Dual Citizenship: A Passport Never Felt So Good
Posted on | March 1, 2010 | 1 Comment
As many of my friends and colleagues know, I am pursuing a life’s passion of living and working in Paris. While I wanted this since the age of 13, I actually organized and executed the plan in six weeks. In this and future blogs, I will write about my move and lessons learned.
European Citizenship: A Passport Never Felt So Good
Itching to live in Paris, Rome or Dublin? Get European citizenship if you can. Do you have a grandparent from Ireland or Italy, for example? If so, then you can get dual citizenship. I have an Irish passport through my Irish grandfather, who was born in County Roscommon. As Ireland is part of the European Union, I can work anywhere in the EU.
In fact, the European Union (its first name was the European Economic Community) is set up to enable free mobility of people, goods and services. I studied the EEC/EU in college, and that knowledge is now pertaining to my personal and professional life.
To obtain Irish citizenship, I had to get my grandfather’s birth, marriage and death certificates and his US naturalization papers. I also had to get my father’s birth and marriage certificates. Because my father was almost 50 when I was born, I had to prove that he was actually my father and not my grandfather, which would have made my grandfather my great-grandfather—and you can’t get dual citizenship with Ireland via a great-grandparent if you’re the first person in your family to attempt to obtain it.
To prove my father’s identity, I had to get a copy of the 1920 Indiana census, which showed that he was 2 years old in 1918, and about to be 50 when I was born in August, 1968. I went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to get the Indiana census—such records weren’t online back in 1995!
Contact a foreign consulate/embassy in your area if you want to learn more about this. Of course, the State Department website is also a good place to start.
If you are able to get a European passport and already have kids, it is not retroactive, meaning you can’t pass it on to them. If you get it now, and have kids in the future, you will be able to pass it on. At least that is the case with Ireland.
A European passport gives you the right to live and work in the EU without a visa. So, even if you already have a corporate job, you would be saving your employer money by using your passport to work in Europe instead of them paying for your visa. I used my Irish/EU passport to work in London back in 2003—it made it easy for McGraw-Hill to grant my transfer. All I had to do was enter the country with my Irish/EU passport.
Clearly, asking for a transfer is the first step you should take if you have a full-time job. As I asked many times to be transferred to Paris and it didn’t happen, I had to take life into my own hands.
I have lots of other factoids, ideas and aspirations to share about my French experience. I’ll try to do a better job of posting here, so keep in touch! Have you moved abroad, or are you interested in doing so? Write a comment and we can talk.
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