Double Ties

Dual nationality was once likened to bigamy. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt called it a "self-evident absurdity." In some nations, notably Germany and Austria, resistance to the idea endures. And terrorist threats have further raised sensitivities about national loyalty. Nevertheless, a revolution is occurring in citizenship law and policies. Spurred by increasing migration and a global economy, many nations now accept and even promote dual status.

Both host and home nations have changed their tune for several good reasons. Many countries of origin, wishing to improve ties with their diaspora — in part because these emigrants send home remittances — have abandoned rules that dictated loss of nationality for citizens who naturalize elsewhere. Some receiving countries, like Australia, have also changed their rules to encourage naturalization and now permit naturalizing citizens to retain their former nationalities.

Migrants generally welcome the change. With cheaper communication and travel, emigration rarely requires a decisive break with their countries of origin. Dual nationality better reflects a migrant’s mix of affections and loyalties.

Critics of dual nationality usually target policies that allow newcomers to naturalize without giving up their home-country citizenship, wholly missing the primary cause of the increase in dual nationality: the growing number of people who automatically obtain that status at birth. The move toward gender equality has dictated a break with the traditional rule that a father’s citizenship determines his child’s. Children now born to parents of different nationalities inherit both. Further, to promote the integration of immigrant communities, more countries are adopting rules that bestow citizenship on children born to immigrants. These children thus acquire both citizenship from their birth country and the nationality of their parents.

U.S. law and practice reflect the trend toward acceptance of dual citizenship. Since the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that Americans taking citizenship abroad cannot be stripped of their U.S. nationality. And despite laws going back to the early days of the republic requiring people seeking citizenship in the United States to renounce foreign allegiances, federal authorities now make no attempt to enforce this pledge. The result is that natives of Mexico who become U.S. citizens are not asked to surrender their Mexican passports, and since 1998, Mexico has permitted them to maintain their Mexican nationality. Moreover, under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, all children born in the United States are U.S. citizens, so if they are born to immigrant parents, they are likely to have more than one citizenship. The numbers of such cases are not trivial. Drawing on census data, we estimate that 500,000 children are born in the United States each year with more than one nationality.

For skeptics, these developments provoke alarm. But dual nationality poses few risks. Through thoughtful management, governments can address the concerns that typically feed resistance, including fears that dual citizens will shop for justice, vote, or hold elected office in two nations and thus divide their loyalties between their original and adopted countries.

Critics seize on the case of Samuel Sheinbein, a U.S. citizen who murdered a fellow teenager in Maryland and then fled to Israel. Sheinbein had never lived in Israel, but courts there ruled that he held Israeli citizenship through his father. Because Israel followed the European rule forbidding extradition of nationals, he escaped U.S. prosecution (though he was eventually tried and sentenced in Israel). But this undesirable outcome can’t be blamed on Sheinbein’s dual citizenship. The fault lay with an obsolete extradition rule; Israel changed it after his trial. In general, whenever laws, entitlements, or obligations (such as military service) conflict, states should give primacy to the country of primary residence.

Dual nationals, it is sometimes argued, may vote in elections in two nations and if the economy turns sour in one can pick up and move to the other. Dual nationality thus allows individuals to manipulate their ties to states to their own advantage. But shifting national residences at will is more a function of wealth or determination than of dual nationality. Many countries also prevent nonresidents from voting, and in others, few nonresidents exercise their franchise anyway. In the unlikely event such votes become a significant problem, states can regulate voting; they need not outlaw dual nationality. Worries about supposed unfair advantages would also fade, albeit more gradually, if a state did not extend citizenship to future generations abroad when a family loses all connection with the country of origin. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a number of naturalized U.S. citizens returned to Eastern Europe to take up high-level positions in new governments. One, Valdas Adamkus, a former regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, became presi­dent of his native Lithuania in 1998. The possibilities for conflicts or entanglements involving dual citizens who hold high office are real, but political considerations will normally lead officials to give up their citizenship to the other country, as Adamkus did before taking office. If not, both states concerned could properly bar dual nationals from holding such posts.

Doubters maintain that residents with dual nationalities may be reluctant to give the newly adopted nations their undivided loyalty. States are right to promote robust citizenship. But complex loyalties are a feature of the modern world. Liberal democracies generally tolerate, or even encourage, a host of affiliations and loyalties on the part of their inhabitants — to family, religious group, college, hometown — and don’t regard these as incompatible with national allegiance. The increasing convergence of state interests, built around commitments to democracy and the free market, along with the decline of conscription and interstate war, also minimizes real conflict.

The growth in dual nationality presents more opportunities than dangers, freeing individuals from irreconcilable choices and fostering connections that can further travel, trade, and peaceful relations. The claim that dual nationality is bigamy adopts the wrong family analogy. Marriage makes a person a member of two families: one’s own and one’s spouse’s. To give love or loyalty to the second does not require subtracting it from the first.