IMMIGRANTS TODAY LESS LIKELY TO SEVER ROOTS
By Mark Bixler
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
April 4, 2006 Tuesday
Main Edition
Leaving the United States to serve in a foreign government is
nothing new.
In the 1990s, U.S. citizens returned to their native countries
to take such jobs as Yugoslav prime minister, chief of Estonia’s
armed forces, foreign minister of Armenia and foreign minister of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. A retired administrator for the Environmental
Protection Agency left Chicago to become president of his native
Lithuania. A U.S. citizen joined the Cabinet of Mexican President
Vicente Fox.
The trend is growing, along with the number of U.S. citizens who
also hold citizenship in another country. Dual citizenship used to be
illegal in most cases, but the U.S. Supreme Court changed that in 1967.
Immigrants sometimes leave the United States to take government
jobs at home — at least two Afghans joined a new bureaucracy in
Afghanistan after the Taliban fell.
The United States is now home to more foreign-born residents —
34.2 million — than at any time in history. Thanks to the Internet
and telephones, they follow politics in their native countries much
more closely than immigrants who came in the late 1800s and early
1900s, said David Pottie, the Carter Center’s assistant director of
democracy programs.
“Once they left home,” he said of earlier immigrants, “they left.”
Kathleen Newland, director of the Migration Policy Institute in
Washington, said critics liken dual citizenship to bigamy, but she
likens it to a man who loves both his wife and his mother.
“Having multiple allegiances is increasingly common in a globalized
world,” she said.
More than 40 countries, including the United States, allow citizens
who live abroad to vote, typically by mail or in person at an embassy
or consulate. Yet last year, only 10 percent of eligible Iraqi
expatriates voted in Iraqi elections, said Richard W. Soudriette,
president of the International Foundation for Election Systems,
a Washington nonprofit agency.
In a few months, Mexican citizens in the United States will for the
first time help choose Mexico’s president, but only 75,000 met a
deadline to register even though at least 7 million live here, he said.
“The fact is that most people really do not participate,” he said.