What makes someone an American citizen? As a consular officer with the U.S. State Department serving overseas, I interviewed many parent couples seeking to claim American citizenship for their children.

In general, anyone born in the United States obtains American citizenship at birth. This is called jus-soli, “right of soil.” Many Americans are not aware that citizenship in some countries is determined by parentage, not by birth in that country.

American citizenship is granted through naturalization to legal permanent residents who have resided in the United States for a period of time and meet other requirements.

A child born abroad also gains U.S. citizenship if both of the child’s parents are U.S. citizens.

U.S. law is more complicated and has changed over time when only one parent is an American citizen and the child is not born in the U.S. If the parent has lived in the United States for a certain number of years, the child obtains citizenship from that parent. The number of required years has changed over the time.  (Ten years, then five.) I had difficulty explaining to some parents why one child in the family was not an American citizen and another one was. Between the two births, legislation had changed the law specifying the length of U.S. residency for the parent.

Some children I saw were not born in the U.S. and had no U.S. citizen parents but had spent most of their childhood here. Thus, they were not entitled to U.S. citizenship, though they had absorbed more American culture than many born abroad to two American citizen parents.

A child born in the U.S. to foreign parents but who grows up in the country of the parents’ nationality can become a difficult subset, one who is legally a U.S. citizen but may know little of the culture gained by living here.

What makes an American? The issues are complex. They deserve our unbiased consideration in this era of a world grown smaller by social networking and complex immigration movements.