Citizenship is a problem I've been wrestling with for a while, now everyone is talking about it.
Dual citizenship is a can of worms. It entangles people in the laws of two countries with necessarily incompatible legal foundations.
The USA recognizes, or rather, refrains from refusing to recognize, dual citizenship.
Japan does not recognize dual citizenship, technically.
If I were to try to obtain Japanese citizenship, by technical requirement of Japanese law, I would have to formally give up my US citizenship (which is an expensive process). And the USA would not necessarily recognize my having done so.
But I have lived more than half my life in Japan at this point, and I have no reason not to expect to die here.
When trying to work through dilemmas, I like to work out ideals and then map them to reality. Or try to.
Ideally, we should not need dual-citizenship. What we call permanent residence should count as citizenship. That we could tell whose laws we have a greater obligation to.
But that ideal requires things to be different from the way they are in this world.
In specific, there would be birth citizenship. There are fine points to untangle in that, but we can't untangle them until we deal with some other problems, so we won't try just yet.
Then, if you had lived long enough to become what we call a permanent resident in our current laws, we should be, rather, citizens, so that we could participate properly in voting and taxation and other duties which devolve on people who live in primarily in one place.
The birth citizenship would not be erased, it would be placed in abeyance, and would be recoverable.
People who spend half their time in one country and half in another would claim one country of citizenship and would be a, perhaps long-term, resident of the other.
Taxes would be split up by where they are incurred.
Social security as a national retirement insurance scheme would have to be privatized, so that the person who moves could take it with him /her.
Now that would require cooperation between the countries involved, but I think it would provide a better framework for preventing countries' laws from becoming entangled with each other.
And that's all the time I have for theorizing I have right now.
