| Like the author, I have a lot of personal experience with this. Going through it basically forces you to become an expert in things don't really want to know anything about. What stuck out to me is that despite obviously being a smart and educated person and having the help of immigration lawyers, the author has made a mistake. Sepcifically this: > I checked in with our lawyers and was told that the kid couldn't get her certificate of citizenship until she turned 18 When you apply to be naturalized (N400) then your children become US citizens by operation of law as long as they are in your physical custody and are under 18. The "certificate of citizenship" the author is talking about is called Form N600 and it specifically doesn't require the child to be over 18. Go and read the instructions for it [1]. If you know nothing about this, you might be confused because the author says his daughter has a US passport. Isn't that the same thing? No. This comes up a lot when US citizens adopt children from outside the US. This essentially causes them to become US citizens (there's a whole process) but some parents fail to go through the application and formally recognize their child as a US citizen. But how does the child travel internationally before any of this happens? There's an allowance for them to get a US passport even though they may not be US citizens. Weird, huh? Some people mistakenly think just having a US passport is proof of US citizenship but it isn't. So here's my advice to anyone who has a child when they naturalize or adopts a child from overseas: IMMEDIATELY file an N600 for that child so they have proof they are a US citizen. This can be incredibly difficult and costly to reconstruct later when paperwork may have gone missing. [1]: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/n-6... |