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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

Multiple-citizenship has always been fascinating to me. For example, most countries oaths of citizenship are worded in such a way that preclude loyalty split between them and another, yet they don't prevent or punish their citizens for holding dual citizenship.

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The Canadians citizenship ceremony to me was fascinating, because it begins with an aboriginal land acknowledgement.

The statement is quite literally "the very ground we're standing on doesn't even belong to us, but here we are saying that you are a citizen of . . . clearly not the land".

Their demographic experiment is also very interesting. About 10% of all Canadians don't actually live in Canada - that is an extremely large ratio. It is also a growing number, and as housing prices and lack of economic opportunity continue to drag, more Canadians leave. At the same time, the Canadian government is desperate to ignore these issues, and just bringing as many immigrants as possible so they can prop the housing market since it is the last bastion of their economy and accounts for a third of GDP when you factor in related services and industries. That was pre-COVID so now it's quite likely to be even larger.

It's a generational revolving door of immigrating, getting citizenship, and then watching your kids emigrate. I suspect that within our lifetimes we'll see >50% of Canadians actually live outside of Canada.

Being Canadian will be a sort of administrative identity more than anything resembling a citizenship.

> Being Canadian will be a sort of administrative identity more than anything resembling a citizenship.

This is pretty much how my US citizenship is now after living abroad for about 6 years and having a long term bearish outlook on NA, EU, China, Japan (demographics, sovereign/corp debt + real yields).

Which countries do you not have a bearish outlook on?

SE Asia (excluding SG), Western Africa.

The Canadians citizenship ceremony to me was fascinating, because it begins with an aboriginal land acknowledgement.

Since when?

I grew up in Canada and obtained citizenship there in 1990. (After the USA decided that they were sick and tired of losing dual citizenship cases in the Supreme Court and stopped pursuing them.) There was no such acknowledgement of the ceremony that I took part in.

Incidentally my children get to be Canadian. But my grandchildren do not unless they are born in Canada. That seems reasonable.

It looks like this is mentioned as a possible change to the oath[1] from a 2015 report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission[2]. But if the current government of Canada website lists the oath without the phrase "including treaties with Indigenous peoples", then I would guess it was never officially changed.

Perhaps it was added as part of the ceremony in another manner but not officially in the oath.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/citizenship-oath-indigenous...

[2] http://nctr.ca/reports.php

I was going to say, the current oath doesn’t have that in there at all.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...

I would imagine that this is a recent thing introduced by the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau.

Housing is only a side effect. The main thing is, Canadians do not make enough children. With fertility rate less than 1.5, immigration is the only source of healthy population. That said, current requirement to have a job to immigrate, makes government locked in its own bureaucracy in current conditions. Businesses need people but no one wants to bet on human resource which needs months if not years to get there.

US with 1.75 is not far ahead, and recent administrations games will soon create a similar crisis.

Canadians don’t make enough children because nobody can afford it. Who wants to live in a studio or 1bd box with a kid?

My understanding of citizenship is that it's a relatively modern invention that a person could have more than one citizenship. The oaths you mention are holdovers from the time when citizenship meant fealty to a specific ruler in exchange for lifelong protection and sanctuary. To have more than one citizenship would be impossible, since you can only be "supremely loyal" to a single sovereign.

These days, since citizenship is more an operation of law from a nation state and less a particular privilege granted by a ruling individual, such loyalty is less required. The vast majority of countries consider someone who has multiple citizenships, including the one of the country in which they are in, to be a citizen of solely that country (e.g. if you are a dual citizen of the United States and Australia and you are standing in the United States, the U.S. only recognizes your U.S. citizenship).

Some countries, like Germany, still actively try to discourage the practice, though even Germany is becoming less strident. If you are a German citizen and you naturalize in any other (non-EU or EEA country or Switzerland), you automatically lose your German citizenship by operation of law unless you asked for permission to retain it. But getting permission has become progressively easier, and Germany does not make a person who is born with German citizenship and another citizenship choose by a certain age.

It is something of an interesting topic, for sure, though it's very easy to fall down the dark well of conspiracy theorists (some Germans believe you are not a Proper German Citizen unless you have the goldenrod-colored A4 form declaring you to be so) and nation state abolitionists (not saying I disagree with the latter, but it is a very short trip from there to "I am a human and also a corporate person separate from my corporeal being").

I'm no expert, but anecdotally I can tell that the idea that the oaths are holdovers doesn't quite apply to the US. Their oath is worded in such a way that you very clearly have to give up loyalty to any other country state, but the US was never governed by a single monarch/ruler (after independence of course).

Yes. The US used to be quite strict about this. It still is if you acquire US citizenship by naturalization.

"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen"

The deal for people who are already US citizens is easier.

> It still is if you acquire US citizenship by naturalization.

No. Notwithstanding the strong language, US law does not require you to relinquish your old citizenship when you naturalize. https://www.usa.gov/become-us-citizen

The US does not require you to give up any other citizenship if you get US citizenship by naturalization.

This. I personally know of multiple instances of Canadians being able to retain their Canadian citizenship after becoming a naturalized US citizen.

No it doesn’t. Although, the oath does place limits on the exercise of any foreign citizenship. For instance a Brit who is a naturalized US Citizenship can’t run for Parliament because it would require them to give an oath of loyalty to the Queen.

There are fun workarounds around that oath. But the point is true in general: as a Member of Parliament, one must put priority to their duty to the country they represent. One might ask whether MPs with sole citizenship perform well in that regard, but it is quite easier to raise doubts in case of MP with additional citizenships.

> There are fun workarounds around that oath

What are the workarounds?

How did Boris Johnson get around that, I wonder?

He was a US Citizen by birth so never took the oath.

I'm curious about what goes through the minds of people who take that oath while retaining another citizenship. To them is it just meaningless words they have to say to get a check mark on paperwork? Do they regard any oath or agreement that isn't enforced by legal consequences as something they can ignore? Do they think of it as unfair and hence not worth feeling bad about?

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