Dual Citizenships Create Dueling Family Allegiances

In 1994, a Queens couple traveled to Pasadena to watch the U.S. soccer team compete in the World Cup. And hopefully get beat.

Effie Giraldo was a new U.S. citizen but a native-born Colombian, and she couldn’t deny her allegiance. She and her husband, Hector, had good jobs and deep affection for their new country, but they cheered loudly for the visitors.

Imagine their surprise when they heard a pipsqueak voice root for the home team.

“My son was like ‘USA! USA!’ but we were like ‘No, Colombia!’ said Giraldo, 51, laughing as she remembered the historic match, when the Americans beat the Colombians, 2-1.

Giraldo is a dual citizen. She voted for President Clinton in 1996, casting her ballot at a precinct station in Flushing. She plans to vote in the Colombian presidential election in May. She only has to travel to the Colombian consulate in Manhattan.

Colombia in 1991 approved a constitution that gave immigrants abroad the right to retain their nationality even if they acquired citizenship elsewhere. In the three years that followed, the number of Colombians who became U.S. citizens doubled.

Giraldo was part of that surge. She and her husband had lived in this country for more than a decade, but they didn’t apply for U.S. citizenship until their government said they wouldn’t lose their native status.

“My husband and myself, we have our families there,” said Giraldo, a registered nurse. “It’s good to have some kind of control over the politics there. Because you never know when you have to go back.”

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Some people find dual citizenship troubling because it represents, they say, only a halfhearted commitment to this country. The fact that Mexico has followed suit is certain to intensify the debate.

Yet leaders from two of the fastest-growing Latino groups in the New York area--Dominicans and Colombians--say dual citizenship gives them a political voice that they don’t yet have in the U.S.

“Fifteen years ago, Colombia had a practice of encouraging people to come back. Now, the Colombians say it would behoove them to naturalize,” said Arturo Sanchez, a Colombian American who teaches a course on immigration sociology at Hunter College. “The state is saying, ‘You can become a political agent by naturalizing and you do not lose your Colombian nationality.’

“The model that was mentioned over and over again was the Jewish model in New York and the Cuban model. These were seen as effective ways to remain engaged at home and affect political policy in this country.”

Yet most Colombians in the United States didn’t vote in the Colombia’s Senate elections held two weeks ago. Only 10,000 were registered, and estimates of the number who voted ranged from 800 to 1,800.

One who refused to cast a ballot was Dr. Daniel Jimenez, a 60-year-old Queens neurologist. He left Colombia when he was 27 because of the drug cartels and government corruption. He refused to vote in this year’s elections for the same reason. He expresses nothing but contempt for the government there.

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But he didn’t get his U.S. citizenship until after Colombia made duel citizenship legal. And he still helps organize fund-raisers to provide health care for Colombian children.

“I am American, but my chromosomes are there,” he said.

Supporters of dual nationality say there is too much hand-wringing, that the Latino immigrants are still in the first phase of their immigration to the United States.

New York City Councilman Guillermo Linares, the first Dominican American elected to political office in the United States, said dual citizenship affords new immigrant groups protection in case they decide to go back home, a phenomenon “which is very much present in the first phase of any migration.”

But he also said the demand for it reflects a universal blurring of boundaries that is new and unique to this era, a prelude to a world of regions as well as nations, “a transition to something else that we can’t begin to define.”

The first generation of any immigrant group has always had the toughest time cutting ties to the homeland, said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, former general counsel to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and an expert on citizenship. Perhaps half of the first Italian immigrants to the United States went back to Italy to stay, he said.

The rise in the demand for dual citizenship among new immigrants is ‘likely to be just a one-generation problem,’ he said. “The real issue here is the second generation.”

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Giraldo agrees. She and her husband speak Spanish to her 9-year-old son, but he answers in English. They feed him Colombian food, but the boy wants burgers.

“We try to integrate both cultures, but he is more influenced by the American culture,” she said. “I’d say he is, oh, 99% American. At least.”