I have paid my taxes.
I have paid my dues, figuratively and literally my Council tax.
Whatever dues we owe in the UK, I've paid them.
Guys, welcome back to the Girl Gone London Channel.
If you're new here, my name is Kalyn
I'm an American who's lived in the I've lived in the UK for almost ten years.
And today I have some very exciting news.
Okay, so I think I forgot the rest of my intro.
I can't even talk. I'm so excited.
I will not make you wait because I think
I've titled this video something like I got my British citizenship.
So I did it. I got it.
I am almost a dual citizen of the UK and the US.
Thankfully, both countries allow you to hold dual passports.
Not every country does that.
If I had to make that choice,
I would have not gotten British citizenship just because I'm somebody
who could never give up my original citizenship.
I know some people do.
But for me, having dual is basically the perfect situation.
So I wanted to do a video kind of answering some questions about how
citizenship works, how I'm feeling about it, how it's going to work going forward,
if my husband is going to get American citizenship, and so on and so forth.
Okay, so let's go all the way back to how do you even get citizenship?
How have I qualified for citizenship?
What is my timeline?
So I have lived in the UK for over ten years.
I should probably change it in my intro because I think it's over now instead
of almost but not all of those years counted towards citizenship.
So only certain visas count towards settlement and towards citizenship.
So if you're here on a student visa,
even if you're here on a student visa for a full undergrad degree of three
years, it doesn't count towards citizenship,
because the point of that visa is to experience your time in the UK and then
to respectfully go back home, you have to be on a visa that leads
to settlement, which could be a work visa or could be a partner visa.
There's also different types of other less known visas.
But I'm just going to talk about my experience, which is on the partner one.
So I qualified first for an unmarried partner visa and then for a partner visa.
These are essentially the same visa.
We just happened to get married in the middle of the process.
So it turned into a partner visa, but they are basically the same.
And you have to be on that for five full years before you can apply for indefinite
leave to remain, which I made another video about
which I'll link below of getting my indefinite leave to remain.
So that's part one,
you cannot get citizenship unless you've got your indefinite leave to remain.
You cannot simply say, well,
I know I want to be a citizen, so I'm just going to jump straight
to that no, you start off with indefinite leave to remain.
So five years you qualify for indefinite leave to remain as long as you meet
financial requirements and have all the other stipulations met.
So I got my indefinite leave to remain in July of 2021 and the end of July.
And I was always somebody who knew that I wanted citizenship.
So with indefinite leaves to remain,
if you do live outside the UK for more than two years, they can and will rescind
your indefinite leave and you are completely wiped back to the beginning.
Now, my business is now remote.
I have a lot of family in America.
We don't necessarily know what our future holds in terms of where we're going
to live or just like what our life is going to look like.
So to me, being able to have indefinite leave to remain was awesome.
But I worried even as soon as I got it,
that if I were to want to be somewhere else for two years in my entire life,
I'm not talking about like right now, I'm talking in ten years from now.
If I wanted to move somewhere for two
years, I would basically lose all that I've worked for.
I'd have to start from the beginning with the visa.
So that really didn't appeal to me.
And because I'm a spouse of a British citizen, it means that as soon as I get
indefinite leave, I can apply for citizenship.
So if you're on a work visa and that's how
you got indefinite leave, you have to wait a year in between getting
indefinite leave and applying for citizenship.
But because I was on the partner route
and the spouse route, I could apply straight away.
So I had all of my citizenship documents ready as soon as I got my BRP biometric
residence permit back with my indefinite leave, which I needed to apply
for my citizenship, I logged onto my account,
hit submit and booked my fingerprinting appointment for a couple of weeks later.
I believe it was like August 2 of 2021.
Now, the things that you need
for citizenship are going to be about 1200 pound fee, nonnegotiable.
You have to pay that if you want the process to go ahead.
You also need two character references.
And there are some things about how long you had to have known them for over three
years, whether they were a British citizen, if they were in a particular job.
So I had two references that I could
submit to the home office to contact if they had any questions.
I also had to kind of fill out my own
little character application, talk about any speeding tickets, parking tickets.
And I had to make sure that I had been
in the country for the past five years, for a certain amount of time in the past
three years, for a certain amount of time, because they want to make sure again,
if you are applying for citizenship, that you are someone who lives in the UK.
So I couldn't have had and definitely gone away for a year to somewhere,
Timbuktu, and then come back and apply for citizenship in the UK.
I'd have to wait to make sure I forget
the exact days now, but it's a certain number of days
in certain periods that you can't have been out of the country.
Luckily for me, we've basically had all
been stuck in the country for the past definitely year.
And I hadn't done more than gone on basic holidays for the past five years.
So I submitted those documents.
You don't have any financial requirements when it comes to citizenship.
I didn't have to prove any bank statements or anything like that.
You have to do that all the way up
until indefinitely, and then you don't have to do that for citizenship.
The other thing that I had to have done was my Life in the UK test.
I did a video about studying
for and passing that, which I will also put over here.
So this is a one time pass and use it forever.
So I passed it for my indefinite leave,
and I just used the same certificate for my citizenship.
So I had to go get fingerprints done
on August 2, and I basically sent off the application.
You are allowed to travel
while waiting for your citizenship application, which was really good
considering I had planned to come back to the US since I haven't been here
in a long time and I'll have been in the US for about
four months by the time we get back to the UK.
But that's perfectly allowed
and acceptable when you're applying for citizenship.
That's not a problem.
Any other visa, you cannot travel.
You are stuck in the country until you get that visa back.
Citizenship is a little bit different,
so they tell you up to six months to hear back on citizenship.
So I actually ended up hearing back in October 23, I think it was.
So it was only about two and a half months for mine, which I felt really happy about.
I was not expecting to get back so soon.
I was sitting in a car funneling enough
in Newport Beach, California, where I was visiting at the time,
and I had an email from the home office, and I was like, oh my God, this is it.
But I didn't know if it was an acceptance, if they wanted more information.
So I go to open it, and I didn't have service in the area,
so I could only see the title, like your citizenship application.
And I couldn't see anything else until I got service later.
So that was stressful.
Finally, when I checked it, I got my citizenship.
So
the way it works is I don't actually have my full citizenship yet.
I have an invitation to a citizenship ceremony.
So the final steps from here are when I get back to the UK in December, probably.
I think my ceremony is in January,
but I will go back in January and I will go to a citizenship ceremony.
I think I have to pledge to the Queen and repeat some phrases and like seeing
a part of God Save the Queen in this group ceremony.
And then I will get my citizenship
certificate and that is when it's official.
Official, official.
No more paperwork, no more fees.
Actually, I completely lied because to get
a UK passport, there will be more paperwork and more
fees, but there isn't any in terms of my status here.
So that will take place in January of 2022,
about a month before I turn 30 years old.
I remember back in the day, more than five years ago, thinking, wow,
if all goes to plan, I'll be 29 when I have dual citizenship.
And at the time it seemed so far away and now it's here and I'm almost 30
and I'm going to turn 30 with dual citizenship in hand.
And I am so excited now.
The reasons I'm excited are firstly obvious.
I have lived in the UK for a long time.
To make it official that I have that citizenship is just to cement
something that I already feel for the past.
However many years my whole life has been
in the UK, we bought a house in the UK, we got married in the UK.
This is really where I have lived most of my adult existence.
For them to say, oh, you need to go home or you're like
deported or we're taking away your visas is just crazy to me.
I couldn't even fathom it because it is where we have made our life.
So to get the official, like, you cannot be kicked out kind of paperwork.
Citizenship is a really good feeling.
It's also a relief in terms of not having to do any more visa applications.
It's really, really difficult for anybody who moves to another country to feel like
your entire existence is being dictated by visas and paperwork.
I'll talk about this more in another video
and I think I've mentioned it before, but I've had to make some really hard
choices that have been based on visas, on qualifying, and it just makes you feel
like you're not in control of your own life.
So to be given that final citizenship
acceptance paper, citizenship,
what are my certificate, my citizenship certificate,
and then my passport is going to be just like this huge weight off my shoulders.
Now, as you might know,
if you've watched my channel for more than a couple of minutes,
my opinions on life in the UK versus life in the US are complicated.
I'm not one of those channels and never
will be, where I basically say life in the UK has been 100% amazing.
I hate life in the US.
I'll never move back.
I never want anything to do with the US.
The UK is so much better.
I think a lot of things are better, and I think a lot of things are worse.
I think probably when you put everything on the pro and Con list of life in each
country, I really think they would probably balance out in different ways.
I think it's a shade of Gray.
So my feelings on the countries are, again, not as black and white as some
people seem to portray themselves on YouTube.
And if someone does feel like that, that is amazing.
But this channel is here to be honest and real.
And yes, I do like America.
I do like life in America.
But that's not to say that I don't like the UK or I don't like life in the UK.
But I know people are already going to be like, well, you made a video about
why sometimes you want to live in America and not the UK.
So why did you get citizenship?
You don't even deserve citizenship, all of this stuff.
So to me,
that is all insane because everything in life is complicated in a shade of Gray,
particularly when you are in a crosscultural cross country marriage.
It's not as simple as just choosing citizenship of somewhere that I would
personally like to live for the rest of my life.
Because if it were,
then I would be basically probably based in Hawaii for the rest of eternity.
It doesn't work like that.
We've set up our life in the UK.
I've lived there for a long time.
I have paid my taxes, I have paid my dues, figuratively and literally my Council tax.
Whatever dues we owe in the UK, I've paid them
to get citizenship is really just like cementing.
I belong, I belong there.
I belong in both countries.
So having dual nationalities is basically how I feel inside.
I feel like I belong in the UK and I feel like I belong in the US.
So I'm just throwing that out there because I know people
are offended by all kinds of things.
I'm sure some people will be offended by me getting British citizenship.
The final question is what this means for the future.
So we're going back to the UK.
I'm currently in America, still on basically a long vacation.
We're going back to the UK in December and January.
No immediate plans after that to do
anything Besides grow my businesses, visit the US.
We live in the UK, we have a house there.
In the future, my husband is going to apply for his green
card so that maybe one day we could both have dual citizenship.
So I am now a dual citizen and my husband is only in the UK.
So when we come to the US,
he has to be on a visitor visa, which ends after a 90 day period.
Again, if you have a remote job, if you have friends and family all over
the US, or a particular affinity to visiting the US like I do,
90 days does feel pretty limiting, and I don't want him to run into any issues.
If we were to want to work, to want to spend even like a year
in America, I want the freedom for us to be able to do that.
So he is going to probably embark on the American green card and citizenship
journey so that we could both have dual citizenship.
And that would be my ultimate dream, to be able to live and work in both
countries, which is a very privileged thing to be able to do.
But being able to go back and forth
without worrying about visas would be incredible.
So, yeah, to make a five plus year story short, I did it.
I got invited for a citizenship ceremony,
and I will definitely do a video in January of my citizenship ceremonies
to let you know kind of how it goes and what the situation is, what I have to do.
I can only have two guests unless I do a private ceremony.
So I'm going to have my husband,
obviously, and then I have to awkwardly choose from his family members.
I'll probably choose my mother in law to be like the official representative
from his family, but yeah, only two guests.
I don't actually know if that's a covert
thing or if that's a regular all the time thing, but that's fine.
So it's not going to be like a huge blowout event
that maybe we'll do some sort of like dinner or party to celebrate.
So I am very relieved.
I think relieved.
Happy is the right word, but also relieved that finally what I have
felt for so long is actually in my paperwork.
I will be a full dual citizen before I'm
30, and who knows what my 30s have in store.
But whatever they do, I know that I can live and work
unless they do something terrible, which I would never do.
They can't really get rid of me now.
So those of you who are British citizens, I am almost one of you.
So now I feel like I can say whatever I
want on YouTube videos because British people can be self deprecating but don't
like when other people say things about them.
So now you guys, I'm just talking about us.
Okay?
Anyway, thank you guys for watching this video.
What should I say if you made it to the end of this video?
Okay, if you made it to the end of this video, I want you to comment below.
What other country Besides the one
that you currently live in that you would like to have citizenship for?
Try not to make it too political.
Just like take a country.
Let us know a fun reason why you think you'd like to have citizenship there.
That would be fun if I was going to get another one.
I think I'd probably like to have like Australian or Canadian,
because both of those seem like also good countries to live in so thank you guys
for watching and I will see you all next time.
Hey.