Another Way Republicans Are Overplaying Their Hand on Immigration 

As I was settling in for a holiday break in Spain last month, my boyfriend’s father alerted me to a fresh Grand Old Party shenanigan with profound potential to screw up my life. “Have you seen this thing about Americans’ dual citizenship?” he asked, phone in hand. “No,” I responded, grabbing my laptop and lamenting how much more keyed into American political news many Europeans are than many Americans (including, seemingly, me: an American working in political news).  

The thing turned out to be the Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025, introduced in December by Ohio’s MAGA-loyalist freshman Senator Bernie Moreno. The bill would bar any American citizen from “simultaneously possessing any foreign citizenship,” thereby making it illegal to hold passports from two countries—a common practice among naturalized immigrants and increasingly among native-born Americans seeking a way to escape the chaos of Trump-era America.  

I hold foreign citizenship: Irish, through my mother, which I’ve held my entire life. My Republic of Ireland passport allows me to live in France with my European boyfriend today, reaping the benefits of national healthcare, superior public transport, and world-class cheese, without having to go through the whole wedlock-for-naturalization hassle. It has not, as Senator Moreno baselessly posits, divided my loyalties. I am an American, born and raised, whose family story reads like millions of others. If Moreno’s bill becomes law, my life would be in turmoil, which is, at least in part, the point.  

Moreno’s crisp four-page bill takes aim, with seemingly diabolical cleverness, at two groups Trump’s base has been schooled to hate. The first is globalist lefties comme moi, who presumably have the education, resources, and, in some cases, lack of faith in the American experiment to consider a moveoverseas. The other is immigrants, particularly naturalized citizens who, in his view, are so lacking in gratitude that they choose to retain citizenship in their countries of origin. At the same time, the bill would have little if any negative impact on the majority of MAGA’s working class base, who are disproportionately likely to lack a first passport—much less hold a second.  

The day after the bill’s introduction, Steve Bannon, long a reliable voice for the populist factions of Trump’s base, hosted Moreno on his War Room podcast. Perhaps betraying a hint of skepticism, Bannon asked the senator—formerly a car dealer turned crypto-enthusiast who flipped Senator Sherrod Brown’s seat in 2024—whether his legislation would apply only to those seeking dual citizenship in the future, or also to the millions of Americans who already hold two nationalities. Moreno made clear it was the latter. “You’re either an American citizen or you’re a citizen of another country,” he said, “You can’t have dual allegiances. It’s not possible.” Apparently satisfied, Bannon called the bill “fantastic” and urged his audience to spread the word about it.  

My fear of Moreno’s measure was not only of the disruption it would create in my own life, but also its potential to stir up the nativism already coursing through the MAGA movement. As it turns out, my concerns may have been overblown. A week after Moreno introduced his bill, YouGov released a web-based poll that asked 1147 adult U.S. citizens whether naturalized immigrants should be required to give up their original citizenship. Less than one-third of respondents agreed. When asked whether Americans who become citizens of another country should be forced to relinquish their U.S. citizenship, three out of four also said no.  

It’s just one poll, of course, but the results suggest Moreno massively misread the room. His proposal might have had more appeal in 2024, when voters were lining up behind Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric. But the tide has clearly shifted, leaving Moreno’s bill stranded. 

The largest swath of Americans the bill targets are dual citizens living in the U.S.—largely immigrants from Latin America, like Moreno himself, who immigrated from Colombia as a child—whose home countries allow their diasporas to retain their first citizenship after adopting a second. The one in ten voters who are naturalized citizens swung right in 2024: 47 percent voted for Trump, compared to just 38 percent in 2020, according to Pew Research Center. Now, however, this pool of voters—like voters more broadly—are unhappy with the president’s performance, with whopping majorities disapproving of his “third country” deportations (80 percent), efforts to end birthright citizenship (69 percent), and the use of masked and plainclothes agents in immigration enforcement (67 percent). The dual citizens in this group may not relish the idea of permanently renouncing their identity, ease of travel home, or the potential to return in the future.  

The 58-year-old Republican also picked the wrong immigrants to mess with. To native-born Americans, naturalized citizens are a sympathetic group. These new Americans not only played by the rules and entered legally, but they also demonstrated their commitment to the country by becoming citizens. That admiration is genuine even among Republicans. Though 59 percent of Republicans surveyed by YouGov said that naturalized U.S. citizens should have to give up their original citizenship, that majority flipped when given the option of requiring naturalized citizens to take an oath of allegiance: In that case, 51 percent of Republicans then said that immigrants should not be required to renounce their foreign nationality. (Needless to say, becoming a U.S. citizen already entails pledging allegiance to the United States of America.)  

Moreno also seems to have miscalculated the number of Americans interested in living abroad. The United States, like most countries, doesn’t track which of its citizens hold dual nationality, making enforcement of Moreno’s bill a costly, nightmarish thought experiment. The YouGov poll found that around 6 percent of respondents self-reported holding a second citizenship. While not a huge voting bloc, there’s a far larger group of Americans who would like to join our ranks. One in five Americans says they want to permanently move to another country, according to a November 2025 Gallup poll, double the percentage who said the same in 2011.  

A February 2025 Harris poll found that 40 percent of Americans have considered or plan to move abroad, with 14 percent “seriously contemplating” a move. This 40 percent predictably skews younger, female, and left. Still, tellingly, the survey also found that 36 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement “I think I would be happier with my life if I moved abroad.”  

In his haste to score populist points, Moreno seems to have forgotten that voters don’t like it when the government makes it harder for them to exercise their rights—even if, as in the case of dual passports, most Americans are unlikely to use them. Perhaps this is why the Ohio senator’s bill has not garnered support from the president, whose wife, Melania and youngest son, Barron, are dual citizens of the U.S. and Slovenia, and only a single Republican endorsement.  

The strongest evidence that Moreno’s bill will flop is his own attempt to course-correct. Less than two weeks after confirming to Bannon that the law would affect current dual passport holders, Moreno appeared on another podcast, telling host Gabe Groisman that it would apply only to “new people [naturalized citizens] going forward,” even though the bill text clearly states otherwise. 

Moreno was right about one thing in his Groisman interview: Patriotism has taken a beating in the U.S. Last year, record-low numbers of adults said they were proud to be American. But it isn’t dueling nationalities driving the problem. It’s pessimistic prospects for young people, unfavorable images of both political parties, and the failure of both parties’ policies to improve the lives of most Americans. In a February poll from Harris, “lower cost of living abroad” edged out “dissatisfaction with the current political leadership” as the number one motivating factor for wanting to leave, followed closely by “desire for a higher quality of life” and “better and/or lower-cost healthcare.” The solution to restoring patriotism isn’t “elevating what it means to be an American citizen,” as Moreno repeatedly claims, but making the American government worthy of its people’s pride.  

“There will be a time when the GOP wakes up in whatever post-Trump world, whenever the post-Trump world exists, and has this raging hangover and regret about the way they were acting and behaving the night before,” Republican political consultant Mike Madrid told me. “You don’t remember if it was the first beer or the 10th, but it was the beer.”  

That world is coming. The Exclusive Citizenship Act is a hopefully doomed, pint-sized example of the decade-long distraction Trump and his MAGA acolytes in Congress have been perpetrating: America First rhetorically, yet policy-wise, pushing America farther from the first place anyone around the world would choose to live.  

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