Dual citizenship

[Elizabeth Dale]

At 05:13 PM 9/16/01 -0400, you wrote:
>             But what about dual citizens, who are also American
> citizens?  Well, I
>certainly sympathize much more with their plight; but I'm not sure whether
>the Constitution protects them against discrimination based on their having
>another form of citizenship other than American.  Yes, if someone is an
>American citizen, we should generally assume (absent other evidence) that
>he's loyal to the U.S.  On the other hand, if someone is a German citizen,
>we can likewise assume -- with no bigotry or insult -- that he's loyal to
>Germany; people are usually supposed to be loyal to their country of
>citizenship.  If he's a citizen of both countries, we have a problem here:
>We have some reason to think that he feels loyalty to both, but we don't
>know which loyalty is stronger.


Are these really valid assumptions? Might the issue not be what the
criteria for dual citizenship was? If, for example, my country of birth
permitted me to become the citizen of another country without losing my
native citizenship, I might not bother to drop the one to undertake the
other, regardless of my feelings of loyalty. If, indeed, to cease to be a
citizen of one country I had to fill out paperwork, I might think, skip it,
and chose to be a dual citizen. More to the point, perhaps, if I became a
citizen of the United States at a time when there was peace between it and
my homeland, I might not think twice about renouncing my former citizenship
before claiming the my new one. Surely the assumption that dual citizenship
equates with dual loyalty without more evidence is an assumption that is
not fully exploring the dynamics of the process.

Likewise, I am unclear about how far this process should be taken. What if
I am a dual citizen, with my "other" citizenship being in a country that is
not an enemy, but not an ally. Do I get watched? Does it matter if I am the
citizen of a country that seems sympathetic to an enemy, or is my mere
status as a person with presumptively dual loyalties enough?  And what, for
that matter, does citizenship mean? Bin Laden is, so far as I can tell, a
citizen of Saudi Arabia. I doubt we want to bomb one of our major mid east
allies as a consequence, and I doubt that we take his citizenship
seriously. Several of the apparent perpetrators of the Tuesday events were,
so far as I can tell, citizens of the United Arab Emirates, another ally,
what does that mean?  How much does citizenship tell us in the modern,
global world? Particularly when people hide behind it?




Elizabeth Dale, Assistant Professor
US Legal History, Department of History

Adjunct Faculty, Levin College of Law

University of Florida
PO Box 117320
Gainesville FL 32611

edale at history.ufl.edu
http://plaza.ufl.edu/edale