Mexico’s Dual Nationality Opens Doors

Ramona Dominguez de Felix is 74 now, but she vividly recalls her father’s stories: how he was shot in the shoulder during the Mexican Revolution and met his wife in a hospital while he recovered, and how they crossed into California as war refugees in 1915.

Although she was born in the United States in 1923 and has lived much of her life in San Diego, Dominguez still keeps pictures of revolutionary hero Pancho Villa, and her ties to her ancestral land remain strong. Yet during her frequent visits to Mexico, she has had to enter the country as a tourist, and she could not buy her dream retirement home on the Tijuana coast.

That changes today, when a Mexican law takes effect allowing Dominguez and millions of Mexican-born Americans and their children to hold Mexican nationality as well as U.S. citizenship.

Analysts say the law could have far-reaching practical effects--even potentially reshaping the flows of people and money between the United States and Mexico--and might have cross-border political repercussions as well.

The Nationality Act revokes the previous rule that took away Mexican nationality from those who became citizens of another country. Furthermore, the new act broadens eligibility for nationality to include children of Mexican-born people. And the law is retroactive: Those who would have met the revised terms in the past may now claim back their Mexican nationality. Those eligible have five years to apply.

The law permits Mexican dual nationality but not dual citizenship, a distinction that will prevent dual nationals from voting in Mexican elections or holding high office here. Some Mexican Americans are now pushing for full voting rights in Mexican elections.

Among the most significant changes in the new law is the removal of investment restrictions imposed on foreigners in Mexico, which some expect to unleash greater capital flows by Mexican nationals to Mexico.

For example, Dominguez now plans to buy her coastal retirement home. Foreigners are barred from buying property within 62 miles of the frontier or 31 miles of the coast for national security reasons--a law written with Mexico’s loss of half its territory to the United States in the 1800s still very much in mind.

“This will enhance the economic mobility of both countries, especially in the regions near the border,” said Miguel Angel Gonzalez Felix, a senior Foreign Ministry official who helped craft the law and the constitutional reforms that were needed to make it possible. “I believe this is part of the broader process of growing commercial, cultural and personal flows between Mexico and the United States.”

Already, Mexicans’ monthly remesas, or transmissions of money from the U.S. to family members in their hometowns and villages, account for more than $4 billion a year, Mexico’s third-largest source of foreign exchange.

Gonzalez Felix said recent seminars with Mexican Americans on the new law had elicited numerous questions about opportunities to invest in business ventures and property. Such direct investment, with its job-creating and skills-building potential, could be more productive for Mexico than mere cash remittances that simply boost consumption.

The constraints faced by Dominguez and the millions of Mexican Americans who have strong cross-border ties have often fostered emotional conflicts and family divisions.

Soon after she was born in San Diego, Dominguez returned with her parents to Mexico and did not move back to the United States until 1938. She and her Mexican American husband had six children, four of whom were thoroughly Americanized while the youngest two, as teenagers, wanted to reestablish their Mexican roots.

Dominguez and her husband spent two years living in Mexico in the 1970s with the two youngest boys, who hoped to attend college in Guadalajara. Dominguez’s application for Mexican nationality at the time was rejected. For fear of jeopardizing the children’s U.S. citizenship, the family returned to San Diego.

The new law opens several doors that had been closed--such as attending Mexican state universities for the equivalent of a few dollars a year--and allows easier entry into Mexico for work.

“Very highly skilled people now can come back to Mexico to work and share their skills,” Gonzalez Felix said. “There will be many more bridges of understanding than have existed in the past.”

Alejandro Carrillo Castro, a former Mexican consul general in Chicago, said Mexicans living in the United States were always far more reluctant than people of other nationalities to assume U.S. citizenship, taking an average of 22 years to become U.S. citizens compared with seven years for others.

As pressure grew in the Mexican American community to change the law, “the Mexican government had to find a way to keep it from being a stigma, a sin, to take on U.S. nationality,” Carrillo Castro said.

By removing the threat of losing one’s Mexican nationality, the law will encourage a rise in the number of U.S. citizenship applications by Mexicans, said UCLA political scientist Raul Hinojosa.

“The U.S.-Mexican immigration situation is huge and unique in the world,” he said. “Never has there been such an influx of people with so many remaining ambiguous about losing their old nationality.

“This resulted in part from reasons of identity, in part from a feeling that they were not really welcome [in the U.S.] and that their votes didn’t matter and, to a certain extent, that they would feel like traitors to Mexico,” Hinojosa said.

“All of these have been swept away in recent years. People here are realizing a resurgence of identity, [that] their votes do matter, [that] their leaders are becomingelected. They don’t feel like second-class citizens anymore. That’s a very important watershed.”

On top of that, the Mexican government “has become more open and accepting of the importance of the Mexican people living in the United States and has been treating them with more respect,” Hinojosa said.

But Antonio Gonzalez, leader of the Southwest Voter Research Institute in Los Angeles, said he expects little direct impact on citizenship applications as a result of the law.

“If you’re not yet a U.S. citizen, you already have a real self-interest in becoming one,” he said, “because those who are not citizens are gradually being stripped of entitlements, to our national shame.”

Much of the workload from the new law will fall on Mexico’s 42 U.S. consulates--by far the largest foreign consular presence of any nation in the U.S. Mexico has 10 consulates in California alone. With the law in the works for more than a year, officials say forms are ready and consular workers prepared for the anticipated demand.

“I see this as a great moment,” said Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, Mexico’s consul general in Los Angeles, heartland of the diaspora. “It represents a historic gesture toward Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans.”

According to Mexican government estimates, Pescador said, the law could ultimately benefit as many as 2 million naturalized U.S. citizens; up to 3 million U.S.-born offspring of Mexican immigrants may also come forward to claim nationality. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants now awaiting U.S. citizenship--and all who sign up in the future--will remain Mexican nationals.

The application process will cost $12, and it will take several weeks to confirm that documents proving eligibility, such as a Mexican birth certificate, are genuine.

Those who adopt Mexican nationality will become subject to a number of requirements; they will have to enter and leave Mexico with their Mexican documents, not their foreign passports.

Jose Chapa, a 78-year-old retired radio broadcaster in Chicago who was born in Mexico and settled in the United States 45 years ago, has been among the most vocal activists for dual nationality. He said he plans to be first in line at the consulate in Chicago today.

“They called me stupid, a dreamer, but now it has happened, and there are 5 million Mexicans in the United States who are going to receive this with great pride and satisfaction because it is time they recognized us,” he said by phone.

“Many Mexicans saw us as the ugly ducklings, but President [Ernesto] Zedillo is finally seeing us for what we are, as Mexicans who are working for our country abroad, working for our families and the well-being of our communities. Mexico is our ancestral heartland, we love Mexico, and we also love the United States. This is our casa too.”

Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell in Los Angeles contributed to this report.