No? If you're born in the US you have US citizenship, you're American. You don't just magically get citizenship for your parents home country, at least not for most countries.
It’s not automatic, it requires applying and at times can take years of proving in terms of paperwork, that is by definition not automatic.
I have personal experience with the Greek, German, and Italian systems, prepare your self for 1-2 years to gain it even if you have rights to it.
In some countries it is automatic in others it is not.
Say one of your parents is a citizen of some other country.
If they're Canadian, you're a Canadian citizen. Period. The process is to get your documents that prove it. You don't apply for citizenship, you apply for proof.
In many European countries you are not a citizen. The process is to become one by descent. You apply for citizenship.
Fair question, though it assumes citizenships are simple things you “use,” which you either need or don’t. They’re not. People attach all sorts of baggage, duties, and rights to them. Mine are a mix of ancestry, residence, and ones I helped my spouse with. They’re not things I “need,” they’re just where my family and life have been. European family trees often produce this. The original point still stands: even when you’re entitled to a citizenship, actually obtaining the documents takes real time and money.
Also, in some cases, you may automatically lose your original nationality if you seek an additional one (Spain comes to mind; though in their case you'd need to manually request not to lose your nationality to keep it within a certain time period, IIRC).
> You don't just magically get citizenship for your parents home country, at least not for most countries.
Are there any countries where this is not true? I struggle to think of any, especially amoung highly-developed democratic nations. (There might be a couple of weirdo dictatorships that do not allow it.) It seems this would be necessary to prevent statelessness. For example, if your parents are living in the Netherlands as foreigners, children born there are not entitled to automatic Dutch citizenship. As a result, they will obtain citizenship through their parents (in a foreign nation).
Quite a few countries do not allow dual citizenship. So a person who was born in the US and is therefore US citizen at birth will not be allowed to have that country's citizenship until they revoke the US one.
China and Singapore are some of the more prominent examples.
China considers it a "nationality conflict," the child is issued a Travel Document and treated as a citizen domestically, they can still be registered on hukou and get ID card. Apparently they used to unofficially force you to decide as an adult, but stopped a few years ago and now issue the Travel Document for life.
edit to add -- that assumes the parent is not a unconditional green card holder, which is the scenario here.
Singapore allows dual citizenship until 21. Which is not necessarily a good thing, as if you do not do their national service you will effectively get banned from ever going there even if you renounce it later.
Japan and Korea both allow it forever from birth in practice, but the latter also has some complexities regarding the military (either renounce before a certain age or you have some restrictions returning until past a certain age).
They are not entirely wrong. The person you replied to said "that country's citizenship":
> So a person who was born in the US and is therefore US citizen at birth will not be allowed to have that country's citizenship
Taking example of China, you said "the child is issued a Travel Document and treated as a citizen domestically"
"Treated as a citizen" is not same as "having Citizenship". OCI card holders are India are pretty much treated as citizens, except few rights such as the right of suffrage/ability to engage in agricultural land use etc, but that doesn't make them citizens of India.
There is a huge political difference between OCI and a Chinese travel document. A CTD explicitly lists the bearers nationality as Chinese.
An OCI card, as you said, is effectively like a PR card for former citizens. It is explicitly not citizenship politically and India fully recognizes their foreign citizenship.
If an OCI holder with a US passport gets arrested, India will notify the US consulate as they are a citizen. The same would not apply for a Chinese travel document holder. That is what I meant as “treated as a citizen domestically.”
As to political rights, I assume in practice that one cannot join the Party without first revoking their other citizenship, if at all. But since it is not a democracy, that was never a right/element of citizenship in the first place.
The whole concept of getting citizenship where you're born is mostly an American concept. Though, if you do get born in a place where you get citizenship based on location alone, your parents will probably need to figure out a lot of paperwork to sort things out.
Most of North America and South America operates under Jus sanguinis -- you get citizenship for being born in country, even if your parents are not citizens.
A lot of countries don’t provide citizenship automatically without condition by blood. China for example, a kid only inherits citizenship if one parent is a chinese citizen and not a PR of any other country (so kids born to Chinese parents with green cards don’t count, which doesn’t really matter in this case).
Also the USA used to have weird rules about young mothers not transferring citizenship automatically (which the whole Obama birther myth relied on).
What happens if two Chinese parents are living and working in the Netherlands with permanent residence. If they have a child, what is the nationality? I don't think it will be Dutch because the Netherlands does not have automatic birth right, unless to prevent statelessness.
The child has Chinese citizenship (and presumably some kind of Dutch PR) from birth in that case.
> Any person born in China whose parents are both Chinese nationals or one of whose parents is a Chinese national shall have Chinese nationality.
> Any person born abroad whose parents are both Chinese nationals or one of whose parents is a Chinese national shall have Chinese nationality.
> But a person whose parents are both Chinese nationals and have both settled abroad, or one of whose parents is a Chinese national and has settled abroad, and who has acquired foreign nationality at birth shall not have Chinese nationality.
- "Settled abroad" means having unrestricted, legal permanent residence. Recently, it was clarified that the two-year conditional US green card does not count, for example.
- Due to an "interpretation," as this law was written pre-handover, the "settled abroad" limitation sentence does not apply where (one of) the Chinese parents is a HK/MO resident.
- A parent from HK/MO pre-handover, or Taiwan, is still a Chinese citizen and will transmit citizenship to their children.
If both/the only Chinese parent is a mainland or Taiwan resident, not settled abroad, the child would get a Travel Document to enter mainland China. They cannot get a visa to do so inside the foreign passport. Foreign passport can still be used for HK/MO/TW.
The child cannot get the ordinary red Chinese passport (unless they "resolve the conflict" by abandoning the other citizenship). They can, IIRC, still get a resident ID card if their parents still have hukou and register them?
In your scenario (not overseas citizen at birth), the child does have a regular red Chinese passport. Because they live overseas, they can get a permit from the Chinese embassy inside the passport to visit HK/MO, and they can also get an entry permit from the Taiwan authorities to visit for two weeks at a time, which is a loose leaf paper.
If one Chinese parent is a permanent resident of HK/MO, the child generally gets both Chinese nationality and HK/MO residence. Thus they are issued a full HK/MO passport. These passports still cannot enter the mainland directly, so they can ALSO get a Travel Document OR first visit HK/MO and then apply for the Home Return Permit using the domestic procedures.
Dual nationality for kids in China is a PITA and we were careful to avoid it for our son. I had a coworker who had a mess in figuring it out, with Beijing (where they had residence) demanding documents from Shanghai (where the mom had hukou) that Shanghai didn’t issue anymore.
Sometimes. In many/most countries, it requires at minimum that both parents be citizens of the same country. In a few countries, dual citizenship is banned completely, so if the kid is a US citizen they cannot be the country's citizen.