helped me research the archives all the way back to 1947.
I made application, sending in all the original documents I had collected. I received one question back in a letter, I responded, and shortly thereafter I received my passport.
Thus, I did have to prove that I was a British Citizen by right of descent but that citizenship was automatically mine at birth.
And FWIW, when I applied for and received my American citizenship, I had to orally renounce allegiance to other countries but neither Canada nor the UK considered that actual renunciation, instead requiring a written renunciation in front of a consular official.
Since that time, there have been several cases that have been decided by the Supreme Court that permit dual citizenship and ensure that my citizenship is equal to that of a natural born citizen, ie, I can't be stripped of my American citizenship by virtue of the fact that I automatically hold citizenship in two other countries.