Latest / IMI Podcasts / Is America About to Ban Dual Citizenship?

Transcript

Is America About to Ban Dual Citizenship? · IMI Podcasts

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: An immigrant US senator has filed a bill that would force every American with a second passport to pick one nationality or lose both.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: You'd have 12 months to decide.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: The bill is called the Exclusive Citizenship Act.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: The reason this bill is dead on arrival has nothing to do with American politics.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's really because 76% of the world's countries have already moved in the opposite direction, and that trend has been accelerating for 60 years.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does this trend in dual citizenship mean for you and your plans for multiple identities in multiple countries?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: IMI did the research.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: But before we cover that, let's start with context for this conversation.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: In December 2025, Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno introduced the Exclusive Citizenship Act to ban Americans from holding dual citizenship.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Existing dual citizens would choose one nationality, either American or one of their other citizenships, or the US government forfeits their American passport for them.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: This contradicts US Supreme Court precedent going back to 1967.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: In a Freyan v.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Rusk, the court ruled the government cannot strip citizenship from an American without their consent.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Nearly 60 years of settled law.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the enforcement issue.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: The US government doesn't even track who holds dual citizenship.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Estimates range from 500,000 to 5.7 million American dual citizens.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Some analysis suggests over 40 million Americans may qualify for a second citizenship through ancestry alone.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can't enforce a ban on something you can't measure.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: If this bill somehow passed, it would place the United States alongside China, the Gulf States, and a shrinking handful of countries that still restrict dual nationality.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: GovTrack's forecasting model gives Moreno's bill a 3% chance of enactment.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: That number tells you what Congress thinks of its prospects.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: But what makes the bill truly remarkable is how it runs against 60 years of global momentum.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: According to the Macamide Global Expatriate Dual Citizenship Dataset from Maastricht University, which tracks 200 countries going back to 1960, more than 76% of countries on Earth now allow their citizens to hold a second nationality without losing the first.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: In 1960, only about 38% of countries accepted dual citizenship.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: By 1990, roughly 50%.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: By 2000, around 60%, and by 2020, 76%.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: In this dataset, researchers tracked 75 policy changes, of which 85% were litations.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: What took centuries to build, the single citizenship orthodoxy, took about 30 years to take apart, and four forces drove it.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: First, gender equality in nationality law.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Once countries allowed mothers to pass citizenship to their children, the number of people born with two nationalities rose immediately and automatically.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Punishing people for something they didn't choose became indefensible.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Second, diaspora politics.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Much of Latin America moved in a single decade.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Colombia reformed in 1991, the Dominican Republic in 1994, Costa Rica and Ecuador in 1995, Brazil in 1996, Mexico in 1998.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Overseas communities refused to choose between political belonging at home and practical integration abroad.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, they demanded both.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Third, regional diffusion.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers found countries were far more likely to liberalize if their neighbors already had.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Peer pressure, it turns out, works on nation states too.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth, the end of the Cold War when military conflict between states was routine.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Dual nationality raised questions about battlefield loyalties.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Once that fear faded, the strongest argument for restriction went with it.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: So the global liberalization trend is not new, but you're probably wondering which major countries recently changed their rules.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Germany's June 2024 reform was the most consequential shift.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: The country eliminated the requirement that naturalizing immigrants renounced their existing citizenship and cut the residency requirements from eight to five years.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: As a result, record naturalizations followed.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: South Africa's constitutional court struck down automatic revocation in May 2025, retroactive all the way to 1995.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Nigeria, Liberia in 2022, and Malawi in 2019 all joined the permissive column.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Remember when we said 85% of policy changes were liberalizations?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: That leaves another 15% who are still holdouts from dual citizenship.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: China officially prohibits dual citizenship, though enforcement is selective.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone in the investment migration market can tell you that demand from Chinese nationals for second passports is among the highest in the world.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Japan formally requires dual nationals to choose only one nationality by age 2022, but enforcement has been inconsistent.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia don't recognize it either, making Southeast Asia one of the most restrictive regions.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Austria allows dual citizenship only where it arises involuntarily.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: The GCC states all formally prohibit it.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: But this group is getting smaller and smaller by the year.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: The IMI citizenship catalogue maps exactly where every country stands on dual citizenship policy.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Link is in the description if you want to check your country.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, dual citizenship policy sometimes is just pure geopolitics.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Slovakia's 2010 restriction is the sharpest reversal in the entire dataset.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: On the same day Hungary offered simplified naturalization to ethnic Hungarians living abroad, Slovakia, home to roughly 500,000 ethnic Hungarians, decreed that any citizen who voluntarily acquired another nationality would lose Slovak citizenship.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: The law was partially relaxed in 2022, but the core restriction holds.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, geopolitics can create exceptions, but exceptions don't reverse a six-decade trend line.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: While there are many ways to obtain alternative citizenships, including by birth, by descent, by exception, by marriage, and by naturalization, the one for which you're likely watching this channel is by investment.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Citizenship by investment or CBI programs exist because people want to add a nationality, not swap one.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Every Caribbean CBI program, for example, St.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, Granada, Antiwa, and Babuda, St.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Lucia, recognizes dual citizenship.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Without that recognition, these programs will be functionally unworkable.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Very few investors acquire a Caribbean passport to surrender the one they already have.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: The same logic applies to golden visa programs in Europe, Portugal, Greece, Malta, Italy.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: They all work because you can layer this new residency or eventual citizenship on top of your existing nationality.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Global acceptance of dual citizenship is the structural foundation this entire market is built on, and the relationship runs both ways.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Every time a CBI program grants citizenship to someone who has never set foot in the country and nothing bad comes of it, the case for restriction gets a little weaker.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: The programs themselves are part of the engine driving acceptance forward.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Senator Moreno's bill has a 3% chance of passing.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: It contradicts decades of Supreme Court precedent.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: The US government has no way to identify most dual citizens, let alone force them to choose.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it runs against a global consensus that is stronger today than at any point in history.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: The holdouts are becoming fewer and more isolated.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And for anyone building a multi-passport strategy, that is the most important structural fact of all.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you're interested in expanding your mobility and options across the globe, maybe Citizenship by Investment is in your future.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Apart from the 15 to 20 active Citizenship by Investment programs globally now, the video on your screen now will walk you through all citizenship by investment programs that are planned or forthcoming.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: To get a jump on what's next, watch this video and subscribe to the channel so we know you appreciate this content and we can continue making it for you.