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This chapter brings to the fore the current American perspective on taking away citizenship. In the past, expatriation was mainly enforced as a punishment for un-American activities. Even though there were only a few such instances, the publicity they attracted reinforced an ideology of belonging, sending a message about what it meant to be a good citizen–and a warning about what it could mean to fall short of that. Several decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, beginning under Chief Justice Earl Warren, shifted the benchmarks for stripping away citizenship, placing new emphasis on the intent behind expatriation. These include the rulings in Trop v. Dulles, Afroyim v. Rusk, and Vance v. Terrazas. Following the Court's decisions, the U.S. Congress changed the expatriation policy so that citizenship can be revoked only after the state has shown that there was a voluntary intent to relinquish it. This chapter offers a close look at the conflicting political and philosophical ideals that govern this approach.

This chapter brings to the fore the current American perspective on taking away citizenship. In the past, expatriation was mainly enforced as a punishment for un-American activities. Even though there were only a few such instances, the publicity they attracted reinforced an ideology of belonging, sending a message about what it meant to be a good citizen–and a warning about what it could mean to fall short of that. Several decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, beginning under Chief Justice Earl Warren, shifted the benchmarks for stripping away citizenship, placing new emphasis on the intent behind expatriation. These include the rulings in Trop v. Dulles, Afroyim v. Rusk, and Vance v. Terrazas. Following the Court's decisions, the U.S. Congress changed the expatriation policy so that citizenship can be revoked only after the state has shown that there was a voluntary intent to relinquish it. This chapter offers a close look at the conflicting political and philosophical ideals that govern this approach.

This chapter documents the shift toward toleration of dual citizenship status, beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Afroyim v. Rusk. The Warren Court came to see citizenship as a right, raising the bar to its dispossession. Justice Black’s categorical rejection of Congress’s power to “take away an American citizen’s citizenship without his assent” was not meant to protect dual citizenship, but it set in motion a series of judicial and administrative decisions that reached that destination. These moves were enabled by a shift in global relations. It was no longer imperative to maintain clear boundaries of human community. Competing claims became less incendiary as the human rights revolution constrained the ways in which states could any individual, regardless of nationality. Manpower became less important to establishing state power in the wake of military mechanization. The ideological and bipolar orientation of the Cold War helped break down old-world notions of loyalty to sovereign.