The Case for Enforcing Denaturalization

... The failure to enforce denaturalization law marks a sea change in the way America’s leadership classes treat citizenship. At the start of the century, America was a republic, and naturalized citizenship was conditional upon meeting a set of responsibilities agreed upon at the moment when one became a citizen. The denaturalization process followed from the failure to honor those terms...

Our denaturalization statutes are still on the books and are legally sound, even if rarely used...

Citizenship is the offer of legal and political equality... Individuals who wish to become members of the community read the terms of the offered social contract and accept them. On oath, they swear to uphold them for the rest of their lives...

First, an applicant must show good moral character...

Second, the applicant must show a genuine attachment to the principles of the U.S. Constitution.

Third, the applicant must be well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States...

Denaturalization is the corollary of Congress’s power to establish naturalization rules. The Supreme Court recognized as much in 1917: "No alien has the slightest right to naturalization unless all statutory requirements are complied with; and every certificate of citizenship must be treated as granted upon condition that the government may challenge it."...

Over a few decades, citizenship went from being conditional on government discretion to something unconditioned, thereafter secure from the executive branch. Patrick Weil, the author of the most detailed monograph on U.S. naturalization, The Sovereign Citizen, provides the standard narrative of this process...

The surest path to strengthen denaturalization is through Congress. A bold step would be for lawmakers to clarify which ideologies, groups, or loyalties demonstrate hostility to the Constitution, just as Congress did in the 1950s with the Communist Party through the McCarran Act...

Most ambitious of all would be for Congress to restore residency requirements and reterritorialize citizenship...

The large number of those U.S. citizens living abroad, particularly in China, poses risks to national security...

The tools are right in front of us, ready at hand. We just need our historical memory to remind us how they should be used.