Multiple citizenship, way of the future

Seen from the state’s point of view, multiple citizenship is at best untidy and at worst a menace. Officials would prefer you to be born, live, work, pay taxes, draw benefits and die in the same place, travel on one passport only, and bequeath only one nationality to your offspring. In wartime the state has a unique call on your loyalty—and perhaps your life. Citizenship is the glue keeping individual and state together. Tamper with it, and the relationship comes unstuck.

But life is more complicated than that. Loyalty to political entities need not be exclusive: indeed, it often overlaps. Many Jews hold Israeli passports in solidarity with the Jewish state (and as an insurance policy), alongside citizenship of their native country. Teutons may be proud to be simultaneously Bavarian, German and European. Irish citizens can vote in British elections. The old notion of one-man, one-state citizenship looks outdated: more than 200m people now live and work outside the countries in which they were born—but still wish to travel home, or marry or invest there.

The wrong response to this is political protectionism, with states forcing citizens to choose one nationality only, or hampering their right to multiple passports. This seems an odd approach, given that citizenship is so easily acquired. In some countries it is, in effect, on sale. In others, such as America, it may be an accident of birth, with no conscious choice involved.

Rather than making a fetish out of passports, a better approach would be to use residence (especially tax residence) as the main criterion for an individual’s rights and responsibilities. That encourages cohesion and commitment, because it stems from a conscious decision to live in a country and abide by its rules. The world is gradually moving in this direction. But many states (mostly poor and ill-run) resist the trend and some rich democracies like the Netherlands and Germany are trying to curb it (see article), offering a variety of excuses. Read full article in The Economist...

Dual nationality

Europe bucks the trend

While internationally there is a trend of loosening up restrictions on dual nationality, several European countries are going in the opposite direction, The Economist notes:

… in November politicians in Germany, which generally offers dual nationality only to applicants from Europe, turned down a proposal that would have allowed Germans born to foreigners to retain their parents’ nationalities in adulthood. From January 1st new citizens in France are required to sign a charter accepting that they “will no longer be able to claim allegiance to another country while on French soil”, even though dual nationality remains tolerated […] A new law proposed by the Dutch government aims not only to limit dual nationality among immigrants (in 2011 around 20,000 people gained Dutch nationality through naturalisation) but also to make it easier for the authorities to strip members of the 850,000-plus Dutch diaspora of their nationality, should they secure a second citizenship abroad. […]

In 2008 the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank, found that almost half the world’s countries tolerate dual nationality in some form.[…] One reason for more liberalisation is practicality: dual nationality has become harder to control. Increased migration and rising numbers of cross-border marriages mean that ever more children are born to multinational families. […] Governments that take in many immigrants […] see benefits from allowing them to keep their old passports. Research suggests that immigrants who do not fear losing their existing nationality are more likely to pursue naturalisation in their adopted countries—and subsequently more likely to integrate than those who maintain long-term residence as aliens. (Whether they go on to make better or worse citizens is harder to prove.)