On November 26, after I’d spent hundreds of dollars obtaining certified documents and a considerable amount of time agonizing over the status of my application, FedEx delivered the piece of paper I had spent three years waiting for: confirmation of my acquisition of German citizenship by descent. But less than a week later, I learned that some Midwestern car salesman turned senator wants to take that away from me and millions of other Americans.
On December 1, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio announced new legislation, the Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025, which would ban dual citizenship, a move that followed months of agitation against dual citizenship by far-right podcasters. Under the bill, Americans who acquire the nationality of other countries would “be deemed to have relinquished United States citizenship,” while those who already had it would have a year to renounce it or else lose U.S. citizenship. “Existing law allows certain United States Citizens to maintain foreign citizenship, which may create conflicts of interest and divided loyalties,” the bill states, and “it is in the national interest of the United States to ensure that United States citizenship is held exclusively.”
Here in a place called “reality,” my dual citizenship in no way threatens America’s national interests and is actually none of Moreno’s business. Ditto for the multiple citizenships of children born to American parents on foreign soil, descendants of immigrants from various countries, and Black Americans connecting with their heritage through citizenship-by-descent programs from certain African nations. That I can belt out a rendition of “Das Lied der Deutschen” that’s just as sappy as “The Star-Spangled Banner” does not aid or comfort America’s enemies. The fact that I am one among many everyday Americans with multiple citizenships has as much to do with Moreno as what we eat for breakfast or the colors of our curtains.
But the fact that a sitting U.S. senator saw fit to introduce such a bill in the first place speaks to an ugly strain in American society of blood-and-soil nationalism, xenophobic paranoia, and the puritanical delusion that other people’s private lives are somehow detrimental to the rest of society.
For all the busybodied handwringing over the supposed threat posed by dual citizens like little old me, one hardly needs multiple citizenships to work against the interests of the United States. One of the far-right agitators for a dual-citizenship ban, Benny Johnson, allegedly helped spread Russian disinformation (he claims he was duped into it), while many Americans with no obvious additional nationalities have spied for China. By contrast, I have harshly criticized people who spread pro-Kremlin propaganda and Russian colonial narratives, and despite fond memories of my three years in China, I loathe the tyrannical regime that rules it and would never spy on its behalf. So maybe John and Jane Q. Public dual citizens are not the people Moreno should be worried about.
At any rate, legal scholars have said the bill is unconstitutional and unlikely to pass, and it appears deeply unpopular even among Moreno’s constituents. While trusting precedent in the hands of today’s Supreme Court may be unwise, in two landmark decisions—1967’s Afroyim v. Rusk and 1980’s Vance v. Terrazas—the court has ruled that Americans can have multiple nationalities and can’t be deprived of U.S. citizenship without their consent. Nevertheless, the nationalist sentiments that led to Moreno’s bill, however irrational, still have currency among some Americans, even liberals, which demands scrutiny.
Though Moreno’s justifications may seem superficially principled, they are based on purely hypothetical abstractions rooted in fearmongering and cornball sentimentalism rather than the real lives of real people.
Particularly when applied to Jews, “divided loyalties” is also a longtime antisemitic trope that hints at the dark undertones never far beneath the surface of opposition to dual citizenship. Moreno confirmed to NBC’s Sahil Kapur that his bill would apply to U.S.-Israeli dual citizens. It should come as no surprise that far-right antisemites like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson are among those who have joined the call for this ban. Those on the right and left inveighing against dual citizenship have disproportionately directed their ire at real or imagined Israeli Americans based on the incorrect assumption that American Jews—particularly those in elected office—have Israeli nationality.
In reality, Jews are not automatically born with Israeli citizenship and can only obtain it under the Law of Return by physically going to Israel, which can be cumbersome and expensive, may entail military service, and often involves emigration. Only a small minority of American Jews have actually gone through the process: There are no clear data, but estimates by outlets like The Jerusalem Post suggest that the number of American Jews who have obtained Israeli citizenship is in the low six digits, while the total number of Jewish people in the U.S. is as high as 7.5 million.
Moreno’s bill would also adversely affect figures within and close to the Trump administration like Turkish American Mehmet Oz, South African Canadian American Elon Musk, and Trump’s Slovenian American wife and youngest son, as well as many GOP voters and donors. Consider too the irony of native-born Americans—who would presumably include Revolutionary War descendants, people with Native American heritage, and descendants of enslaved Black people whose ancestors obtained citizenship via the Fourteenth Amendment—losing U.S. citizenship at the whims of a Colombian immigrant.
Americans inclined to support Moreno’s bill should also ask themselves if they’re comfortable with the kind of company our country would find itself in if it passed.
The vast majority of countries in the Americas and the West allow dual citizenship in some form, and while some may restrict who can have it, hardly any ban it entirely. Japan’s ban makes it an outlier, but it rarely enforces the rule, especially for those born with multiple nationalities. The global trend has been toward liberalization, with democratic nations like South Korea and Ukraine, and even some nondemocratic ones like Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates, loosening their laws in recent years.
So which countries ban dual citizenship completely? China, Singapore, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Brunei, Myanmar, and all Gulf Cooperation Council member states except the UAE, to name a few.
Notice a pattern? Most democratic nations allow dual citizenship. Most of the countries that ban it to enforce narrow-minded visions of “national loyalty” are under authoritarian regimes, sort of like the one the MAGA right is trying to establish here.
Summarily stripping people of citizenship, as Moreno’s bill would do, is likewise an authoritarian move. In 1967, the Greek military junta revoked the citizenship of actress Melina Mercouri for criticizing the regime. In 1905, the Kingdom of Bavaria stripped Donald Trump’s grandfather of citizenship and deported him for emigrating illegally.
Wanting to ban dual citizenship on the premise that it creates divided loyalty springs from the same type of puritanical paranoia behind far-right efforts to ban same-sex marriage on the premise that it supposedly harms the institution of marriage as a whole. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself in arguments with right-wingers who wax philosophical about the dangers of allowing two men or two women to marry but can’t name one demonstrable harm that it causes. Moreno and his far-right propagandist inspirers operate under the same modus operandi: They subordinate the empirical to the imaginary. It’s just another version of the “ick” factor dressed up as logic.
What you have are people instinctively disconcerted at anything unfamiliar to them—whether that’s marriage between two people of the same sex or someone having the citizenship of multiple countries—and who concoct political arguments and legislation to put a veneer of reason on their panicked emotional state. Moreno’s bill is, at heart, classic vibes-based policymaking.
Such a vibes-based policy would cause very real harm to millions of Americans and to the U.S. itself. To understand how, it’s helpful to have some knowledge of how nationality laws work.
There are two main principles that form the basis of nationality laws worldwide: jus soli, or law of the soil, and jus sanguinis, or law of the blood. Derived from English common law and prevalent in most countries in the Americas, including the U.S., jus soli is what Americans often call “birthright citizenship” and means that one acquires a country’s citizenship through birth on its sovereign soil. Jus sanguinis comes from the Napoleonic Code and is the basis of nationality laws in most of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It confers citizenship at birth via one or both parents, often irrespective of birthplace.
The nationality laws of most jus soli countries, including the U.S., have elements of jus sanguinis, such as granting citizenship to children of citizens born abroad. At the same time, jus sanguinis countries’ laws often result in children born in jus soli countries acquiring dual citizenship at birth. And many jus sanguinis countries—particularly in Europe—consider certain descendants of emigrants to be citizens, meaning that many Americans may unknowingly already have European citizenship or at least the eligibility for it.
What would Moreno’s bill mean for them? Or for those who use dual citizenship to study, work, retire, or invest in other countries? Or who have spouses and children with a mix of nationalities?
Millions of Americans in these situations would quickly find their lives upended under Moreno’s proposal, and for no good reason.
Many more dual citizens will happily throw their American passports in the trash, if forced to choose, to avoid the hassles that come from being citizens of the only major country that imposes taxes based on citizenship rather than residency in the country. Others prefer living abroad as other countries offer better quality of life, better upward mobility, and saner politics. There’s a reason “the new American dream is to leave America.” All those Americans taking their money and talents elsewhere would greatly damage the American economy.
Reforming the U.S. tax code so that only people who actually live and earn an income in the United States have to file with the IRS—which Trump, in a rare broken-clock moment, has even proposed—would bring our laws up to speed with those of pretty much every other country except the East African dictatorship of Eritrea and encourage more dual citizens abroad to keep U.S. citizenship. Moreno’s proposal would be a massive step backward and would make U.S. citizenship far less attractive.
But then again, policies that prioritize nationalist sentimentalism and ideological dogma over practical reality tend to cause economic damage. That has been quite visible in the U.K. in the aftermath of Brexit, one of whose chief backers, far-right politician Nigel Farage, also wants to ban Britons from having dual citizenship.
The U.K. and U.S. both are experiencing declining living standards and quality of life for the average person, hence many citizens of both countries looking to emigrate. Acquiring dual citizenship—which, to be sure, is an enormous privilege that most people don’t enjoy and which often draws envy and resentment, particularly with the current American political climate—makes emigration easier. Banning dual citizenship makes it easier to bring emigration to a halt. Whether encumbering people from leaving is either Moreno’s or Farage’s goal is unclear, but it would certainly be an effect.
What is clear is that countries that are on the up and up, self-assured, and optimistic about the future don’t usually need to coerce citizens to stay by resorting to petty, nationalistic stunts like laws to ban dual citizenship, which accomplish nothing but massaging fragile egos.
