Readoption = Citizenship ... are you sure?

Okay, so I have been investigating this issue lately due to conflicting information received from a variety of places. Does the fact that we have readopted Eli, that he has a U.S. Birth Certificate really make him a citizen. So, initially we were told no he needs a Certificate of Citizenship (CoC)($450) or a U.S. Passport ($150).

Pros/Cons. A CoC is a permanent document, but takes 2 years to get and is clearly expensive. A Passport verifies citizenship but needs to be renewed every 10 years and is less expensive. Basically the odd thing to us was that you have to be a citizen to get these documents so how do they give you citizenship by having them.

Okay, confused yet? I was because then I saw a blog posting from a fellow adoptive mom of a son about Eli's age from Ethiopia and she posted their readoption photo with new that her son was now a U.S. citizen! So, I contacted her and our adoption agency and here is the result of my *research.*

In some states a child is issued a "Certificate of Foreign Adoption" which has a disclaimer at the bottom that "this does not serve as identification." This certificate along with the court decree you get at readoption do verify that the child is a citizen. However, when the child goes to get a driver's license basically the DMV (or tag agency depending on your state, actually it is a BMV here in OH) has to understand this paperwork. One possible outcome is that they *get it* and issue your child the license understanding that they are a citizen. However, if they are incompetent, and *don't get it* they may refuse the license not understanding that the child is in fact a citizen. So, if you get a passport or CoC you ensure that the anyone seeing this document will understand that your child is a citizen.

As my fellow adoptive mom put it "(in reference to the government) if two papers are good, five are better."

So, I went to get Eli's new Birth Certificate. His doesn't say "Certificate of Foreign Birth." His says "Certificate of Live Birth," and has no disclaimer about identification on the bottom. So I called the agency back. To this I was told. "You're good." This document is every bit the same for Eli as Abi's Birth Certificate is to her. He should not encounter any of the issues with the DMV that we were told might happen. I guess we will see if that is true in about 14 years....