Dual citizenship an inevitable election issue

Parviz Malakouti-fitzgerald

Does being a dual citizen mean having divided loyalties? Republican voters in Pennsylvania will have to decide that at the ballot box in today’s GOP primaries. Celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Senate candidate, is an American-turkish dual citizen — a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by his opponents.

Political attacks on Dr. Oz, based on his dual-citizenship status, belie the United States’ history as a nation of immigrants. Moreover, the United States is becoming a nation of dual citizens due to a global loosening of restrictions combined with a number of European countries heavily liberalizing citizenship by descent laws in recent years.

As more Americans become dual citizens, it’s inevitable that candidates for political office will reflect this growing demographic. To attack a candidate on these grounds is increasingly becoming an anachronism from a less globalized period. It’s also one that calls on our basest xenophobic instinct.

As a general matter, the United States has been permissive of dual citizenship since the early 1990s. Simultaneously, in the past 30 years, the world has experienced a trend toward acceptance (whether explicit or tacit) of dual citizenship. This inclination towards approval includes countries that send many immigrants to the U.S., such as Mexico, El Salvador, South Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and others.

This has two important implications. First, naturalizing U.S. citizens from most countries now automatically become dual citizens. Second, because they remain citizens of their home countries, the future children of these immigrants in most cases also become dual citizens upon their birth here. The Constitution contains no prohibition on these people from being elected to the Senate or House of Representatives so long as they fulfill the age and state residency requirements in Article I, Sections 2 and 3.

The earlier group of these people born in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s are dual citizens and are entering their 30s now. Those who oppose these future candidates based on their citizenship status will have to make the argument that someone born and raised in the United States is not necessarily “American” enough.

Questioning a candidate’s fitness for office based on his or her nationality is not sensible and it’s not American. On a feasibility level, it’s not even practical because Americans are seeking dual citizenship in adulthood.

There are ever-increasing paths to second citizenship for Americans because European countries that saw millions immigrate to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century have passed laws to welcome back the descendants of their citizens.

Since 2011, Hungary, Croatia, Czechia, Bulgaria and, most recently, Slovakia have passed laws making millions of Americans eligible for citizenship by descent. Italy and Ireland, two countries with enormous diasporas in the United States, both have older citizenship-by-descent programs generously allowing children and even great-grandchildren to qualify. Collectively, tens of millions of Americans qualify for dual citizenship under these programs.

Americans are taking these opportunities, and it’s a trend I expect to accelerate as more people in the U.S. become aware of their eligibility for a second nationality. These are Americans adapting to a mobile world with people who move around and integrate in additional communities. To exclude or discredit them as political candidates would obviously reduce our qualified candidate pool for higher office.

If Dr. Oz and other dual-citizen candidates are going to be attacked, it should be over policy beliefs, not dual nationality. In the coming years, criticizing a candidate for being a dual citizen will become archaic — an outdated concern ill-fitted for the reality of a United States with millions of dual citizens.

Parviz Malakouti-fitzgerald is a Los Angeles-based immigration attorney, former adjunct professor at Nevada State College, and a dual U.s.-iranian citizen.