Republican Files Bill to Eliminate Dual Citizenship, Force Renunciations

A Republican senator has introduced a bill to ban Americans from holding dual citizenship, in the latest attempt by the right to attack immigrants and tighten the rules around what is permissible with regards to American citizenship.

Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, introduced the legislation, entitled the “Exclusive Citizenship Act,” on Tuesday. The bill makes the sweeping assertion that people with foreign citizenships may have “conflicts of interest and divided loyalties.”

Under the bill, anyone who acquires foreign citizenship would be forced to relinquish their U.S. citizenship, and any who already hold foreign citizenship would have to submit a written renunciation of their U.S. or foreign citizenship to the government within a year. Those who didn’t comply would be assumed to have renounced their U.S. citizenship. Anyone who relinquished their U.S. citizenship would be “treated as an alien for the purposes of the immigration laws,” the bill says.

The legislation also directs the Secretary of State to establish a database on Americans with multiple citizenships.

“Being an American citizen is an honor and a privilege — and if you want to be an American, it’s all or nothing. It’s time to end dual citizenship for good,” said Moreno in a statement.

The legislation faces long odds of passing; many prominent Americans hold dual citizenship, including First Lady Melania Trump, who is a dual citizen with Slovenia. There are few statistics on how many Americans hold dual citizenship, but a significant proportion of the U.S. population is made up of immigrants. A growing number of Americans are also seeking dual citizenship in order to have a safe place to flee from the U.S.’s increasingly fascist rule.

The legislation is problematic for numerous reasons, ranging from the logistical to the ideological. American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnik pointed out that many Americans would be unable to comply with the order even if they wanted to renounce their foreign citizenship.

“To note just one of the many problems with this idea, there are multiple countries that do not permit you to relinquish citizenship — and some of those countries also have jus sanguinis laws that make someone a citizen even if they were born in the U.S. and never left,” Reichlin-Melnik said, referring to laws that confer citizenship based on the citizenship of one’s parents.

Supposed tests of “loyalty” have a sordid history in the U.S. During World War II, U.S. authorities suspected all Japanese Americans to have dual loyalties, and incarcerated them in squalid camps, where they were issued a “loyalty questionnaire.”

One of the questions, for instance, asked incarcerated people if they would “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America” and “forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese Emperor or any other foreign government,” as historians have documented. Those who answered this and other questions “incorrectly” were labeled as “disloyal” and segregated, with some deported to Japan.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-Florida), who is infamous for his vehement defenses of Israel, has previously introduced legislation to bar people with dual citizenship from serving in Congress.

The Trump administration has threatened numerous times to take away Americans’ citizenship. On Sunday, President Donald Trump said that he would “absolutely” move to denaturalize supposed “criminals” naturalized under President Joe Biden “if I have the power to do it.”

Taking away citizenship is a constrained process, and citizenship is typically only forcibly taken away by judicial action. The Supreme Court has established dual citizenship as a constitutional right in previous orders.

However, the Trump administration is currently trying to vastly restrict citizenship requirements in the U.S., including in its executive order to end birthright citizenship that’s currently pending a response from the Supreme Court.