A Child of No Country
“Since you’re giving birth in the UK, will the baby be a UK citizen?”
I get this question a lot lately: from Americans, Europeans, and even Brits. To their surprise, the answer is actually no.
The right in question is called jus soli, the right of the soil, and it’s much rarer than you might think. Due most likely to colonial history, unrestricted birthright citizenship applies in most countries in the Americas, and almost nowhere else. Most other places, at least one of the parents also has to be a citizen.
I checked, under the idle notion that EU citizenship could be plausible and useful for the little one.
It turns out this is a hot topic in French politics right now: if the baby was born in France and lived there for five years during its childhood, it could claim French citizenship upon reaching the age of majority. The conservative party wants to abolish this rule. I don’t think we would take advantage anyway: between Australia, the US, and the UK, our little family already has too many countries to live in. Sorry, little one.
Although our baby will be legally permitted to remain in the UK without a visa after it is born, and is even afforded free healthcare for its first three months of life, the child is not a UK citizen, and would need paperwork to return to the country if we were to go abroad — so a family Christmas in Europe might be out. (My sister and her husband live nearby in the EU, but because of Brexit, my brother-in-law’s Indian passport doesn’t give him easy access to visit us in the UK.)
In fact, our baby will belong to no country at all unless and until we do some paperwork — and it’s not a trivial affair.
The United States considers any baby of mine to be a citizen by default, but we have to file a Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA): a six-step process involving fees, forms, and an interview at the Embassy in London. You can’t start the process until you have the baby’s long-form UK birth certificate in hand, and processing and scheduling can take a few weeks.
My favorite part is that I will have to prove my own physical presence in the United States in order to get my child citizenship: “The U.S. citizen parent must have a total of at least 5 years of physical presence in the United States, at least 2 of which must be after the age of 14.”
Despite having resided in the United States every year of my life until this one, I’m weirdly nervous about having to prove I was there. From the website, I gather that school transcripts are an accepted means of proof, so I’ve reached out to both my high school and undergrad transcript offices for official copies of grades I thought would never be relevant again. We won’t dwell on the fact that my equally legitimate grad school transcripts were all earned remotely.
Robert’s Australian citizenship is even less powerful for his baby born abroad. If we were to give birth in Australia, it would be automatic. Actually, if we then stayed there for ten years, the baby would get citizenship even if Robert wasn’t a citizen. But since we’re having the baby in the UK, baby only gets rights as a descendant, which is a fairly expensive application.
As it turns out, that paperwork would be much the same as mine as a spouse (though I would have to go through a permanent resident pathway first), and it’s heavily discounted if we and any of baby’s future siblings all apply at the same time. So given that it’s easy to get a visitor visa to Australia as an American, we might none of us pursue dual citizenship for a while.
In the meantime, I’m gathering paperwork early. Though I’m chill about travel, long-term visas are one area where stress feels appropriate: the unknowns are many, decisions feel arbitrary, and outcomes can change the course of your life.
As of late June, Robert and I have the right to live in the same country as one another. But that’s not a guarantee after January 2026 — or if he loses his job. Before that, I was pushing the limits of my visitor visa in the UK; there’s a guideline of six months’ stay within a year (I hit that in May), dependent on your non-intent to remain (iffy given my address and marriage). Each crossing into the UK ultimately relied upon the favorable judgment of the border control agent. They ask on your visa application whether you’ve ever been denied entry before; you want to be able to say no.
We could get a dependant visa for baby in the UK, but we want to end up in the States eventually. Robert is allowed there for 90 days at a time, but even just for paternity leave we’re hoping for six months — another visa application he’ll have to complete, plus wait time. Though Australians have special work visa deals in the United States (a reciprocity arrangement), my country’s immigration processes are famously long, fraught, and vulnerable to politics. Things could be tenuous for a long time.
In the meanwhile, we’ll control what we can. Getting our baby at least one citizenship will be a good start; at least two of the three of us will have legal guarantees of same-country residency. The third person, we’ll just have to keep figuring out.
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