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Great news re Uruguayan passports and citizenship!

armin31

I just checked and I did not see anyone else having spread this truly good news for expats.  I hope you will be as excited as I am!


Until the end of April the passports of those expats that carried a Uruguayan passport (which you can apply for after 3 years of being a legal resident if you are married and after 5 years if you are not), would show as “nationality” your country of birth (unless in your specific situation it is even more complicated).   


The problem was - and for those that still have such a passport is – that Uruguay calls what they offer you after these 3 or respectively 5 years “citizenship”.  So countries not allowing dual citizenship have taken the citizenship of their nationals away if they applied for so-called Uruguayan citizenship and these persons were then without country, which does not help at all when you want to travel for example.


The Uruguayan passport also did not better your situation when you are or were a citizen of a country that is not good for visa free travel.  That could be because you are from a country that is frowned upon - such as the Russian Federation is now in many places - or that do not offer reciprocity, which Canadians, Americans, and Germans for example have had problems with lately.   So really as happy as we can be about Uruguay, the passport was not worth much for us when travelling, and true citizenship (in the sense of naturalization) we did not get anyways, just the right to vote I guess, which is important, but not everything that almost all other countries bestow on their (true) citizens.


Now this has changed and Uruguay offers true citizenship, i.e. no diverging nationality in the passport.  Isn´t that something worth celebrating?  I certainly think so!

See also

Living in Uruguay: the expat guideMore on changes to passportsThe neverending story of the new passportMother and 16 yr old son leaving America for UruguayResidency status