American born children and dual citizenship

[lucyrich 20]

Great! So after I get my permanent residence... I'll apply for a dual. I love my home country, can't just leave it like that

Yes, though you don't really apply for dual citizenship. You apply for US citizenship. Whether your application for US citizenship has any effect on your prior citizenship is a matter of your prior country's citizenship laws. In the case of Canada, there's no effect, so if you're a Canadian citizen who naturalizes in the US, you become a dual citizen.

See the Dual Citizenship FAQ for lots of discussion.

Oh, and to keep to the initial discussion, I believe our daughter was born a triple citizen. She was born in the US, which gave her US Citizenship by the 14th Amendment. Her mother was a dual Venezuelan/Italian citizen at the time of our daughter's birth, so our daughter inherited both of those citizenships, via Venezuelan citizenship law and Italian citizenship law.

Mom has lived in Venezuela all her life, but inherited Italian citizenship from birth because her father was born an Italian Citizen in Italy. However, Mom never bothered to document her Italian citizenship, and some of the documents would be hard to come by today, so while we're confident the Italian citizenship exists, we don't have ironclad documentary proof of it. And we don't believe any Italian authorities are aware of it.

When mom naturalizes to become a US Citizen later this summer, Venezuelan law says it won't affect her Venezuelan citizenship, but Italian law says she'll lose her Italian citizenship. So Mom goes from being a dual Italian/Venezuelan citizen to being a dual US/Venezuelan citizen. Now there's really little reason to bother formally documenting that Italian citizenship, since it's going to go away soon, anyway.

But mom's losing Italian citizenship won't affect daughter's Italian citizenship, at least not theoretically. As time passes, it may become more and more difficult for our daughter to prove that the Italian citizenship existed, though. We don't plan to pursue getting the Italian citizenship documented.