Multinational People

I’m boring. I only have one passport. I am a citizen only of the US. Everyone else seems to be collecting passports faster than they are collecting credit cards.

Getting one of those passports is not an easy thing. It seems to be required that you marry someone and then swap nationality. But what ever happened to renouncing one’s citizenship in another country when you add citizenship of one. Yes, strictly speaking, you are supposed to give up your citizenship when you become an American citizen. With a small number of exceptions, dual citizenship is not formally recognized I believe. But in practice, about half my friends have a selection of passports to choose from when traveling internationally.

And at least in some cases, the “issue” of those marriages seem to inherit those multiple citizenships. How long is it before we have a global passport, perhaps with little stamps to indicate your claimed citizenships? Or perhaps a north-south passport: a passport that indicates you are a citizen of Europe or North America, for example, and then individual passports for other countries. Or, given the trajectory of politics in the US more recently, maybe we will see the opposite: required loyalty oaths and surrendering alternative papers as the border.

This entry was posted in General and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

4 Comments

  1. Rochelle
    Posted 4/9/2008 at 12:45 pm | Permalink

    I’m sort of hoping that Canada will join the EU and I can get one of those passports. As I understand it, the US won’t allow dual citizenships, but Canada will; so Jeremy won’t need to renounce his American citizenship to become a Canadian, but I would have to renounce my Canadian citizenship if I wanted to become a US citizen. Strange, eh?

  2. Posted 4/11/2008 at 6:51 pm | Permalink

    I fear the idea of North-South passports. Those who have a South one will be likely to need a visa to enter the North.

  3. Posted 4/23/2008 at 4:41 am | Permalink

    I have friends from the US here in Aus who have dual citizenship. It doesn’t seem to be a problem these days.

  4. Simon North
    Posted 7/3/2014 at 9:35 am | Permalink

    I have three passports: British, Irish and Dutch. Strangely enough, I still get treated like a second-class citizen as if having an extra nationality was a dilution instead of an increment. I made a conscious choice to get my extra nationalities, I think that’s more genuine that acquiring a nationality by birth.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>