Comment on What common American habits do people find quietly annoying?
Fondots@lemmy.world 3 days agoKind of funny you specifically call out Irish-Americans, because Ireland does actually have some options for citizenship-by-descent. It’s not quite as simple as anyone with Irish ancestry can become a citizen, but it is a thing.
If you have a grandparent who was born in Ireland you’re eligible
Or if your parent was an Irish citizen at the time of your birth
So hypothetically if you have a great grandparent born in Ireland, your parent could apply for Irish citizenship, even though their parents (your grandparents) weren’t citizens and had never set foot in Ireland
And if they did that before you were born you would also be eligible
And so on down the line to your children, and their children, etc. if everyone keeps on top of it.
There’s actually a decent handful of countries with some sort of citizenship-by-descent, not a majority by a longshot, and of course every country that does offer it has different requirements and restrictions, but for some people it can potentially be a viable pathway to another citizenship.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
i am not going to verify what you said, but regardless of if it is true, if your grandparents have the citizenship, you probably don’t need dna test to find that out…
Fondots@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It’s absolutely an edge case, but there are still a lot of wonky family situations out there, people who are estranged from their family for any number of reasons, adoption, people raised by their grandparents under the impression that they were their parents to hide the fact that their sister is really their mom and they were hiding a teen pregnancy, your mom cheated and your dad isn’t actually your father, etc.
And sometimes that all stays under wraps until someone in the family takes a DNA test.
I have a friend with a big family who just recently discovered that most of her aunts and uncles are actually her grandfather’s biological children. She and her siblings haven’t done a test themselves and her father’s dead so the jury is still out on whether she’s blood related to him or not.
But if she’s not, and she finds out who her actual biological grandfather is, it’s not impossible that that may open up a new pathway to citizenship through him.
And laws change, as a hypothetical, let’s say Poland starts getting antsy (well, antsyer) about Russia doing Russia stuff and really wants more people to feed the war machine in case of WWII breaking out, they already have a citizenship by descent option but the proper documentation to qualify can be tricky, but if they decide they really want to increase immigration I don’t think it would be out of the question for them to open up a pathway for someone who can show a DNA test with X% polish ancestry. In that hypothetical it might be kind of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation, but maybe it would still be preferable to the situation in someone’s home country.
It’s just one more tool in the box that can open up new avenues for people to explore. It may not pan out for everyone or even most people who look into it, but in some small handful of cases it may save their lives.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
in some small number of cases you can get hit by a meteorite during that search, so be careful.
Fondots@lemmy.world 2 days ago
In some small number of cases you may die in a house fire, and I’ll bet you have smoke detectors and fire extinguishers around just in case
MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Sorry if I’m missing something, but aren’t everyone’s aunts and uncles (other than those by marriage) the biological children of their grandparents?
Fondots@lemmy.world 2 days ago
If your grandmom cheated on your grandad, your aunts and uncles may not be his kids.