The DU Lounge

My younger daughter, for whom I got citizenship at the US embassy in Germany within six weeks of her birth, wanted to get US citizenship for her daughters, also born in Germany, but of a German father.

In 1985, I walked into the US Embassy in Bonn at about 10:00 A.M. About two hours later, I walked out of there with her American birth certificate, her Social Security number, and her first US passport. Those were the days. To get citizenship for her daughters, she had to prove ten years of US residence, which, due to her years of US high school through Law School, she was barely able to do, and paperwork that it took her eleven months of appointments and piles of documents. But she was magna at her law school on the states, and made a living at dealing with such situations. Her daughters, now 5 and 7, are not only dual citizens of The EU (Germany) and the USA, but bilingual in German and American English. Our daughters wanted their children to have the same advantages we gave them, i.e. not only the right to choose (the paperwork), but the ability to take full advantage of that choice (fluency in both languages). The ten years of US residence was a requirement for our daughter to pass on her U.S. citizenship to her children. You had better see if Canada has a similar requirement to pass on Canadian citizenship. Not all countries do, so it may not even be an issue. My daughter in New York could have easily furnished proof of ten years of German residence to pass on German citizenship to her sons, but the Germans never requested it. Still, it’s better to know before you apply.

PS one funny footnote: while at her undergrad college in DC, she wanted to take a semester at the Sorbonne in Paris, which her college offered. We said sure, and she warned me I’d have to fill out some paperwork. When I got it, one of the questions I had to answer was, “are you 100% confident that your daughter possesses the necessary maturity to live in Europe for four months?” I laughed, and said, “OK someone at the university is not proofreading the paperwork they are sending me.” I wrote back, “after carefully considering that my daughter had the necessary maturity to be born in Europe, grow up in Europe, and go to school in Europe, I had come to the conclusion that she did indeed possess the necessary maturity to come back here for a semester.” Her school, to their credit, wrote back to apologize for not checking her home address (Düsseldorf) before sending the application, on which they would have crossed out that question, had they been paying more attention.