Of Births and Borders part 2 of 3

There must be something in the water here at our international school. We have had five babies born to staff members or their wives since the school year began.

After I blogged this winter about some of the cultural differences that our colleague experienced when she gave birth here, one of you asked whether or not the child was given citizenship status because he was born in Hong Kong.

Great question. The answer –of course- is no.

But I thought it was such a great question because it had never dawned on me to ask it. It never even occurred to me that a child born to a citizen of another country who had been living and working in Hong Kong for just eighteen months might be granted citizen status.

The practice of granting citizenship to anyone born on that country’s soil is known in Latin as jus soli which literally means “right of the soil.” Less than twenty percent of the world’s countries’ grant citizenship status based on jus soli. Virtually no European or Asian country grants citizenship to individuals just because they happen to be born within that nation’s boundaries. The United States is the largest and one of the few nations that issues citizenship based on jus soli.

The vast majority of the world’s nations require that one or both parents have citizen or some sort of residency status. This practice is known as jus sanguinis –or “right of blood.”