Getting UK Citizenship for Our Daughter May Have Financial Implications

My wife, Kate, was born in England and moved here when she was five with her parents.  She became a US citizen many years later and now has dual citizenship in the US and in the UK.  It never occurred to me that there could be any benefit to having citizenship in two countries until Kate flew to England a few years ago to visit her family.  I was back at home working when I got the call from England.  Kate was having stomach cramps and she was planning on going to the doctor.  My first thought was, “Oh no.  I hope she’s okay” and then, “Oh crap, this is going to be an insurance nightmare!”.

After a couple hours of worrying about Kate, she called to say that she was back from the doctor and everything was okay.  The doctor had prescribed some medicine for her and she had already taken the first ones and was starting to feel better.  As I let out a sigh of relief Kate said, “Oh and the best part is that there is no charge!”.  I said, “What??  How can that be?”  It never occurred to me that, in England’s eyes, she is a citizen and is eligible for government health care.  I can’t tell you how relieved I was that Kate was okay and that there would be no 2 hour phone calls arguing about how my health care provider in the states should help cover the cost of the care.

A few years later we became parents to a wonderful little girl.  When she turned 6 I happened to wonder whether she had any rights to citizenship in the UK since she was born to a UK citizen (even though we live here in the US).  After a couple hours of Googling and reading way more than I cared to, it became clear that, indeed our daughter IS a UK citizen.  They consider her a “UK citizen by descent”.  This means that she is a UK citizen but that if she was to have children when she’s older they wouldn’t have automatic rights to UK citizenship (unless of course she was living in England at the time).

We are now in the process of gathering birth certificates, marriage licenses and passports so that we can get our daughter officially registered as a UK citizen.  While it isn’t necessary for us to do this right now, by doing it now, we will save her the grief of trying to find these documents if she ever decided to move to England and had to prove her citizenship.

So, what’s the big deal of getting our daughter documented as a UK citizen?  Well, the first one that comes to mind is it gives her the freedom to move to England if she chooses to later in life and will give her unrestricted access to employment there.  The second reason is that she would always have England as backup healthcare if we were to ever lose our coverage in the states.  Believe me, if my daughter was to get sick enough to require significant care and we didn’t have health insurance, I’d be more than happy to fly her over the pond to England for treatment.  While this isn’t very likely, it’s just one more option for her.

So, those are a couple of the reasons that we are following through with getting her registered as a British citizen.  Are you aware of any others?