Citizenship Round-Up: Nine Trends from 2013

Citizenship practice and policy is mostly below the news radar; change is slow; and the field tends not to be reported in any sort of integrated way. So here are the key threads from 2013 and how they might spin out in 2014.

1. Citizenship is not priceless.  A growing number of states are selling citizenship. Malta is the latest. EU citizenship can be yours for 1.15mn Euros. Hungary, Spain, and Portugal now offer permanent residency in return for smaller investments in residential property, which can lead to citizenship in short order; and Cyprus tossed consolation passports to foreigners who lost more than three million Euros in the country’s banking collapse. The trend has been somewhat predictably lamented by liberal nationalists (see this forum, for example, on EUI’s excellent citizenship observatory site, with a lead contribution from Ayelet Shachar), but look for other states to cash in on a commodity that has no effective marginal cost. Will 2014 see a passport price war?

2. Even the Germans can live with dual citizenship. Americans will have a hard time understanding how big a flashpoint dual citizenship has been in German politics over the last 15 years. As a condition for remaining a part of Angela Merkel’s coalition after recent elections, Social Democrats secured the elimination of the so-called “option model” that had required German-born dual nationals to renounce one or the other by age 23. Dual Turkish-German citizens living in Germany are the big winners. If Germans can live with dual citizenship, any country can. Expect the dramatic trend towards acceptance of the status to move into its mopping up stage, with remaining holdouts (e.g., Japan) giving up their old-world jealousies.

3. American no more. 2013 saw a continued uptick in the number of individuals renouncing U.S. citizenship, with Tina Turner following in the footsteps of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, along with thousands of ordinary Americans living abroad. Taxes supply the clear motivation, as much the burdensome administrative requirements imposed by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) as the payment obligations themselves. Expat websites are aflame with outraged citizens ready to cut the cord. Expect this story to get closer to the front burner as FATCA enforcement kicks in during 2014. Do external Americans have enough political clout to repulse this IRS juggernaut?

4. Foreigners have privacy rights, too. In the NSA’s massive post-9/11 surveillance apparatus, it was open season on non-citizens outside the United States. With good jurisprudential reason: the Supreme Court (in Verdugo-Urquidez) squarely held that non-resident foreigners have no Fourth Amendment rights against the U.S. government. But that understanding is under pressure from other quarters. There’s the prospect of an international right to privacy. That won’t have much effect on America’s spymasters, at least not in the short run. The President’s NSA review board might be more influential. Its recent report called for substantial limitations on eavesdropping on foreigners (see pages 155-56). It will be interesting to see whether Obama buys in.

5. A human right to citizenship. The Dominican Republic came under withering human rights fire after its Supreme Court declared Dominican-born individuals of undocumented parents (almost all Haitian) not to enjoy Dominican citizenship. The ruling leaves 200,000 effectively stateless. Those crying foul included the major human rights groups, the UN, major powers, the Caribbean Community, and the Dominican diaspora. Expect the DR to reverse course during the coming year or face some material consequences. Other states are also coming under increasing scrutiny for rights-problematic citizenship practices. The Gulf States are getting more bad press for their notoriously ungenerous naturalization laws. Notwithstanding significant goodwill in the wake of the transition to democracy, Burma is not getting a free pass on its continuing refusal to facilitate citizenship for the Rohingyas. Human rights-based citizenship claims are clearly on the upswing, a context in which sovereignty once supplied a trumping defense.

6. Obama’s gives up on The New Citizenship. President Obama centered citizenship as a theme in a number of high profile speeches, including the trifecta of his nomination acceptance speech, his second inaugural address, and the State of the Union. In his words, citizenship “describes the way we’re made. It describes what we believe. It captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.” Lofty rhetoric, but nobody seemed to notice. Don’t expect any more stabs at this one. Much as he would like it to, this will not go down as the defining label of the Obama Presidency.

7. Ted Cruz may be a Canadian, but he is eligible for the presidency. There’s a delicious irony in the fact that the candidate most attractive to Obama-obsessed birthers himself has a much bigger question-mark relating to presidential eligibility. But even though Ted Cruz was born in Canada (and holds Canadian citizenship as a result), he is almost certainly eligible to run for president as a “natural born” U.S. citizen, holding citizenship at birth through his mother. Cruz says he has applied for termination of his Canadian citizenship. Expect the questions to linger if his candidacy looks viable; it’s just too easy a poke in the Tea Party gullet.

8. The path to legal residency matters more than the path to citizenship. At least among those affected, namely, 11-13 million undocumented aliens in the United States, as evidenced in a Pew Hispanic Center poll and reported by Julia Preston in a NYT story here. This can’t be surprising, since the main drawback of being out of status is locational insecurity. So why the persistence of the popular political tagline, “a path to citizenship”? It plays better for political proponents of regularization by lending their agenda a high-minded civic orientation. It also seems required by American notions of equality: we can’t just give undocumented aliens permanent residence insofar as it would offend baseline equality norms. Could reform advocates cave on this in 2014 if it presents the only path to a deal? Maybe.

9. Recementing ties to long-lost brothers and sisters. Spain followed through on its 2012 promise to extend citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain half a millennium ago. Though meaningful ties persist (including in a still-living language spoken by Sephardi), one might wonder if the Spanish government was looking to capitalize on somewhat tenuous ties to its economic advantage, granting citizenship to nonresidents at the same time residents (Moroccans, for example) face significant obstacles to naturalization. More controversially, Hungary moved ahead with policies to extend citizenship — and the vote — to nationalistic co-ethnics in neighboring Slovakia and Romania supportive of the right-wing government in Budapest. Look for more countries to strategically relax requirements for citizenship by descent as they increasingly see diaspora populations as an economic and/or political resource.

And a couple to watch for 2014: what would be the UK/EU citizenship mechanics of Scottish independence; will increasingly common birth tourism packages revive efforts to scale back birthright citizenship in the US; and how will citizenships of convenience play out in the Sochi Olympics. Happy New Year!