U.S. Citizenship Rules More Liberal Than Most

Despite recent safeguards that have slowed the process, U.S. citizenship policies remain among the world’s most liberal.

Only Canada, Australia and New Zealand have friendlier naturalization procedures, said David S. North, an immigration scholar in Virginia.

Under U.S. law, naturalization applicants generally must have lived here as legal residents for five years (three years for spouses of citizens), show good “moral character,” demonstrate proficiency in English and pass a test in U.S. civics. Would-be citizens must also be willing and able to take a “meaningful oath” of allegiance.

Notably absent in the United States are the kinds of bars to citizenship that have left millions of “guest workers” and their children virtually stateless in adopted homelands from Germany to Saudi Arabia to Japan, where ancestral blood ties are the primary determinant. Large-scale immigration in recent years has prompted Western European nations to reexamine citizenship policies.

France, site of fierce conflict about illicit arrivals from Africa and elsewhere, has revised its laws so that citizenship is no longer conferred automatically on the children of immigrants born on French territory.

Mexico, whose leaders regularly denounce U.S. immigration policies, itself permits relatively few immigrants and is stingy in naturalizing longtime foreign settlers.

But the Mexican government has reversed decades of practice and will soon allow that nation’s expatriate legions to maintain Mexican nationality even if they become citizens of the United States. The growing use of dual nationalities worldwide is drawing fierce criticism from some U.S. activists concerned about split loyalties.

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The still-expansive U.S. sense of the citizenry is closer to the cosmopolitan version employed in classical Rome--which bestowed the privilege liberally in its far-flung empire--than the more narrow definition crafted in ancient Athens, where the concept is said to have originated. Citizens in Aristotle’s time were an elite corps of decision-makers that excluded immigrants, among many others.

Today, some would like to see Washington head in a more restrictive direction. Several bills pending in Congress would deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. The Orange County Board of Supervisors went on record Tuesday in favor of the controversial proposal, which would represent a radical departure from tradition.

But modifying birthright citizenship may require a constitutional amendment to overturn the 14th Amendment’s landmark citizenship clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

This seminal, post-Civil War wording finally confirmed the citizenship status of African Americans, effectively voiding the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision. In that ruling, the nation’s highest court had held: “The word ‘citizen’ in the Constitution does not embrace one of the Negro race.”