Although, in some cases, dual loyalty would be a marked improvement:
In 1915, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, at a convention of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, bellowed: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism … German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is a man who is an American and nothing else.”
The New York Times headline the next morning:
“Roosevelt Bars the Hyphenated.”
It continued: “No Room in This Country for Dual Nationality, He Tells Knights of Columbus. Treason to Vote as Such.”
What would Roosevelt think of the dual citizenship of many Americans today? If someone is a citizen of more than one country, how do we know where his primary allegiance lies?
Does not dual citizenship, de facto, imply dual loyalty?
Nor was the Rough Rider alone in his alarm. As America edged toward intervention in the European war, President Woodrow Wilson, too, tore into “the hyphenates”:
“The passions and intrigues of certain active groups and combinations of men amongst us who were born under foreign flags injected the poison of disloyalty into our most critical affairs. …
“I am the candidate of a party, but I am above all things else, an American citizen. I neither seek the favor nor fear the displeasure of that small alien element amongst us which puts loyalty to any foreign power before loyalty to the United States.”
In another address, Wilson declared:
“There is disloyalty active in the United States, and it must be absolutely crushed. It proceeds from … a very small minority, but a very active and subtle minority. It works underground but it shows its ugly head where we can see it, and there are those at this moment who are trying to levy a species of political blackmail, saying: ‘Do what we wish in the interest of foreign sentiment or we will wreak our vengeance at the polls.’”
What did Ilhan Omar say to compare with that?
Jesus Christ said, “A man cannot serve two masters.” How is it, then, that an American citizen can hold foreign citizenship?