Having Czech citizenship means having EU citizenship, so you could live and work almost anywhere. I’d take a hard look at any and every angle for getting citizenship through your mother. If she never lost her citizenship you’re in. She also may have had it retroactively restored by recent law.
If you’re entitled to birthright citizenship somewhere it isn’t something you need to apply for. You already have it and you just need to claim it with some paperwork.
Should be noted that dual citizenship has only been allowed in the Czech Republic since 2014. It’s very possible that your mother had to renounce Czech citizenship to emigrate to America.
I wonder if it’s possible at all if she was born prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia.
Yes she was. I should ask if she has paperwork anywhere. However having done some cursory research I don’t think it’s as easy as ‘if your parent was born here you’re in!’, maybe bob can tell me otherwise.
That’s why I mentioned the retroactive part. Most immigrants never formally renounced previous citizenship, it was just kind of assumed to have happened. Some countries have written their laws to restore citizenship to those people. Canada is one of them, and I think (but have never verified) that’s how I was granted citizenship there even though my mother had become a US citizen before I was born.
OK this is promising
An amendment to the Act on the Citizenship of the Czech Republic (hereinafter “ACCR”) which took effect on September 6, 2019, allows a new category of foreigners to acquire Czech citizenship by making a declaration. This declaration on Czech citizenship is anchored in ACCR’s new Article 31.3.
The new option for acquiring Czech citizenship is open to foreigners:
- who are not citizens of Slovakia
AND- whose parent(s) or grandparent(s) originally was/were but ceased to be Czech/Czechoslovak citizen(s) at any time in the period up to December 31, 2013. See footnote (*) below for exclusions.
I’m not sure my mom has any proof she was born there though, I’ll have to check. She also may be reluctant to play ball because she won’t want me to leave the US, although not clear she’d actively hinder me if it hurt our relationship worse.
You’d just need her birth certificate and yours. You don’t need to get it from her.
OK…where do I get it then? Seriously I have no idea.
Probably in whatever city or town she was born.
So like, go to the Czech Republic and find some pre-Soviet records? Seems kinda unlikely
Birth records are srs biz and carefully maintained in all but the most extreme circumstances. It is almost certainly available and indexed somewhere official. You might even be able to order it online. See what google says.
I think you can get residency with 60k in a Costa Rican bank or investments, 1k/month in proven pension/retirement income, or a 200k+ property purchase. Eligible for citizenship in either 7 or 10 years, I’d have to double-check.
Either way, it’s sweet and reasonably achievable.
If she was born before the split, could you try for Slovakian citizenship as well?
You’d be surprised. The U. S. government apparently had my grandmother’s expired Irish passport somewhere.
Anyway, you’ll almost certainly have to consult a lawyer or someone else who has expertise in this field to help you get through the paperwork process. You’ll probably have a lot of documents that will need to be translated into Czech and only translations done by translators certified by the Czech government are valid. Of course, Czech forms you need to fill out probably won’t have an English translation either.
I hope this works out. Keep us updated if you go this way.
This will likely depend on what part of Czechoslovakia she was born in.
So Czech republic won’t give you citizenship if you were born in what is now Slovak Republic?
According to Wikipedia
If a person was a citizen of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic as of 31 December 1992, he may declare citizenship of either the Czech Republic or Slovakia (gaining Slovak citizenship) assuming he does not have any other citizenship. The Slovak provision allowing for this grant expired in 1993, however the Czech equivalent remains in the citizenship law.
It’s how the PM got his Czech citizenship despite being born in the Slovak area of Czechoslovakia.
Another part
During the communist era (1948–89) hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovakian citizens had emigrated into other parts of the West. The regime punished emigration by removing Czechoslovak citizenship, along with property confiscation and in absentia prison sentences. Since the Velvet Revolution in 1989, many emigrants demanded their citizenship be restored. Between 1999 and 2004, a special measure allowed them to regain the citizenship,[6] but a few people took advantage of the wording, which “granted” citizenship rather than “restored” it and so got dual citizenship.
Basically, @mjiggy has to consult a lawyer about this.
Is it easy to find furnished apartments on airbnb? We need to find a place to stay for 2 or 3 months this winter while our home undergoes major renovations. (We could stay in the home, but it would be a huge pita for them to work around us, and would probably add months to the work.)
Very easy
Yes, very easy. At least in Montreal in the off season.
