Calling EU citizens: Permanent Residency or Naturalisation?

[stickygotstuck]

Just that.

I think it may be unearth-head-from-sand time, and so was wondering what everybody else is doing, or has done?

If you are an EU MNetter and are staying in the UK, which option seems preferable to you?

Thanks all

feonie
If your DCs father isn't British then they have 3 paths to citizenship:

• either they were born in the uk and you qualified for permanent residence at the time of their birth (look at the official date on your PR card for that) and they are already a British citizen- you can directly apply for a passport.
• they were born in the UK but you only gained PR status afterwards. In that case, either you wait until they are 10 and you fill out the MN1 form to get them on the register (birth in UK plus 10 yrs uninterrupted residence).
• or you naturalise before they turn 18 and you register them on that basis (that one works even if your dc was born outside the uk)

As far as I know your DH does not need to adopt them for that. Im not a solicitor but am familiar with the situation.

No, my DC only has one parent - me - on the BC and were born in my home country, hence their citizenship abroad. The actual father is British, but goodness knows where he is now.

They also have my maiden name (my home country does not normally allow name changes), which is different to all of our now. So adoption has multiple purposes for us.

I'm Spanish and have been here for 30 years. I just sent my papers to the Home Office to get naturalisation. It's expensive but I don't want the hassle of not having done it.

Spain allows both passports to be kept simultaneously so I will do that when I get the British one

@LaBrujaPiruja , as you are ahead of me in this process, do you mind if I PM you if I have any questions at a later stage? I only sent the naturalisation application last week, but I've been told they can take as little as 2 months now.

Naming law is a bitch. It transpires that I have to renounce my European citizenship in order to get my married name on my new British passport as my home country is being difficult about changing it and I cannot even get an appointment to hand the form in. No way am I waiting until an appointment may be available next year sometime...

So naturalise in my maiden name, renounce my citizenship in the other country, then get a British passport in my married name. It's funny, because all other official documents and even my work contract are in my married name, but when it comes to passports, my home country's law supercedes British law. Go figure.

feonie
Would you not be able to just keep your maiden name then? Is it not just as valid a name? Sounds difficult.

@GreenandBlueButterfly
Yes, no problem, PM if you need anything.

Would you not be able to just keep your maiden name then? Is it not just as valid a name?

In Britain? Yes. The issues arise when my name on my passport is different to that on any other document and it is needed for ID purposes abroad. Here, a marriage certificate is fully accepted; in my home country you need an official document to say you have changed your name and anything else is just not valid.

But Britain will not accept my name change for passport purposes if I have another passport in my maiden name. So the choice is either wait several months (they're fully booked the next 3 months and no other appointments are released yet) and hope to be lucky enough to snap up an appointment in far away London to change my name or to do it all now and sacrifice my citizenship to finally fully get rid of a name I've always hated and which is a ballache to use in Britain as no one can spell - let alone pronounce - it.

Which is mental, given that even organisations like HMRC and the DVLA accept my married name.

But I feel that the clock is ticking too hard for me not to go for citizenship before 3/19.

How is everyone getting on?

It's been a bit of a nightmare trying to get an appointment with the Nationality Checking Service for the final application, but I finally managed to find an office in a county a few hours' drive away in about a month or so. Locally, everything was booked for the foreseeable future.

It certainly looks like I'm not the only one panicking by now.

Reading with interest although does not affect me (have not found a single ancestor back to the 1700s not from UK or Ireland - we are such a boring log with one passport only). One very unlikely to be relevant point worth mentioning in having two passports is that the law in the UK generally prohibits the country from making someone stateless. In fact I think that would breach international human rights law. So if you have two passports and citzenships there is a tiny risk if you get into trouble you might lose the british one because you have a foreign one. This happened with some dreadful men with British and foreign passports who were terrorists in Syria who were born in London of foreign parents. As they had a British and a foreign passport they could be expelled from the UK or not allowed to return and their British passport cancelled because they had a second one for another country.

Also be careful of minor breach of law. The Financial Times has been highlighting the cases of some self employed IT programmers from places like India who like many self employed people put in their tax return and then slightly corrected it in the normal course of events but because that was then classed as tax law breach (probably wrongly in my view) they were thrown out or are being thrown out of the UK and back to their other country - again they have two passports.

The naturalisation people just wrote to me asking for my ex-husband's details. I have been here 29 years and had not mentioned him in any of my forms, except for ticking the "divorce" box.

Is this normal?

Not sure whether it is normal, but it may be supportive? As in, if you've been married for more than a year (or is it 3?) and can prove it, your application may be a far more straightforward one?

I was married for 16 years so might be supportive. I hope so. I still think it's a bit unfair on the people who have ended up in bad terms with their ex-husbands, or who were married to men who turned out to be criminals, etc.

Anyway. Nothing I can do. They asked, so I sent them the information and a photocopy of his passport.

For the Spanish people on this thread.... Has any of you requested a Spanish birth certificate online? As in Partida Literal de Nacimiento

I found the way to do it sometime ago and now I cannot find it anymore

I'm going to apply for settled status - but only after brexit has actually happened. I'm one of the tricky cases as have been both a student and a SAHM in the last 5 years.

If we are still here once we've finished having children I'll naturalise....but want to be able to pass on EU passports to all my future DC first.

Camomilla, you would not lose your EU passport, would you?

I know Spain allows us to keep both. I would not have naturalised otherwise. Losing it would be madness

advanced passenger information thing. That prevents you from exiting the country with one passport and enter it with a different one, so I don't know how having two would work in practice.

I'm sorry for the derail but how does this work if you book single rather than return fares, or use Eurostar? What's to stop someone like my DD entering the U.K. on a FR passport and leaving on her U.K. passport? Or even arriving with an FR ID card and leaving on a FR passport? How can they track people if they do this?

Advance passenger info is not cross checked. I've often entered the passport details in the API, but then presented the ID card at the airport. They've never mentioned it, so i can only assume they don't cross check. Especially at Arrivals

The way I understand it (and I could be wrong...all official Italian stuff is so hard to read!)
I could keep both passports (Italian and British) but if I live in my new country and have taken up the new passport I then lose the right to pass on my original Italian citizenship to my DC.

I'm in the EU and obtained PR in April last year. Then applied to be naturalised in August. Costs 1000 EUR plus associated costs for police check, apostilled documents and affidavit in court.
It takes about a year apparently. No language test but they test on culture, history etc.
No reason to think I will be refused. We've been here 15 years, settled and both working.
Husband had dual Brit/Irish nationality.

Honestly, I'll be so relieved when it is all finished, Brexit has cast so much uncertainty on our lives here. We don't even know if we can legally work in the event of a no deal and 3rd country nationals are not treated well in general.

Camomilla I don’t think that’s the case, my family is a nutcase and my DH an even worse one, but according to Italian law citizenship is passed by birth (jus sanguinis), dual citizenship is allowed, you don’t need to be born in Italy to get it from your parents and if things go bad the worst they can ask your kids is to prove they haven’t voluntarily and formally renounced to their right to Italian citizenship...when that happened to DH (who didn’t know he actually got this famous Italian citizenship, so clearly he could not give it up...told you it was nutcase) at the end the guy that processed his application decided to write to all the consulates of his previous residences and ask them for confirmation within 60 days. Clearly nobody replied, so after 61 days he was issued his Italian ID.

Due to the nutcaseness of our family situation, and the fact that on his side at each and every generation since 1815 a member was either stripped of citizenship, or evicted from the birth country, or both, we went for naturalisation well before the referendum, so we now have a collection of 2 passports and 1 ID each (3 separate countries). Tracking what we fly with might be challenging...

(That is, of course, if there will still be flights and any money to travel...otherwise it’s going to be the smallest of our problems...)

Benefits of citizenship, for who’s got kids:
You vote
They’ll vote
Should the government decide that EU students have to pay the same university taxes as ex-EU, that’s going to be a major, major hit on a family’s finances (current fee 9.25k/y, extra EU fees can go above 20k/y)

That would be great. I've got a phone appointment with the Italian consulate tomorrow...I've got lots of questions to ask!

Bit annoyed about the money aspect of it all...it's a stretch to find £500 odd (passport, train ticket, translations for DS passport, DS passport) If it weren't for Brexit I wouldn't do both things in 1 go. And there's just 2 of us, imagine if I had 3 DC and DH needed to do it too.

(general rant about how Brexit will disproportionately affect the poorest)