Saturday, July 29, 2006

Dual citizenship: points to keep in mind

With the recent evacuation of Canadian citizens from Lebanon, there has been some debate on Canada's policies on dual citizenship. Coincidentally, I recently did some research on dual citizenship, and learned a number of interesting things that I haven't seen mentioned in this debate:

1. Some countries don't have a mechanism for renouncing citizenship. It simply cannot be done. There is no enabling legal statute, their computers simply do not allow a citizen to be deleted from the database, basically you can't renounce your citizenship any more than you can walk into city hall and buy a fish licence for your pet fish, Eric. Some people have brought up the idea of requiring new Canadian citizens to renounce any other citizenships. But what would happen if the other country didn't recognize the renunciation?

2. In some countries, citizenship is automatically hereditary. Any child of a citizen is also a citizen. This means that there may be some dual citizens walking around who don't even know that they are dual citizens. From a more pratical perspective, it is quite possible for someone to be born in Canada and inherit a citizenship from an immigrant parent, but not speak the language of the old country since they have lived all their lives in Canada. Since not all countries publish their citizen information in English or French, these unwilling dual citizens would not even be able to do the research to learn whether they are dual citizens and how or if they can renounce their other citizenship. (Realistically, the parent may well be able to help, but we can't make policy that assumes everyone's parents are living and willing and able to help them.)

3. Parents deal with citizenship issues on behalf of their minor children. I don't know the details here, but if a couple with young children immigrates, no one is going to ask, say, a six-year-old to take the citizenship exam and the oath. Teenagers maybe, I'm not sure, but simple logic dictates that parents must be able to act on their children's behalf for citizenship as with any other legal matter. If the whole citizenship thing happens when the kid is too young to understand, and they've been a Canadian citizen as long as they can remember, they may well not think to look into their old country citizenship status. I myself know some people who immigrated as children, have been Canadian citizens for decades, and only recently learned that they still hold old country citizenship after being informed that they might by someone else in the same position.

These sound like minor exceptional cases, but we need to take them into consideration when making dual citizenship policies - especially since they can occur in combination.

Picture this: a family immigrates and becomes Canadian citizens when their children are young. The children grow up and have children in Canada, with these children automatically being Canadian citizens. The children grow up, the grandparents (i.e. the original adult immigrants) pass away. However, unbeknownst to any of the survivors (and perhaps to the grandparents, since they didn't have internet when they immigrated), the old country has hereditary citizenship with no way of renouncing it. So one of the Canadian-born generation travels to the old country on a classic 20-something journey of self-discovery, when disaster strikes and they need to be evacuated. But guess what? They can't be evacuated because it turns out they're a citizen of the old country, even though they're born in Canada, in Old Country for the first time in their life, and hardly even speak the language!

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