I'm a US citizen. Do I have to pay for my kid's citizenship?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. Mackenzie and I did a webinar the other day and it crashed and burned. Apparently Webinar Jam, which is a software that we use, they went ahead and updated the software and didn't tell anybody. When we tried to run our webinar, it just didn't work. We couldn't make the thing go live. We hopped on over to Facebook very quickly and we did a rough a webinar or a rough question and answer. We're going to try it again here pretty soon, to do an ask me anything webinar. If you have questions about that, leave us a comment down below and we'll fill you in on our next one.
In any event, this question came from the Facebook webinar that we ran. Somebody asked, "I just became a US citizen and I have young children. Do I have to pay to get them their citizenship?" I think the question is a little bit off. I wanted to phrase it in the way that the question was asked. Here's how it works.
On the day you become a US citizen, if you have a child who's under the age of 18, then they are a citizen as an operation of law. What that means is that on the day that you naturalize, as long as they're not 18 and they're living with you and they're in the United States on a green card, they're going to become US citizens. Now the rules are different if your kids are overseas, but we're talking here about situations where mom or dad naturalizes, they're in the United States and they're lawful permanent resident children are here with them. What the question asks is, do I have to pay to get them their citizenship?
That's a tricky question. Here's how it works. They're automatically a citizen on the day you get sworn in. Let's say they were 17 years old. You became a US citizen. They were in your custody. They had a green card. Let's say three years later, unfortunately they get into trouble and they commit some crime that is a deportable offense. Maybe they got convicted of drugs or writing bad checks or stealing money or something like that. The government might try to deport them, but they couldn't because your child is already a US citizen. That's as of the day that you yourself were sworn in.
It's interesting because you can go ahead and get a passport for that child, but in USCIS's mind, they're still not a US citizen unless and until you file an N600. An N600 is not as onerous as an N400. It's just a form to allow the government to reclassify you as a lawful permanent resident into a US citizen. The child is who we're talking about. Sometimes parents don't do that, but they should.
I know that the filing fee for the N-600 has gone up a lot. It's gone up more than a hundred percent in the last year, and it's over a thousand dollars now to get that certificate. Obviously you're going to want to get your child their passport, their US passport, and they're entitled to that as long as they're under 18 when you naturalize. You need to go ahead and get that certificate of citizenship. It's such a strange time now in immigration that you're going to want to have your child properly classified. One, for that criminal issue that I mentioned earlier so they can't get deported. An immigration lawyer could still argue that they're a citizen and that they can't be deported by demonstrating that all the requirements for derivative citizenship were met for the child, but that's going to be a whole lot messier, especially if they get taken into ICE custody than if you have that certificate of citizenship.
Another reason why you might want to do it right away is that eventually, if they're going to want to sponsor someone from the home country, where it's important that they're classified as a US citizen, you're going to want to make sure that they have that N-600 in hand. They're going to need it for the rest of their life. Think of it as an investment in their future in the United States. I would say just go ahead and do it.
If you need help with an N-600 or clarifying your child's immigration status, give us a call at 314-961-8200. You can email us as at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group. It's called Immigrant Home. We update new immigration news in there just about every day. If you liked this video, please be sure to share it out on social and to subscribe to our YouTube and LinkedIn channel so you get updates whenever we make videos just like this one.
Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
