Citizenship isn’t a split decision

OVER THE LAST few decades, globalized commerce and booming international migration have challenged the role of the traditional nation state and called into question the validity of single-nation citizenship. Governments, adapting to the mobility of their populations, have allowed people to claim citizenship in more than one country. Some theorists think this heralds an era in which we all will become “citizens of the world.”

But since 2001, the emergence of another globalized phenomenon -- terrorism -- has caused Western policymakers to reconsider the value of old-fashioned one-country citizenship and the dangers of plural nationalities. The arrest this month in London of several British-Pakistani citizens allegedly involved in a plot to blow up airplanes over the Atlantic is bound to draw greater scrutiny to the practice of holding dual passports. But the question shouldn’t be whether nations ought to allow or prohibit dual citizenship but rather how they can best manage the contradictions it sometimes fosters.

First, there is no evidence that dual citizenship increases the chances of domestic terrorism. Indeed, even without holding two passports, the London terror suspects could have just as easily made their frequent visits to contacts in Pakistan by carrying only British travel documents. Still, their dual status highlights how important immigrant integration has become to national security. And there’s the rub. Should Western nations such as the U.S., Canada and Britain continue to allow foreign-origin citizens to hold multiple passports, even as they encourage them to identify fully with their adoptive nation?

Many immigrant-sending nations allow for dual citizenship to maintain contact with native sons and daughters. Hoping to receive remittances or cultivate an electoral base that champions its interests abroad, sending nations would rather share these citizens’ loyalties than lose them altogether.

But the advantages of dual citizenship to immigrant-receiving countries are less tangible. Historically, these nations required naturalizing immigrants to renounce their loyalties to the country of origin. But with people pushed or pulled to work, marry, give birth or just live in a country other than the one of their birth, even the U.S. (whose Oath of Allegiance requires renunciation of “fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty”) doesn’t actually prevent people from having two passports. In some cases, nations have allowed dual citizenship as a way to encourage assimilation. In other words, by not requiring the renunciation of other citizenships, receiving nations hope to remove any barriers for immigrants to officially join their new nation.

Of course, it is easier to tolerate multiple citizenship in peacetime. In wartime, national identities solidify and citizens are forced to decide what side they are on. In 2003, Britain enacted the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, which empowered the government to remove British citizenship from dual citizens who threaten Britain’s national interest. That year, the U.S. enacted a provision that allows the government to expatriate Americans who join designated terrorist groups.

In the end, however, the greatest danger of dual citizenship isn’t that radical jihadis will falsely take our Oath of Allegiance. It’s that members of a truly globalized class -- immigrants and native -- will have no loyalty to this or any country. In becoming “citizens of the world,” they will become citizens of nowhere. And that has the potential to undermine the shared sense of fate and community that democracies like ours need to function.

Dual citizenship “becomes a type of portable patriotism,” said Noah Pickus, Duke University public policy professor. “It allows elites who have a business in Bonn and homes in Umbria and New York to feel disconnected from community.”

Still, cosmopolitan nations such as the U.S. shouldn’t prohibit dual citizenship, they should impose greater restrictions on people with competing loyalties. We should stop tacitly allowing our citizens to serve in foreign armies (Jewish Americans, for example, sometimes join the Israel Defense Forces) or to hold high office in other nations (after the Soviet Union collapsed, more than a few naturalized U.S. citizens returned to Europe to assume new government posts). And dual citizens should be discouraged from voting in more than one country.

To bring these elites into the fold, Western nations should more aggressively promote civic integration and the ideal of an individual’s responsibility to place. It’s a sign of the globalized times that we now accept plural cultural identities in the West, but cultural and national identities are not one and the same. Unlike culture, national identity is rooted within geographic boundaries. As globalization threatens to undermine our sense of place, nations should do whatever they can to restore it.