Have you ever thought about that you could deliberately give birth to your child in a certain country so that it would get citizenship there? Perhaps you have heard stories of pregnant Mexican women who ran, climbed and swam across the border into the US so that their children could get citizenship there and the whole family would get residency? Which, by the way, is no longer as easy in the US as it once was. But in some other countries it is still possible without any problems.

There are different ways in which a child can acquire citizenship of a country. If citizenship is acquired by being born in a country, the legal principle is called "jus soli", the right by birth on the soil of that country.

If citizenship is acquired through the fact that the parents are nationals of a state, then the legal principle is called "jus sanguini", the right of blood.

Often there is a certain mixture of these two legal principles. 

Here you will find a list of countries in which a child born there to foreign parents receives or can receive citizenship. Sometimes this is linked to further conditions, e.g. that the parents had a residence permit:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

The countries without further conditions other than birth there are mainly North, Central and South American countries, almost all of them. However, this possibility also exists in Tanzania, Lesotho and Chad. 

It would also be important to mention that a child's citizenship does not automatically mean that the child's parents will get a residence permit. In Canada and the USA, for example, this was reportedly quite easy in the past, but no longer. The children can make use of their Canadian or US citizenship only when they are of age.

From Mexico and Peru, on the other hand, I have heard reports of families who obtained residence permits in these countries by giving birth to children who thereby acquired the respective citizenship.

I would be very happy to collect further reports on this subject from various countries, please send them to me. 

And before you want to give birth to your child in a certain country, please do find out for yourself exactly what the current conditions are.