For decades, new Americans have had to take the citizen’s oath, which begins, “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject . . .”
True, the wording is a bit archaic, but it is also rather eloquent. At any rate, the oath’s intention is abundantly clear to all who become an “American.” Their loyalties and allegiance now lie in one place alone. The only problem is that it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
This winter–in a little-reported act that will change the United States–the Mexican government unilaterally put through a new provision of its citizenship laws allowing any American born in Mexico or born to a Mexican national to claim “dual nationality.” This means a Mexican-American can now also be a Mexican national and carry both passports. (Other countries, such as Lithuania, Poland, Israel and Colombia, also allow dual nationality.)
Since the act on March 20, hundreds of American citizens have applied at Mexican consulates to claim what is essentially a form of dual loyalty. Mexico expects at least 3 million of an estimated 5 million eligible Mexican-Americans (out of a total of 20 million of Mexican origin) to avail themselves of this curious anti-citizenship choice.
The arguments being put forward for it here are interesting indeed.
The possibility of holding dual nationality with Mexico will make it “easier for procrastinators” to finally get citizenship (says the director of the California Hispanic Resource Council in Sacramento) and keep new citizens “honest” by not forcing them to make an oath they didn’t intend to keep anyway. Dual nationality will be part of a “strategy of enlarging global democracy” and spreading American values outward (Peter J. Spiro, immigration law specialist at Hofstra University).
After offering these ideas and many more for essentially watering down American allegiance and sovereignty, the pro-open borders lobby inevitably states that, after all, there is no danger of conflict between the United States and Mexico, so why not make everybody happy?
But who will fight for what and whom if some future Mexican government or some radical Mexican-American revanchist group claims the Southwest they lost in 1848? What will happen if the Colombia-Mexican drug mafias totally take over the north of Mexico, as they are close to doing, and use these “dual nationals” to further infiltrate drugs into the United States across a border that by then has become irrelevant?
The immediate problem that the pro-dual nationality forces and the utopian globalizers alike miss is the degree to which our policies of encouraging ethnic “cultural identity” are leading to nationalistic separatism and to a radicalization of immigration. (To cite two examples, In Albuquerque recently, the radical Mexican student group MECha, or the Aztlan Chicano Student Movement, has been behind rabidly anti-American teaching in the schools, while in New Mexico, Hispanic-Americans are trying to get back in the courts lands lost from the U.S. after the Mexican-American War of 1848.)
The next step in this whole sorry drama will unquestionably be for Mexican and other Latin American political candidates to campaign among these constituencies, particularly dual nationals, in the United States. (Some already are.) It will become inevitable for Mexican-American dual nationals to vote in Mexico and finally be required to serve in the Mexican military (there are already bills in the Mexican congress that would require this).
And so, instead of the American utopians’ dream of dual nationality spreading American principles to their wonderful “globalized world,” it will be others’ principles that are spread to America. Just ask Rome.
