The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit to revoke the naturalized citizenship of Manuel Rocha, the former American diplomat exposed in 2023 as a long-running espionage asset of Communist Cuba. Not since Alger Hiss was unmasked as a Soviet spy has the State Department—and the nation—suffered such a profound betrayal by a senior diplomat.
Rocha was a Colombian-born immigrant who became a naturalized American citizen in his late 20s. Evidence suggests that Cuban intelligence recruited him before his naturalization and encouraged him to pursue a career in the U.S. Foreign Service. Yet beyond the outrage provoked by Rocha’s treason lies a broader concern: the question of divided loyalty in modern America.
After decades of mass immigration, approximately 25 million Americans are naturalized citizens. Many come from countries—like Mexico, the Philippines, and India—that continue to claim the allegiance of their nationals even after they acquire U.S. citizenship. The Mexican government is particularly aggressive, actively encouraging its expatriates in the United States to maintain political, cultural, and economic ties to the patria while simultaneously becoming Americans.
Although no official statistics exist, hundreds of thousands of federal employees in the national security bureaucracy are believed to hold dual citizenship, including an unknown number with access to classified information. The State Department has long attracted dual nationals, recruiting heavily among naturalized and first-generation Americans whose foreign-language skills and overseas experience are valuable diplomatic assets.
To be clear, the overwhelming majority of dual-national Americans are loyal citizens and bear no resemblance to Rocha. It should also be noted that the infamous Hiss and many other Cold War spies emerged from the heart of the American middle class, not from immigrant communities. Espionage will always remain a threat, and no vetting system can eliminate it entirely.
Yet decades of multiculturalism and unassimilated immigration have introduced a subtler challenge: government officials whose attachments to another nation may influence their judgment, create conflicts of interest, or leave them vulnerable to foreign pressure. Even when loyalty to the United States is unquestioned, secondary allegiances can complicate decision-making in sensitive positions.
For precisely this reason, the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service traditionally restricted dual-national Foreign Service officers from serving in countries where they were born or whose citizenship they retained. It was a prudent policy, one that was unwisely loosened during the Biden administration.
Even dual-national officials whose primary loyalty is unquestionably American may retain powerful emotional ties to their countries of birth. This is neither surprising nor unusual. In a Burkean sense, attachment to one’s native land is deeply rooted in human nature, anchored in family, language, childhood memory, and custom.
Historically, millions of Americans have honored ancestral homelands without compromising their loyalty to the United States. Yet the modern era of rampant multiculturalism presents circumstances unlike those of previous generations. Instant online communication, inexpensive international travel, and transnational political engagement allow many immigrants to remain deeply involved in the affairs of their birth countries. Some maintain connections that are as strong as—or stronger than—their attachment to the United States. When American interests diverge from those of the homeland, conflicting loyalties can emerge.
We will never know exactly what was in young Manuel Rocha’s head before he was recruited to spy for Fidel Castro. Ideology presumably played a role in the Cuban pitch used on Rocha, but more than an appeal to communism, I would guess Castro’s operatives likely stoked young Manuel’s devotion to Colombia and his duty as an Hispanic to resist the gringo colossus. Almost certainly it was the “Latino solidarity with Fidel” narrative that convinced Rocha to spy for Cuba, just as it did Ana Belén Montes, a U.S. intelligence officer of Puerto Rican heritage, and probably others still undiscovered.
As with most immigration policies, Washington policy experts have thought very little about the unintended problems that come in an age of non-assimilation with minting 25 million dual-national Americans over the past two generations. In the early years of our Republic, the situation was entirely different. Immigrants who naturalized were compelled to make unequivocal and binding renunciations of any other citizenships or foreign loyalties.
As late as the 1930s, the U.S. State Department negotiated a series of bilateral treaties—known as the Bancroft treaties—for the explicit purpose of clarifying obligations and duties in cases in which foreign nationals became U.S. citizens. The Bancroft treaties were intended, in part, to ensure that naturalized Americans were not permitted to hold on to citizenship in their birth countries. American diplomacy strove to ensure that when immigrants took the oath to the United States, they cut their ties.
The Bancroft treaties’ legal standard made practical sense for a country like the United States with a tradition of taking large numbers of foreign immigrants. Unfortunately, in the fight to maintain the supremacy of U.S. citizenship, an activist left-wing federal judiciary intervened. The Supreme Court has chipped away at the traditional concept of U.S. nationality and the requirements that secondary citizenships be authentically abandoned. In dubious rulings in the 1960s, the Warren Court—no surprise—opened wide the door to double-loyalty citizenship, in effect ignoring the plain language of the U.S. naturalization oath, which says inter alia:
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.
The language could not be more unambiguous. Nevertheless, thanks to U.S. Supreme Court decisions, it is almost impossible for naturalized Americans to take any actions that would be held to violate their U.S. citizenship oath. The courts have decreed that—no matter what the objective facts might otherwise indicate—a dual-national American can go back to his birth or second country to live permanently: voting, serving in the military and even in high office, all the time comfortably keeping his blue American passport.
The extreme form of our current dilemma is so-called “birth tourism,” whereby foreign parents have absolutely no intention that their babies grow up as Americans. They pack up their newborns, return to their homeland, happy because their offspring can claim a U.S. passport as a ticket for what it will entitle them to receive in the future. Birth tourism makes a mockery of the old legal principle of jus soli (right of the soil) that grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. territory because it was thought they would remain and grow up as Americans. The jus soli principle is part of the underpinning of the often-misapprehended 14th Amendment.
To its credit, the Trump administration is fighting the battle to terminate birth tourism and to end the whole category of birthright citizenship for babies born to foreign mothers unlawfully in the country.
At the same time, the president can also open another front in the battle for unitary citizenship by denying government security clearances to any U.S. officials who claim a second citizenship. Of the roughly 4 million official Americans holding a U.S. security clearance, between 200,000 and 300,000 are dual-national citizens. (Nobody knows for sure how many there are because records are not kept.)
All U.S. security clearances are granted only after thorough background investigations (as was the case with Rocha), which often involve field work in foreign countries where the applicants have spent time. As a new vetting requirement for obtaining or maintaining clearances for dual-national Americans, the Trump administration should require them to proactively renounce any second citizenship, regardless of whether they actually hold another country’s passport or whether they simply have a legal claim never pursued.
Such a measure would be a crucial step in setting a new tone in U.S. government service and it might even help on some conflicted loyalty matters. Nick Pietrowicz, a U.S. State Department senior security officer, lawyer, and fellow in the Ben Franklin Fellowship, has researched this subject extensively and warns about the looming danger of a surge of counterintelligence cases related to confused allegiances tied to dual citizenship. Pietrowicz has written:
The American public deserves a national security system that protects our secrets. Certain members of the military, law enforcement, and all our spies and diplomats must have loyalty to one country and one country only: our own. In the realm of classified information, America should be first. Not third. Not second. Not equal. First. Congress must act now to codify this protection by limiting access to classified information to those who are American citizens, and American citizens only.
Unfortunately, the U.S. national security bureaucracy will always encounter treasonous spies like Rocha, but let’s not compound the problem by encouraging confused allegiances among immigrant Americans. Let the campaign to end dual citizenship begin with U.S. officials.
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