Term: Country of Citizenship

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Glossary Definition

Last Updated: 2022-12-08

Definition:

A country that the individual is a national (e.g., passport holder). Citizenship or nationality is the status by which an individual has full rights and responsibilities in a country, either as a result of being born there or by having acquired it through the legal immigration and citizenship process (i.e., naturalisation or kinship ties). International migrants who became naturalised and did not give up their former citizenship are said to have ‘dual citizenship’ and frequently hold two passports.

Country of citizenship is a variable that can be found in both the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Permanent Resident Database data files, but the variable name is different in each file, as follows:

IRCC File Name	Variable Name
LEGACY LANDING	COUNTRY_OF_CITIZENSHIP_CD
LANDING	COUNTRY_OF_CITIZENSHIP

• Country of citizenship denotes the country where an individual holds citizenship status and labelling of race, culture or ethnicity should not be used or inferred without a strong rationale.
  
• As with most numeric codes used in the LEGACY LANDING and LANDING files, the codes used in each file have different values and have their own unique formats to convert codes to country names.

Related concepts 

• Immigration / Migration Overview - Links to Immigration / Migration Data and Related Concepts and Glossary Terms

Related terms 

• Country of Birth
• Country of Last Permanent Residence
• Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Permanent Resident Database
• Migrant / Migration