New passport rules for dual citizens

[TheMagpieRobin]

I've seen quite a few stories about how dual citizens must now enter the UK on their British rather than foreign passport.

My kids are technically dual citizens as I am British and they can inherit British citizenship through me. Their dad is from another country and the children were born in that country, we live there and they have passports from that country. We've never bothered applying for British passports for them as there didn't seem to be a need. We don't have any plans to live in the UK or spend longer than a couple of weeks visiting.

I'm quite unsure whether the rule changes apply to them. I suspect the rules do apply and we'd need to get them British passports before we visit again but it's a bit ambiguous because we haven't "claimed" British citizenship for them. At the moment they are just Thai and if we wanted to apply for their British passport we'd have to send off a load of documents and pay a fair chunk of money. I'm not overly worried right now as we got their ETAs before the rule change and those are valid for another year or two and should be enough for them to enter??

Bit niche but I was wondering if anyone has a concrete answer for this based on their own experience?

I see this trotted out a lot - that it's just the same in other countries. It's not. Because other countries don't automatically confer citizenship by descent on people who weren't born there, don't live there and don't want it.

Thanks for confirming this!! Booking a holiday for next month (I only hold an Irish passport) and got rather worried by pp!!

Really really ensure your Irish passport matches your British one in every detail as you now have to send in your Irish one when renewing your british

My children inherit U.K. citizenship though me as I wand born ‘79 and my husband was born in 85. Friends of ours, the husband born in the U.K. in 1987 married a Chinese lady, kid born in china and the gorvernment refused to give the kid a U.K. passport. Worth checking the rules before applying.

If it's not relevant then why did you bring it up in the first place? You said I had odd ideas about foreigners in the UK, I explained to you what I meant.

The fact that your relatives and friends are not yet able to apply for ILR doesn't change the fact that there is a route for foreigners in the UK to be treated as citizens, in many places around the world that is unthinkable.

Interesting! I assume I must have just unthinkingly ticked "no" as I didn't realise that they are automatically British citizens, I assumed there must be some kind of process to claim/confirm that citizenship.

Me and my husband are british, born in the uk, we live abroad and all our kids born abroad. We didn't have to do anything cumbersome to get uk passports for them. We didn't register them as british at birth or anything like that. It wasn't any more difficult or expensive than doing it in the uk. Now, the process is exactly the same. We used to do it in the British Embassy (could do a kids passport in one day back in those days) but now its all online.

However, we discovered that our grandchildren are NOT automatically UK citizens even though our kids have british passports.

So if you are not born in the UK and are British through descent, I don't think you have to worry about it.

It's a bit different because my DH is not British. They need some extra documents because of that and it's also that it feels like an unnecessary expense/effort. If DH were also British we would of course have applied for their British passports as soon as they were born because that would be their only nationality.

I may be completely wrong here, but the UK and Ireland signed the Common Travel agreement way back in the 1920s or 1930s that still governs rights of British and Irish passport holders traveling to either state, regardless of where they're traveling from.

As I said, I may be wrong here.

My DH is also not British. All I needed were grandparent birth certificates and marriage certificate, which I ordered from the GRO website, and a translation of DDs birth certificate. It's a time consuming, but not difficult. The passport office were very quick too.

Another passport is a good thing to have and will give your children more options in the future. The expense is annoying, but I think the positives are enough to justify it.

It's not relevant to the point I was making in reply to a point you made about "foreigners" getting benefits and free medical care. They were just two examples to show that you are simply wrong about that view.

Changing your point doesn't make your original point right. It's simply a straw man.

Only if you choose to renew your British passport. You can just let it expire if you want, and use your Irish passport instead.

The poster you're replying to doesn't even have a British passport.

If their citizenship hasn't been claimed they are not dual citizens.

That's incorrect.

Have fun proving you're a British citizen without any documents to establish your entitlement. Until you provide the evidence, the UK authorities have no way of knowing you're British.

I have had sort of this situation but… it didn’t work quite well.

I booked my flights with the British passport, but trying to avoid having to pay for a visa for my own country at the point of entry, I showed my other passport. The immigration official scanned it, looked at me, and asked me if I was travelling with another passport.

They couldn’t find me in system because my other passport was not registered in the flight manifest. So I had to go through migration as a British citizen and get a tourist visa regardless…

Well, in this scenario, they are children travelling with their British mother so that might tip them off..

Op, if you have not registered the birth of your kids at the British consulate in your current country, they are NOT British citizens yet.

Nope, that’s not enough at all. They are not British until they have completed all the paperwork.

I'm sorry, but that's not true. My children are born abroad and I've never registered them at a consulate. They're British citizens automatically.

So if you haven’t registered with the British system then they aren’t British atm as they are not on the radar and can travel to uk on their non uk passport.

Not true.

… and some countries have some very different rules. I have some latinamerican friends who were studying in Britain when their child was born, they were not expecting the child would be British just by being born here but what they didn’t know was that their country would only consider the child a national from the country unlrss he was born there so the kid was “stateless” until they went through a lot of red tape. They couldn’t even take the kid back to their own country until the process was completed.

I don’t see how that is super expensive for the privilege of documenting another citizenship

Unfortunately you cannot get a passport at the British Consulates overseas. You have to apply online and then send all the paperwork, and the existing British passport if renewing, back to the UK. If you are a dual, you also need to include a colour photocopy of every single page of the other passport. I recently had to renew DS British passport, so have just done this. Very frustrating that we cannot do this at our local consulate.