In Australia, you're ineligible to be a member of parliament if you're a citizen of another country. Which sounds like a good rule until you realize how easy it is to become a citizen of another country, with changes like these.
3I highly recommend giving something like this series of prompts to your favorite LLM, if you like exploring absurd geopolitical dramas:
In Australia, you're ineligible to be a member of parliament if you're a citizen of another country. What happens if some country passes a law that all Australian MPs are automatically citizens?
What if Monaco offered each MP $5 million to visit Monaco once and confirm their citizenship for a period of 5 years, with no other requirements?
Suppose that 15% of MPs take the payment and argue they should keep their seats. Monaco publicly announces that the payment was to cover the large travel cost between the nearly antipodal countries, and that many MPs conducted globally beneficial diplomacy and cultural exchange with them and EU countries as part of their trips. What action do AFP and ASIO take?
Suppose that no state action was found, but the payments were found to be linked to a billionaire Hong Kong businessman who covertly bought Monaco real estate in exchange for this scheme. His motive seems to be differentially removing corrupt officials from Australia, whose bureaucracy he felt once harmed his business interests. Obvious suspicion on the Chinese government, but nothing concrete is found. What happens next?
2Wow, thank you so much for this post, you might have just gotten my (trans and thus endangered) girlfriend out of the US. This saves us so much trouble with the immigration process. Seriously, thank you so much.
I'm in a somewhat similar position as a British citizen with an Irish grandparent - I'm entitled to dual citizenship. I got the passport even though I live in the UK - the option value of being able to easily move to the EU is valuable. Given recent developments in the USA, I would think that the option value of having a plan B is even higher.
Relatedly, anyone with a single grandparent who was an Irish citizen born on Irish soil can get Irish citizenship, so there's probably a good number of Americans who qualify. The application process was cheap and relatively easy. At the time it was slow - there was a long post-Brexit backlog - but that may have eased now.
This is my situation as well. I am an Irish citizen because one of my grandparents was born in Northern Ireland. I have never been to any part of the island of ireland (would like to one day), and not have either of my parents. Now my son can also apply for Irish cirizenship through me.
Weirdly, my son could not apply for British citizenship through me, even though I am a British citizen who spent most of my life in the UK, because of laws about place of birth. Its not relevant though because he gets UK citizenship through his place of brith and/or his mother so no issues. Just weird that I can grant citizenship of a country I have never been to but not my home country.
I agree the process of applying for Irish citizenship is really smooth. If that is any indication of the rest of the country's bearocracy then its amazing. A colleage was applying for a visa to bring his wife into the UK, which we calculated was more than 100 times more complicated than me applying for Irish citizenship.
What about the requirement that the parent must have had "at least 1,095 days (three years) of cumulative physical presence in Canada"?
I'll be curious to see how your application goes! I have a somewhat closer connection (my mother's mother's parents were both born in British Columbia) but my read of C-3 was it only applies beyond the first generation if each subsequent ancestor was "physically present in Canada for at least 1,095 days" before procreating. My grandmother and mother didn't live in Canada at all, so my conclusion was that I'm not Canadian. I'd be excited to be wrong, though!
Thanks, I am now looking into this myself. In my case the most recent ancestor born in Canada was my father's father's father, born 1884. My father is still alive, so he could potentially apply for the Citizenship Certificate, and for him it would just be his grandfather. Also my great grandfather was still alive in 1947 when Canadian citizenship was first defined, which may be an important link in the chain.
However, it seems (based on AI search) that in the early 1900s when my ancestors became US citizens, dual citizenship was not allowed by either the UK or the US. Becoming a US citizen involved verbally disavowing any allegiance to a foreign power, and British subjects were deemed to have automatically lost their citizenship in such a case. As I read it, to become a Canadian Citizen on 1 Jan 1947 when Canadian citizenship became a thing, my great grandfather would need to have been a British subject at the time, and it's likely that he'd already given that up more than 40 years before. The UK and Canada almost certainly had no record of this, since I doubt anyone notified them. AI also told me that at the time it would have been fully possible to maintain two passports and live as a dual citizen, despite the actual laws in both countries not allowing this. However, the actual law may still be relevant for deciding whether my family are now Canadian citizens.
On the other hand, I know that in modern cases, it sometimes happens that a minor can end up retaining multiple citizenship when an adult would not be able to, because they do not have the legal capacity to renounce their previous citizenship, and it's possible that my great grandfather was still a minor when the family got US citizenship.
It sounds like your Canadian ancestors are similarly old, do you have any more information about whether Canada has figured out how to treat these cases?
I learned a few weeks ago that I'm a Canadian citizen. This was pretty surprising to me, since I was born in the US to American parents, both of which had American parents. You don't normally suddenly become a citizen of another country! But with Bill C-3, anyone with any Canadian ancestry is now Canadian. [1]
In my case my mother's, mother's, father's mother's mother was Canadian. While that is really quite far back, there isn't a generational limit anymore.
Possibly you're also a Canadian citizen? Seems worth checking! With how much migration there has been between the US and Canada, and citizenship requiring only a single ancestor, this might mean ~5-10% of Americans are now additionally Canadian, which is kind of nuts.
I very much think of myself as an American, and am not interested in moving to Canada or even getting a passport. I am planning to apply for a Citizenship Certificate, though, since it seems better to have this fully documented. This means collecting the records to link each generation, including marital name changes, back to my thrice-great grandmother. It's been a fun project! I'm currently waiting to receive the Consular Report of Birth Abroad records for my mother and grandmother, since they were both born outside the US to American parents.
[1] This is slightly too strong. For example, it doesn't apply if you're born after 2025-12-15 (I'm guessing you weren't), and no one in the chain can have renounced their Canadian citizenship. But the caveats all exclude very few people.