True Enough

A new bill from Senator Bernie Moreno would force millions to choose between passports in a dramatic departure from precedent that critics say is impractical, outdated and potentially unconstitutional.

The Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025, introduced on 3 December, would require all dual or multiple nationals to surrender their foreign citizenships within 12 months or risk losing their American citizenship. In announcing the bill, Moreno claimed that dual nationality creates “conflicts of interest” and poses a “national security concern,” insisting that Americans should hold “sole and exclusive allegiance” to the United States.

The proposal exposes a growing disconnect between an increasingly globalised population and a strain of nationalist policymaking that seeks to define loyalty through bureaucratic purity tests, destabilising millions of legal citizens in the process.

If enacted, the legislation would place the U.S. among the most restrictive countries in the world regarding multiple nationalities. While countries such as China, India and Japan prohibit dual citizenship, most Western democracies including the UK, Canada, France and Brazil continue to permit it.

Under current U.S. law, dual citizenship is widely accepted. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that Americans cannot be stripped of citizenship without voluntarily relinquishing it, and naturalisation procedures do not require applicants to renounce their existing nationalities. Moreno’s proposal would mark a significant departure from this precedent, affecting not only naturalised citizens but also U.S.-born dual nationals, children who automatically acquired another citizenship through their parents, Americans with foreign nationality obtained through marriage, and citizens born abroad to American parents.

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, more than 818,000 people were naturalised in 2024, the vast majority of whom retained their original nationality, often for pragmatic reasons. “It would affect people whose work, education or family ties span multiple countries,” an Ohio immigration attorney told the Ohio Capital Journal, noting that the bill would overwhelmingly impact ordinary citizens rather than the influential minority it allegedly aims to target.

Implementation may prove equally fraught. Countries like Brazil impose strict limits on
renunciation, while others refuse to allow certain groups such as minors or those with military obligations to renounce citizenship at all. When foreign governments decline to process renunciations, it is unclear how U.S. authorities would compel compliance.

Dual citizenship has risen sharply over the past decade. A 2024 report found that more Americans have pursued second citizenship or residency rights since the pandemic, often citing mobility, employment opportunities and family obligations abroad. Younger adults tend to view multiple nationalities as functional tools for navigating global life rather than symbolic statements of ideological identity, thus making Moreno’s stance appear outdated and out of sync with demographic trends.

Critics also argue that the proposal ignores global policy shifts. Countries with large
diasporas, including Portugal, Italy and Ireland, have recently expanded their eligibility for dual citizenship to strengthen diaspora ties and encourage return migration, treating multiple nationality as a strategic asset rather than a liability.

The bill has not yet been scheduled for a hearing, and it remains unclear how much support it will attract. Previous attempts to limit dual nationality have failed, and constitutional experts question whether automatically treating non-compliant dual nationals as having “voluntarily relinquished” their citizenship could survive judicial scrutiny. For now, the proposal has reopened a broader debate in Washington: what does American citizenship mean in the 21st century, when mixed-nationality families, global mobility and transnational workforces are the norm, even as political rhetoric narrows the definition of national allegiance?