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Is Dual Citizenship Bad?

Christopher Caldwell argues in The Claremont Review of Books that the United States should stop permitting dual citizenship: Until recent decades, the traditional oath of allegiance was understood in an uncomplicated way: when you became an American citizen you ceased to be the thing you were before. But starting with the Supreme Court’s Afroyim v. […]
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Christopher Caldwell argues in The Claremont Review of Books that the United States should stop permitting dual citizenship:

Until recent decades, the traditional oath of allegiance was understood in an uncomplicated way: when you became an American citizen you ceased to be the thing you were before. But starting with the Supreme Court’s Afroyim v. Rusk decision in 1967, which found voting in a foreign election to be consistent with American citizenship, federal authorities ceased to insist that American citizenship be an exclusive thing. A spike in dual citizenship has been the result. It is impossible to say how many Americans have availed themselves of it, but the number of those eligible is in the tens of millions. The oath is still part of the ceremony, yet today you can pass U.S. Customs and show the officer two passports—or even three—and he’ll say nothing about renouncing or abjuring. He’ll just say, ‘Welcome home.’

Political theorists used to think dual citizenship a dangerous thing because it presents occasions for dual loyalty and erodes the social compact on which all citizens’ rights depend. Under the newer understanding, that’s a feature rather than a bug. We live in an interconnected global economy in which we’re supposed to have multiple loyalties. Rights are human rights—no national authority need assert them.

There will always be a use for dual citizenship, especially in dealing with children of international marriages. But the old understanding was more right than wrong. The transformation from national citizens’ rights to universal human rights does divide loyalties and corrode sovereignties. On top of that, we are beginning to notice practical problems with mass dual citizenship that were hardly considered at all when we began dispensing it liberally at the sunny outset of the civil rights era.

Dual citizenship undermines equal citizenship, producing a regime of constitutional haves and have-nots. The dual citizen has, at certain important moments and in certain important contexts, the right to choose the regime under which he lives. He can avoid military conscription, duck taxes, and flee prosecution. When Spain, as coronavirus cases spiked in mid-March, banned all movement outside the home except for designated purposes, one of those purposes was to ‘return to your habitual place of residence.’ A Spaniard with citizenship in a second country thus had the constitutional privilege of exempting himself from a nationwide lockdown in a way that his fellow Spaniard did not. Such special privileges do not often matter—but when they do, they matter in a life-or-death way.

You can read the rest here. A couple of thoughts: My wife and I are dual citizens of the United States and Switzerland—so are our children. So, we have skin in the game, which I’m sure colors my point of view on this topic. I became Swiss in 2004. My wife became an American in 2014. She wasn’t sure she wanted to for a while, but after it became clear that we—our kids included—would likely live in America for the rest of our lives, she decided to take the plunge. After all, if I died early, it might be difficult for her to stay in the country when the kids were grown. Don’t get me wrong. She loves the States. But she is still Swiss—and given the choice between saying she is an American or saying she is Swiss, she’d probably say the latter, though she certainly feels less Swiss than others.

Caldwell is not arguing that we should do away with dual citizenships like ours, but he does make a number of remarks that seem like overstatement. “Almost by definition,” Caldwell writes, “dual citizenship serves Swiss elites.” No doubt it does serve Swiss elites, but “by definition”? Pshaw. I know a great many dual citizens in Switzerland, and most of them are not part of the elite. They are secondary school teachers at private schools (where they are paid less than at state schools); they are middle managers at banks, missionaries, copyeditors, marketing professionals, and so forth.

Caldwell spends a fair amount of time rehashing the argument that getting rid of dual citizenship would get rid of dual loyalty. I’m not so sure, and neither is he it turns out: “As the world globalized in the years before the coronavirus, dual loyalty appeared to be a problem of diminishing importance. Perhaps it is indeed no longer the main problem with dual citizenship.”

And will dual citizens, who pledge allegiance to the United States while still retaining an allegiance to another country result in what Caldwell calls “civic demoralization”? I don’t think so. First, requiring citizens of the United States to renounce citizenship to their home country wouldn’t solve anything. I don’t think my wife would feel any less Swiss if she had to renounce her Swiss citizenship. I can’t imagine that she would suddenly support American actions against Switzerland simply because she no longer had a Swiss passport.

But nor does maintaining her Swiss citizenship make her blind to the shortcomings of Switzerland or any less concerned with the safety and flourishing of the United States. After all, this is where we live. This is our home. Do our neighbors find her Swiss citizenship (or mine for that matter) “demoralizing”? Do they think the time that we spend volunteering in our church, opening our home to neighborhood kids, supporting local businesses, and caring for our community part of some nefarious plot to undermine America? I haven’t asked them. Maybe I should.

In my limited experience, most people with dual citizenship do have attachments to their home countries—how can you avoid it?—but that doesn’t make them mindless mouthpieces for a foreign power or incapable of supporting and defending the country where they live. I have no doubt that many elites who have dual citizenship think and act differently, probably in ways that Caldwell describes—that is, avoiding taxes, escaping prosecution, and fleeing instability—but the elite have always been able to act that way. It’s not lax attitudes toward dual citizenship over the past fifty years that is to blame.

Does this mean we should just give citizenship away? Not at all. It should be limited, and a country should take steps to make sure it is meaningful, but I’m not convinced it is as big of problem as Caldwell makes it out to be.

In other news: Andrew Roberts argues that Western schools must teach Western civilization: “We all know the joke that Mahatma Gandhi supposedly made when he was asked what he thought about Western civilization: ‘I think it might be a good idea.’ The gag is apocryphal, in fact, first appearing two decades after his death. But very many people have taken it literally, arguing that there really is no such thing as Western civilization, from ideologues such as Noam Chomsky to the activists of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford University, who demand the removal from Oriel College of the statue of the benefactor of the Rhodes Scholarships.”

The rise and fall of the Habsburgs: “The House of Habsburg has a plausible claim to having been the most successful ruling dynasty in world history. For a thousand years, from the dynasty’s emergence as feudal warlords in northern Switzerland in the 10th century to their ousting as emperors of Austria in the early 20th, they reigned at one time or another in most European countries (including, briefly, England and Ireland), and over colonial possessions that reached across the globe, from Peru to the Philippines (the one nation that still bears the name of a Habsburg king).”

Police seize thousands of stolen artefacts in international art trafficking crackdown: “Two huge international police operations targeting the trade in stolen artworks and archaeological artefacts have led to the arrest of 101 people and the recovery of more than 19,000 items, including a pre-Columbian gold mask, a carved Roman lion and thousands of ancient coins.”

Did Thomas Jefferson ruin the presidency? Tim Rice reviews Stephen Knott’s The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: “Knott, a presidential scholar with an affinity for George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, uses the standards set by these men as a jumping-off point to explain what he calls the presidency’s ‘decline into demagoguery.’ Knott’s book is a familiar tale of how the presidency envisioned by the Founding Fathers was degraded by populist and progressive alternatives. But Knott takes this argument further than most. In fact, he idealizes Washington to such an extent that he makes the decline of the presidency seem inevitable and its renewal unlikely.”

The cult of modern architecture: “It is little wonder that ordinary human beings hesitate to question the pretensions of modernist architects. From the 1920s, becoming more and more opaque ever since, obfuscatory language effectively camouflages massive programs to impose architectural fads on a global scale, and cows objectors, afraid of challenging them. Readers are referred to that masterpiece of impenetrable jargonese, Chora L Works, by Jacques Derrida and Peter D. Eisenman, with obligatory holes punched in the book. So-called ‘starchitects’ and their disciples seem to be oblivious to the impact of what they are doing or have done as they bask in the adulation of a handful of critics adept in the fancy jargon of what has become a cult. So what is a dangerous cult? It is a kind of false religion, involving the adoption of a system of belief based on mere assertions, or excessive, almost idolatrous, admiration for a person, persons, an idea, or fashion. The adulation of Le Corbusier, accorded the status of a deity in architectural circles, is just one example.”

Photos: Jupiter and its moons

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