Dual citizenship

[shubha ghosh]

Sorry to repeat my point made on another thread, but I
am troubled by the assumption that being an American
citizen presumes loyalty.  Being an American citizen
provides the right to dissent against your
government's actions within the parameters of the
first amendment.  Presumably not being an American
citizen does not grant these rights and imposes the
possibility of being deported for acts that may be
anti-American (actually i am not sure that this is
true under Constitutional law but I will presume it is
for my argument).  So why aren't US citizens more
likely to be disloyal since they do not face the
threat of deportation?

--- Elizabeth Dale <edale at HISTORY.UFL.EDU> wrote:
> 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


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