Article I, Section 8, Clause 4:

[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States; . . .

In a number of cases, the Supreme Court considered Congress’s authority to remove citizenship based on the performance of specified acts. Initially, the Court determined that Congress had broad authority to remove citizenship that was rooted in its power to regulate foreign affairs. But the Court later imposed limitations on Congress’s authority, concluding that Congress can only remove citizenship from those who voluntarily commit specified acts with the intention of relinquishing their citizenship.

For example, in Mackenzie v. Hare, the Court in 1915 considered a challenge to the 1907 Act’s provision that terminated citizenship of U.S. citizen women who married foreign nationals.1 The Court rejected the plaintiff’s contention that expatriation can be shown only by an act demonstrating a voluntary renunciation of citizenship.2 Instead, the Court upheld the statute as a lawful exercise of Congress’s authority to regulate foreign affairs and determine the conditions of nationality.3

Several decades later, in Perez v. Brownell, the Court in 1958 addressed a constitutional challenge to the INA provision that removed citizenship from a U.S. citizen who voted in a foreign political election.4 The Court declared that “[a]lthough there is in the Constitution no specific grant to Congress of power to enact legislation for the effective regulation of foreign affairs, there can be no doubt of the existence of this power in the law-making organ of the Nation.” 5 The Court determined that Congress’s power to regulate foreign affairs authorized it to make voting in foreign elections an act of expatriation.6 Additionally, while the Court recognized that “Congress can attach loss of citizenship only as a consequence of conduct engaged in voluntarily,” the Court rejected the notion that an individual must intend to relinquish citizenship.7

Footnotes

1

239 U.S. 299, 306–07 (1915).

2

Id. at 310–12.

3

Id. at 311–12.

4

356 U.S. 44, 47 (1958), overruled by Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967).

5

Perez, 356 U.S. at 57.

6

Id. at 59–62. The Court reasoned that “Congress has interpreted this conduct, not irrationally, as importing not only something less than complete and unswerving allegiance to the United States but also elements of an allegiance to another country in some measure, at least, inconsistent with American citizenship.” Id. at 61.

7

Id. at 61–62. The Court also briefly considered the Citizenship Clause of Fourteenth Amendment, which instructs that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Id. at 58 n. 3; see also U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1, cl. 1. The Court determined that “there is nothing in the terms, the context, the history or the manifest purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to warrant drawing from it a restriction upon the power otherwise possessed by Congress to withdraw citizenship.” Perez, 356 U.S. at 58 n.3. For more information about the Citizenship Clause, see Amdt14.S1.1.2 Citizenship Clause Doctrine.