I would say that a head of government having dual citizenship is not a great look anyway.
It is also easier to get visas for other countries using a usian passport.
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For now, anyway.
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No, it isn’t. It’s grounds for disqualification in Australia, even for the Senate, I think. (“Wait, that wasn’t supposed to apply to British citizenship, just those other places!”)
Now that Scheer lost, and is out as Conservative leader, I wonder if he’ll follow through on dropping his US citizenship?
Or do pre-flight US customs clearance like in major Canadian centres. (Which gives US customs people ridiculous powers on Canadian soil, like detaining you, even if you withdraw your request to enter the states.)
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I am coming at this from an odd perspective. My family has been in the United States since before it was the United States. Yet, I have family members who have immigrated and emigrated. I have a lot of friends who have immigrated… and some who have emigrated.
Read through this thread. Remember, this is a pretty progressive site. Our attitudes to immigrants… well, suck. Everyone thinks they are scamming the system or refugees or seeking asylum or can’t be successful in their old countries. Good ol’ America, Plan of the B.
Our immigration is completely screwed up because we don’t let enough people in. At this point, it’s so hard to get in that not only do only desperate people try it, but it breaks almost everyone who does it.
And we forget that Immigration is how we make our country better. Fresh ideas; fresh skills; fresh blood; fresh eyes on our problems. It increases our diversity, which makes us stronger.
We need to stop thinking about immigration as a charity and start thinking about it as a way to welcome new people in. We need a flow of people from all over the world. Yes, we need to help refugees and people who are running away from things - but we also need to help people who aren’t running away from anything but running to something.
And frankly, we need to export people too. We need to send Americans to other countries; some for good, some to work there for a bit and come back. We need to stop treating national borders as fortresses and start allowing for circulation.
Edit: Note to be clear: by breaks almost everyone who does it, I mean it is exceptionally financially draining and normally requires at least a few years before they get back on their feet and have financial success and recover. I have seen a lot of immigrants go on to build great lives for themselves here.
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Ohmygosh! The uppity crone in me is hoping they’ll ask when I’m on my way back from Iceland this coming summer.
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I agree. Those screaming and shouting about this are concerned over their racist and mysogynistic agenda.
However in the background it has grown from a complete non-issue to a resource issue in certain areas. So there is a problem of dealing with the public resource impact (well here - not sure if the US considers their health care infrastructure a public resource) without the screaming xenophobes getting their way.
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days now, after I read about this from a news alert. The idea is to ban ‘birth tourism’ which, according to sources, is mainly happening from China. Apparently, there are tour agents that organize ‘birth tourism’ vacations for women who have the means to do this and the desire to secure US citizenship for their child. The reason the US Gov was considering banning ‘birth tourism’ is due to national security reasons (aren’t all reasons tied to national security? /s).
What would that look like?, I asked myself. Only thing I came up with is something like this: If the US allows thousands (millions?) of babies to get their birthright citizenship, and their mom/family takes them back to live and grow up in their ‘home’ country with absolutely zero ties to the US, there can be potentially thousands (millions?) of potential spies who can easily flit back and forth across the oceans. These potential spies would have access to not only the US Citizen line at the passport check at the airport, but possibly jobs in the US that are only open to citizens. Citizenship is more than just carrying that blue passport; comes with all kinds of rights and privileges. And responsibilities.
As far as these babies-turn-kids-turn-teenagers-turn-adults filing US taxes as was suggested here on this board, how does that get tracked, especially from the beginning (ie, birth)? Babies these days born in the US get a social security number straight away, so does the Social Security Administration send letters to China, keeping in touch with them? Probably… not?
I’m assuming that these tourist birthed citizens also get (let’s say) Chinese citizenship, so this takes me back to my question about the topic of dual citizenship. That never squared in my head, even with some kind folks here on BB who tried to help me understand. I think where I get stuck is somewhere around that line in the oath that naturalized US citizens have to recite where it goes into “renouncing and abjuring all allegiance… to any foreign…state.” I dunno, maybe it’s just me, something else that I just won’t ever get. (But kind of a different topic, I realize.)
(Edit for clarifications.)
Google how hard it is to actually renounce your US Citizenship… it’s a lot harder than you would imagine.
Dual Citizenship just means that you hold citizenship rights (and responsibilities) to two countries.
For instance, imagine someone who was born in Panama, in the Canal zone, to a US serviceman stationed in that country and his wife. (Or to a US Serviceman stationed in that country and her husband; for that matter. Either way.) The child is born on a US base in a US hospital on land leased by the USA (at the time). To the US government, the child has American parents and was born in the USA, so is obviously a US citizen. To the Panamanian Government, the child (say a baby girl) was born in Panama and is thus a Panamanian citizen. 30 years later, she gives birth to a child; he’s born in the USA, to American citizen parents; so the US government clearly identifies him as a US citizen. However, all he has to do to claim his Panamanian citizenship is mail a copy of his birth certificate showing that he was born to a Panamanian citizen to the Panamanian government, who is happy to certify him as a citizen too - even if he never steps foot in Panama.
Why would he do this? Perhaps he wants to go to Panama; it is a lovely country, after all. Perhaps he wants to tour South America and feels better doing that on a Panamanian Passport. Perhaps he wants to visit Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Where?
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What now?
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Of note is that 40% of posts on that thread (and 75% of the Undocumented Americans thread) were from me. The reason that I started those threads is that issues related to the persecution of immigrants were going almost totally unmentioned in the main discussion.
Although BB is not a Trumpian cesspit, there are few here who had any overt objection to mass deportation, ICE manhunts and Border Patrol murderousness when Obama was running the show. And I expect that there are still plenty here who see the deportation of most undocumented Americans as a desirable thing, and even more who see the formal creation of a non-citizen guestworker underclass as an acceptable compromise.
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Nope. It’s pay to play.
Doesn’t it can also happen with citizenship by blood, i.e., one of your parents is american but you were born in a different country, and your parents are not that sympathetic to the US?
I’m not sure about the exact details about the US, but doesn’t those critical jobs allowed only for citizens also require a background check?
From what I understand, this process is not transparent and if there was really a problem with those dual-citizens exfiltrating information from their privileged positions, the dual citizens would automatically be banned from those positions.
I’m also not sure how hard is it to find citizens (not dual-citizens) to help a foreign organization in detriment of their own government, with or without they knowledge of the real intent of their actions.
It might have made sense to have more trust on your own citizens before the internet when it was much more costly to recruit someone from overseas, but now it seem cheaper than raising a spy from birth for maybe having an asset in 20~30 years.
IIRC, North Korea allegedly has such a program, but I all have seen about it focused on the scary side of maybe someone who looks like you is a NK spy than on the real results obtained.
Call me cynic, but this oath, as any other oath, sound only like empty words or a ritual people have no choice but perform to be able to get some rights.
It seems that it works more to have a more solid proof that someone knew that they shouldn’t do something unlawful than to really deter those actions.
My impression is that a US passport would be better for dealing with official entities (immigration, police), except maybe for Venezuela, and the choice between passing as an American or Panamanian would depend on who you are interacting with, the US passport opens doors and the Panamanian make you less vulnerable to people who see an American as automatically rich and exploitable.
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