Daniel sent us this one — he wants to talk about dual citizenship. Not the passport-collecting, golden-visa, buy-your-way-into-a-country version, which he thinks is a total defeat of what citizenship actually means, but the more everyday version. People who were born in one place, moved to another, built a life there, and now hold both. Daniel himself is Irish-born, became Israeli under the Law of Return, and apparently there's some lively debate in his household about whether he should rescind the Irish one. His wife Hannah thinks that would be stupid. Daniel's been the one pushing for it. And that tension — ideological conviction versus pragmatic reality — is basically the whole story of how countries approach this.
It's a story that's playing out in real time, because we're in a moment where the number of dual citizens globally has probably never been higher. Nobody has a perfect count, because countries don't always share this data and some people don't even know they qualify, but estimates put it somewhere between two hundred million and three hundred million people worldwide. That's roughly the population of Indonesia or Pakistan, just floating around with multiple passports.
Which is wild when you think about how recently the whole concept was considered an abomination in international law.
And before we dive in — quick note, today's episode is being written by DeepSeek V4 Pro. So if the script sounds unusually well-read on citizenship law, that's why.
It's also why I sound slightly more articulate than usual. Don't get used to it.
I won't. So let's start with the baseline, because most people don't realize how recent the acceptance of dual citizenship actually is. For most of the twentieth century, the international consensus was that dual citizenship was something to be eliminated, not accommodated. The League of Nations in 1930 literally called it a problem that "all nations should seek to abolish." The logic was that citizenship was like a marriage — you couldn't be married to two countries at once. It created divided loyalties, complicated military service obligations, diplomatic protection nightmares. If you're a dual citizen and you get arrested in one of your countries, the other country's embassy can't necessarily help you.
That's still true. If I'm an American-Israeli dual citizen and I get detained in Israel, the U.embassy will basically say "good luck, you're Israel's problem.
The master nationality rule is still the dominant principle — a dual citizen in one of their countries of citizenship is treated solely as a citizen of that country. So that protection argument for having a second passport is mostly illusory if you're actually living there. But the shift away from treating dual citizenship as something to stamp out accelerated after World War Two for a bunch of practical reasons. More people were migrating. Women were marrying across borders and didn't want to lose their original citizenship. Decolonization created complicated situations where people had ties to both the former colonial power and the new independent state. And countries realized that forbidding dual citizenship was costing them talent, because people wouldn't naturalize if it meant giving up their original passport.
What actually changed? Was there a treaty, a court case, or just a slow unraveling?
Mostly a slow unraveling, but there were key moments. The Council of Europe's Convention on the Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality from 1963 tried to hold the line against dual citizenship, and a bunch of countries signed it. But then in the 1990s, a second protocol opened the door, and by 2011 the Council of Europe had completely reversed itself, saying dual citizenship was fine and countries should be more permissive. Within about fifty years, the European consensus flipped entirely. The United States never really had a blanket prohibition — the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 in Afroyim v. Rusk that citizenship could only be lost by voluntary relinquishment, not just by naturalizing elsewhere. That was a huge deal. Before that, the U.had been stripping citizenship from people who voted in foreign elections or served in foreign militaries.
Which, by the way, Israel does to this day for certain categories. But we'll get to that.
So today, the map looks roughly like this. You've got countries that are fully permissive — the U., Canada, the U., Australia, France, Ireland, Israel, most of Western Europe, most of Latin America. Dual citizenship is either explicitly allowed or just not prohibited. Then you've got countries that are partially restrictive — they allow it under certain conditions. Germany used to be in this category before their 2024 reform, which we should talk about. Spain generally requires you to renounce your previous citizenship when naturalizing, but has exceptions for Latin American countries, Portugal, Andorra, and a few others. Then you've got the hardliners — countries that simply don't allow it, period. China, India, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, most of the Gulf states. If you naturalize elsewhere, you automatically lose your citizenship. No exceptions, no appeals.
India's case is particularly interesting given the size of the diaspora.
India has something like eighteen million people living abroad, the largest diaspora in the world, and it doesn't allow dual citizenship at all. What they did instead was create this halfway status called Overseas Citizenship of India, or OCI, which gives you most of the rights of a citizen — you can live and work in India indefinitely, you can own property — but you can't vote, you can't hold political office, and you can't buy agricultural land. It's permanent residency dressed up in citizenship language. Something like six million OCI cards have been issued. But it's not citizenship, and the Indian government has been very clear there's no path to changing that.
India looked at the dual citizenship question and said "we don't want to go there, but we also don't want to lose our diaspora's money and talent, so here's a laminated card that's almost citizenship but definitely isn't.
That tension — wanting the economic and cultural ties of a diaspora without the political complications of dual loyalty — runs through every country's approach. China has the same issue. Massive diaspora, enormous economic importance, but Beijing is absolutely not going to let Chinese citizens hold another passport. If you naturalize elsewhere, you lose Chinese citizenship automatically under Article Nine of the nationality law. And China enforces this. There have been cases of people trying to enter China on their Chinese passport after naturalizing elsewhere and getting caught because the biometrics don't match.
Let me pull on the thread Daniel raised about Israel, because he mentioned that Israeli parliament members have to renounce other citizenships, and he suspects Israel might have one of the highest percentages of dual citizens anywhere. Is that right?
It almost certainly is. We don't have a definitive global ranking because the data is patchy, but roughly ten to fifteen percent of Israeli citizens are estimated to hold a second citizenship. Some estimates put it even higher, especially if you count people who are eligible but haven't formalized it. The reason is structural — Israel's Law of Return gives automatic citizenship to any Jew who immigrates, and those people don't have to renounce their original citizenship. So you get waves of immigration from the former Soviet Union, from France, from the U., from Ethiopia, all bringing their original citizenships with them. And then their children are often dual citizens by birth.
Then Israel also has restrictions. Daniel mentioned parliamentarians. What's the actual law?
Under Israel's Basic Law on the Knesset, if you hold a second citizenship and you're elected, you have to do everything in your power to renounce it before you can be sworn in. You have to prove you've taken steps to renounce, and if the other country makes it impossible or you haven't completed the process, you can still be sworn in if you've made a genuine effort. This came up recently — in 2023, there was a case with a Knesset member who held French citizenship, and a whole procedure around whether he had adequately attempted to renounce it. For diplomatic appointments, it's similar — ambassadors and senior diplomats are expected not to hold foreign citizenships, for obvious conflict-of-interest reasons.
Then there's the military service angle Daniel mentioned. Some countries will let you keep dual citizenship unless you serve in a foreign military.
The United States is the classic example. Under Section 349 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, you can lose your U.citizenship if you serve in a foreign military as an officer or as a non-commissioned officer, or if you serve in a foreign military engaged in hostilities against the United States. But the Supreme Court has made this really hard to enforce. Since Afroyim, the burden of proof is on the government to show that you intended to relinquish your citizenship. Just serving in a foreign military isn't enough — they have to prove you did it with the specific intent of giving up your American citizenship. In practice, that almost never happens. The State Department has basically stopped pursuing these cases unless someone explicitly says "I want to renounce.
Which brings us to the renunciation question, because Daniel talked about looking into the Irish process and finding it surprisingly difficult. And he mentioned that renouncing U.citizenship is famously complicated.
It's not just complicated — it's expensive and it's become a political issue. To renounce U.citizenship, you have to appear in person at a U.embassy or consulate abroad, pay a fee of $2,350 — the highest renunciation fee in the world by a huge margin — and go through an interview where they make sure you're not being coerced and you understand the consequences. Then, if your net worth is over two million dollars or your average tax liability over the past five years exceeds a certain threshold, you may be subject to an exit tax — you're treated as if you sold all your assets on the day before expatriation, and you owe capital gains tax on the deemed sale.
makes you pay to leave, and then potentially taxes you on the way out.
The numbers have been surging. In 2010, about fifteen hundred people renounced. By 2020, it was over six thousand a year. In 2025, it was over eight thousand. A lot of this is driven by FATCA — the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act — which requires foreign banks to report accounts held by U.citizens to the IRS. This has made it really hard for Americans abroad to get banking services, because foreign banks don't want the compliance headache. So you've got Americans living in Canada or Europe who can't open a local bank account because the bank doesn't want to deal with FATCA reporting, and their solution is to renounce.
That's an insane situation. You're essentially forced out of your citizenship not because you don't feel American, but because the banking system treats you as radioactive.
It's uniquely American. and Eritrea are the only two countries in the world that tax based on citizenship rather than residency. Every other country says — if you live here, you pay taxes here. says — if you're an American citizen, you file U.taxes forever, no matter where you live. There are foreign earned income exclusions and foreign tax credits that mean most expats don't actually owe anything, but they still have to file. And the compliance burden is enormous.
Daniel's looking at the Irish process and finding it's no picnic either. What's the Irish situation?
Ireland's process is governed by the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1956, as amended. You have to make a formal declaration of alienage to the Minister for Justice, and you must already hold another citizenship — Ireland won't render you stateless. The declaration has to be registered, and if the Minister is satisfied that you hold another citizenship, they'll approve it. The fee is much lower than the U.— around a few hundred euros — but there's a catch. Once you renounce, there's no automatic right to get it back. You'd have to go through the naturalization process from scratch, which in Ireland means five years of residence, good character requirements, the whole thing. So Daniel's weighing whether to cut a tie that can't be easily reattached.
Hannah's argument, as Daniel relayed it, is essentially "don't be stupid, there's no need to do that." Which is the pragmatic position. An Irish passport is a European Union passport. It gives you the right to live and work in twenty-seven countries. Why would you voluntarily give that up, especially when holding it doesn't actually cost you anything?
That's the calculation millions of people make. But Daniel's counterargument seems to be ideological — that there's something incoherent about holding citizenship in a country you don't live in, don't intend to return to, and may have political disagreements with. And he's not alone in that view. There's a genuine philosophical debate about what citizenship means if it's just a transactional convenience.
Let's get into that philosophical debate, because I think it's more interesting than the logistics. What is citizenship actually supposed to be? Is it a bundle of rights and privileges that you can accumulate like frequent flyer miles? Or is it a commitment to a political community?
The classical republican tradition — and I mean republican in the philosophical sense, not the party — would say it's the latter. Citizenship is about participation in self-governance. It's about having a stake in the political community and exercising the responsibilities that come with it. From that perspective, dual citizenship is problematic because it dilutes that commitment. If you can always leave and go to your other country, are you really invested in the political health of this one?
Yet, the places that have the most dual citizens are also some of the most politically engaged populations in the world. Israeli voter turnout is consistently around seventy percent, often higher for Knesset elections, and that's with a huge dual-citizen population. The idea that holding a second passport makes you care less about the country you live in doesn't really hold up empirically.
It doesn't. And that's part of why the international consensus shifted. The empirical evidence just didn't support the "divided loyalty" panic. What the research actually shows is that dual citizens tend to be more educated, more mobile, and more economically productive than single-nationality citizens. They're overrepresented in entrepreneurship, in international trade, in diplomacy. Countries that allow dual citizenship are basically getting a higher-quality citizenry because they're not forcing people to make an impossible choice.
There's a darker side to this that Daniel alluded to — the passport-as-commodity phenomenon. Citizenship by investment programs, golden visas, the whole industry of selling passports to wealthy people with no connection to the country.
This is where the philosophical debate gets very concrete and very uncomfortable. Citizenship by investment programs — often called golden passport programs — allow people to essentially buy citizenship. The going rate varies. In Malta, it's been around six hundred thousand to seven hundred fifty thousand euros in direct contributions plus real estate investments. In some Caribbean countries — Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis — it can be as low as a hundred thousand dollars. You wire the money, you pass a background check, and within months you're a citizen of a country you've never set foot in.
What you're really buying is visa-free travel. Kitts passport gets you visa-free access to about a hundred and fifty countries, including the Schengen area.
And these programs have exploded. The OECD estimated that citizenship by investment programs generated about three billion dollars annually by 2023. The European Union has been trying to crack down on this because it's essentially a back door into EU citizenship. If Malta gives you a passport, you're an EU citizen, and you can then move to Germany or France. The European Commission has been very clear that they consider these programs a security risk and a violation of the principle of sincere cooperation among member states.
Then there's the really sketchy end of this — diplomatic passports being sold or handed out as favors. Daniel mentioned that. Is that a real thing?
It's absolutely real. There have been multiple scandals. In 2020, a major investigation revealed that several Caribbean nations had sold diplomatic passports to foreign nationals, including individuals with criminal records. Diplomatic passports typically confer immunity and other privileges under the Vienna Convention, so selling them to random wealthy people isn't just shady — it undermines the entire diplomatic system. The Dominican Republic had a particularly egregious case where diplomatic passports were issued to hundreds of foreign nationals in exchange for payments to officials. Several people were arrested.
You've got this spectrum. On one end, people like Daniel — genuine dual citizens who were born in one country and built a life in another, holding both passports honestly. On the other end, people who've never visited a country wiring a hundred grand to a Caribbean bank account and getting a passport in the mail. And in between, you've got all these weird edge cases.
Some of those edge cases have produced genuine constitutional crises. The most dramatic example was Australia in 2017 and 2018. Australia has Section 44 of its constitution, which says that anyone who holds allegiance to a foreign power cannot sit in parliament. This had been mostly ignored for decades. Then in 2017, it emerged that several members of parliament were dual citizens — often without even knowing it. Barnaby Joyce, the deputy prime minister, discovered he was a New Zealand citizen because his father had been born there. He had no idea. Another senator, Larissa Waters, was Canadian by birth and hadn't realized she hadn't completed the renunciation process. In total, fifteen members of parliament were referred to the High Court, and many were disqualified. It triggered a political crisis that lasted over a year.
Wait — the deputy prime minister of Australia didn't know he was a citizen of another country?
He didn't know. His father was born in New Zealand, and under New Zealand law, that automatically made Barnaby Joyce a citizen by descent. He'd never applied for it, never held a New Zealand passport, had no ties to the country. But the law doesn't care about your feelings — he was a citizen. And under Section 44 of the Australian constitution, that made him ineligible to sit in parliament.
That's almost comical, except it brought down a government.
And it exposed how absurdly out of step Australia's constitutional provision was with the reality of a multicultural, immigrant-based society. Almost half of Australians were either born overseas or have a parent born overseas. The idea that you could find candidates for parliament who had zero foreign citizenship by descent was becoming mathematically impossible. Australia eventually cleaned up the rules, but it took a constitutional crisis to force the issue.
Let's talk about the trend lines. You mentioned Germany's 2024 reform. What happened there?
This was huge. For decades, Germany had one of the strictest citizenship regimes in Western Europe. If you naturalized as a German citizen, you generally had to renounce your previous citizenship. There were exceptions for EU citizens and a few other categories, but the default was no dual citizenship. This created a bizarre situation where millions of people — particularly Turkish guest workers and their descendants, who had lived in Germany for generations — couldn't naturalize without cutting ties to their country of origin. In 2024, the German government passed a sweeping reform that completely flipped this. Dual citizenship is now allowed for everyone. The residency requirement was reduced from eight years to five, or three years for people who show exceptional integration. And children born in Germany to foreign parents can now get German citizenship at birth if one parent has lived there for five years.
What drove that change?
A combination of factors. Germany has a massive labor shortage — they need immigrants, and making citizenship more accessible is part of the pitch. There was also a growing recognition that the old policy was just unfair. You had people who were born in Germany, grew up speaking German, went to German schools, worked in German companies, and they were being told they couldn't be citizens unless they severed ties to their parents' homeland. It was creating a permanent underclass of denizens — people who live somewhere permanently but can't vote and don't have full political rights. That's corrosive to democracy.
Yet, there are countries moving in the opposite direction. Or at least trying to.
The Netherlands has been tightening its rules around dual citizenship for naturalization, and the political debate there has been quite intense. Some Nordic countries have had internal debates about whether dual citizens should be eligible for certain sensitive government positions. The security concerns aren't entirely imaginary — there have been cases where dual citizens in government roles faced conflicting loyalties. But the general global trend is toward greater acceptance, not less. The number of countries that categorically prohibit dual citizenship has been shrinking for decades.
What about the weird cases? Countries that allow it but only for certain other countries?
Spain's the classic example. Spain generally requires you to renounce your previous citizenship when you naturalize, but it has bilateral agreements with all the Latin American countries, plus Portugal, Andorra, the Philippines, and Equatorial Guinea, that let you keep both. The logic is cultural and historical — shared language, colonial history, cultural ties. But it creates an odd situation. An Argentine can become a Spanish dual citizen, but an Italian can't. A Moroccan can't. It's essentially an ethnic or cultural preference baked into citizenship law.
Some countries have restrictions based on how you acquired the second citizenship. Like, it's fine if you got it by birth, but not if you actively sought it out.
Japan is the strictest example. Japan doesn't allow dual citizenship at all, period. If you're born with dual citizenship — say, one Japanese parent and one American parent — you have to choose one citizenship by age twenty-two. If you don't choose, you can lose your Japanese citizenship. And if you naturalize as a citizen of another country, you automatically lose Japanese citizenship under Article Eleven of the nationality law. No waiver, no exception. The Japanese Supreme Court has upheld this repeatedly.
Yet Japan has been wrestling with demographic decline and labor shortages even more acutely than Germany. You'd think they'd be loosening these rules, not defending them.
That's the tension. The economic logic says make citizenship easier, attract talent, integrate immigrants. The cultural and political logic says citizenship is about ethnic identity and national cohesion, and diluting that is dangerous. Different countries resolve that tension differently, and it maps pretty closely onto how they think about national identity more broadly. Civic nationalist countries — places where the national identity is defined by political values and institutions rather than ethnicity — tend to be more comfortable with dual citizenship. Ethnic nationalist countries tend to be more restrictive.
Which is why France, the United States, and Canada are permissive, and Japan and China are not. But then Israel complicates that framework, because Israel is arguably the world's most successful ethnic nationalist project, and it's also one of the most permissive countries on dual citizenship.
Because Israel's definition of the nation is the Jewish people, and the Jewish people are scattered. The Law of Return is designed precisely for people who have an ethnic or religious tie to the country but may have been born elsewhere and may hold other citizenships. For Israel to prohibit dual citizenship would undermine the whole logic of the state as a gathering of exiles. So you get this situation where Israel is simultaneously very nationalist and very permissive on dual citizenship, which seems contradictory until you understand that the dual citizenship is serving the nationalist project, not undermining it.
That's a really important point. The dual citizenship policy follows from the national project, not the other way around. Israel wants Jews to come, so it makes dual citizenship easy. India wants its diaspora to invest, so it created the OCI card. taxes worldwide, so it accidentally pushes some expats to renounce. These policies aren't abstract philosophical statements — they're tools for achieving national goals.
And that's why the citizenship-by-investment programs are so philosophically offensive to people like Daniel. They're not serving any national project other than revenue generation. The country isn't trying to gather a diaspora or integrate immigrants — it's just selling a product.
The product, let's be honest, is mostly a workaround for visa restrictions. If you're a wealthy Russian or Chinese national and you want visa-free access to Europe, you buy a Maltese or Cypriot passport. The country gets cash, you get mobility. The losers are the citizens of the EU countries who now have an open border to someone vetted by a much less rigorous process.
The European Commission has been fighting this for years. In 2022, they referred Malta to the European Court of Justice over its citizenship-by-investment program. Cyprus had already suspended its program in 2020 after an Al Jazeera investigation showed officials approving passports for criminals. The pressure has been effective — several countries have shut down or severely restricted their programs. But new ones keep popping up. Vanuatu has been a recent entrant, and there are always small island nations willing to trade sovereignty for revenue.
Let me bring this back to Daniel's personal dilemma, because I think it illustrates something important. He's not trying to collect passports. He's not gaming the system. He's a genuine dual citizen with real ties to both countries. And he's still uncomfortable enough with the arrangement that he's considering renouncing one citizenship. What does that tell us?
It tells us that citizenship isn't just a legal status — it's also a psychological and moral commitment. Daniel feels Irish, or at least he used to, but he's built his life in Israel, he's raising his son there, his political and emotional investment is in Israel. Holding the Irish passport feels, to him, like a kind of hedging. A lack of full commitment. And I think that's a legitimate feeling, even if his wife thinks it's impractical.
It's also worth noting that Daniel's Irish citizenship gives him something very concrete — the right to live and work anywhere in the European Union. If Ezra, his son, ever wants to study in Europe or work there, that Irish citizenship could be passed down and open doors. So there's an intergenerational calculation here too. Daniel's not just deciding for himself.
That's the thing about citizenship — it's sticky across generations. You can be an Irish citizen because your grandfather was born in Ireland, even if you've never been there. You can be an Italian citizen because your great-grandfather emigrated in 1905 and never renounced. These laws create diaspora populations that span centuries. Italy, Ireland, and Poland all have citizenship-by-descent provisions that go back generations with no residency requirement. You just have to prove the lineage.
Which creates this strange phenomenon where someone in Buenos Aires discovers they're eligible for Italian citizenship, gets the passport, and suddenly they're an EU citizen. They've never been to Italy, don't speak Italian, have no intention of going, but they've got the burgundy passport.
Italy is fine with this. In fact, Italy actively facilitates it. There are companies in Argentina and Brazil that do nothing but help people document their Italian ancestry for citizenship applications. It's a form of soft power — Italy gets a diaspora of passport holders who feel some cultural connection, even if it's thin.
We've covered the permissive countries, the restrictive ones, the citizenship-for-sale problem, the constitutional crises, the philosophical debates. What's the future of this? Are we heading toward a world where citizenship is entirely decoupled from residence and loyalty, where everyone just accumulates passports like insurance policies?
I don't think we're heading toward that extreme, but I do think the trend is toward greater complexity, not less. People are more mobile than ever. Mixed-nationality marriages are more common than ever. The idea that everyone should have exactly one citizenship tied to exactly one national identity is a nineteenth-century concept that doesn't fit the twenty-first-century world. But that doesn't mean citizenship becomes meaningless — it just means it becomes more layered.
The layering creates interesting political questions. If you're a dual citizen, do you get to vote in both countries? Do you get to run for office in both? Should you be allowed to serve in the cabinet of one country while holding a passport from another? Different countries answer these differently, and there's no global consensus.
The voting question is particularly interesting. Most countries allow dual citizens to vote, but some have restrictions. used to bar non-resident citizens from voting if they'd been abroad for more than fifteen years, but they abolished that limit in 2024. Now British citizens can vote for life, no matter where they live. allows overseas citizens to vote in federal elections, but state and local elections depend on the state. Some states treat overseas citizens as residents for voting purposes based on their last U.address, others don't.
Then there's the question of whether dual citizens should vote in elections of a country they don't live in and won't be affected by. If you're an American citizen who's lived in London for thirty years, should you be voting in U.You're not going to live with the consequences of your vote.
That's a real debate, and it's not easily resolved. On one hand, citizenship is citizenship — the right to vote is fundamental, and it doesn't disappear just because you moved. On the other hand, there's something uncomfortable about people who don't pay taxes in a country, don't live under its laws, and won't experience the results of an election having a say in it. Some countries, like Ireland, restrict voting rights for non-resident citizens. Irish citizens abroad can't vote in presidential elections or referendums, though there have been proposals to change this. takes the opposite approach — overseas citizens are a constituency that both parties actively court.
Daniel's case is interesting here because he does live in Israel, he is affected by Israeli elections, and he's not voting in Irish elections. So the democratic legitimacy concern doesn't really apply to him. His discomfort is more about identity and commitment than about democratic theory.
I think that's where a lot of dual citizens end up. The practical and legal questions have mostly been resolved in permissive countries — you can hold both passports, you can vote in both, you can work in both, you can pass both to your children. The unresolved question is the psychological one. What does it mean to belong to two nations? Is that even possible, or are you always going to be slightly outside both?
I'd argue it's not only possible, it's increasingly normal. And the evidence suggests dual citizens manage it fine. They're not confused about who they are. They're not secretly loyal to some foreign power. They're just people with complex biographies in a world where borders are more porous than they used to be. The anxiety about dual citizenship says more about the anxious than about the dual citizens.
I think that's right. The empirical case against dual citizenship has collapsed. The security concerns are manageable with sensible rules about sensitive positions — like Israel's rule about Knesset members, which seems perfectly reasonable. The philosophical concerns about divided loyalty don't hold up when you look at how dual citizens actually behave. And the practical benefits — for individuals, for families, for countries trying to attract talent — are substantial.
What would you say to Daniel, if he were here? Renounce or keep?
I'd say the Irish passport is a tool, not a statement. Keeping it doesn't make you less Israeli. It doesn't mean you're hedging. It means you're giving your son options, and you're preserving a connection to a country and a culture that shaped you, even if you've chosen to build your life elsewhere. Renouncing it is a gesture, and gestures matter, but this particular gesture costs you something real and gives you nothing tangible in return. Hannah's right on this one.
I'd add that there's something to be said for sitting with the discomfort. The fact that Daniel feels tension about holding two citizenships is itself a sign that he takes citizenship seriously. The people who should worry us are the ones who collect passports like trading cards and feel no connection to any of the countries involved. Daniel's not that person.
Now — Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The blobfish, voted the world's ugliest animal in 2013, looks completely normal in its natural deep-sea habitat. Its gelatinous, droopy appearance is caused by decompression damage when it's brought to the surface.
The blobfish is actually a victim of circumstances.
I have no follow-up to that.
So dual citizenship — once considered an abomination in international law, now a normal feature of a mobile world, still generating constitutional crises and dinner-table debates. The trend is toward more acceptance, but the philosophical questions aren't going anywhere. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want more episodes, we're at myweirdprompts.
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