What Would Senator Moreno’s New Bill Banning Dual Citizenship Mean for Americans in Scotland?

An Ohio senator wants to force dual citizens to choose: give up other passports or lose their US citizenship, a plan that Democrats Abroad has called ‘unconstitutional’. We asked UK-based Americans what they think.

In early December of last year, Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican, introduced the Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025, which would require dual citizens to forfeit any other nationalities to keep their American citizenship. The bill is short, only three pages long and its project is clear. Current dual citizens would have one year to renounce their foreign citizenship or forfeit their American one. Moreno frames this as a matter of honour, even patriotism—being an American, he insists, should be “all or nothing”. It is the kind of rhetoric that sounds stirring until you consider what it actually means: that a person’s relationship to their country can only be authentic if it erases every other tie, that loyalty is a zero-sum game.

Govtrack.us gives the bill a 3% chance of passing, but it’s still sparked dismay across the expatriate community. For Americans who have built lives in the UK, like Rachel Gibson, a church administrator and nail technician originally from Northern Virginia, Moreno’s bill feels like an insult. Gibson’s journey to British citizenship was an eight-year ordeal that cost her thousands of pounds—and culminated in a ceremony conducted hours before the COVID lockdown began. “My appointment was at four and lockdown started at five,” she recalls. Now settled in Falkirk with her Scottish husband, Gibson bristles at the idea of forfeiting either passport. “I would never want to give up my American citizenship because I am so proud to be an American. But I’m also proud to be British,” she says. She’s even coined her own term for the hybrid identity: “Amerish.”

For Jessica E., who was born in the UK to American parents in the 1970s and returned after the January 6th Capitol attack, the bill feels performative rather than threatening—at least for now. “I’m actually not concerned about it at all, at least not yet,” she says. Having held dual citizenship her entire life, she acknowledges her privileged position compared to those who fought for years to obtain British citizenship. “It’s easy for me to be sort of dismissive about it. But if you’ve really had to work for your citizenship here, the announcement of this kind of bill is really, really frightening.” Still, the proposal stings regardless of its chances of passage. “It’s not only the taking away of it, it’s the threat that somebody from your country wants to do that to you,” she explains. For Jessica, the question of which passport she would keep remains hypothetical—the world is “so much in flux right now” that it’s impossible to predict what such a choice would even look like when the time came to make it.

Jack Nevin, the current chair of Democrats Abroad in Scotland, has spent years helping Americans navigate the bureaucracy of voting from overseas. His organisation’s work is unglamorous and essential: “assisting Americans in requesting their ballots and ensuring that they’re empowered and enabled to send them back correctly”. But it is also about something less tangible—what Nevin describes as providing “support to Americans in social capacities, in building community, in organising protests to make sure that the voices of Americans living in Scotland are heard and engaged with”. The Exclusive Citizenship Act would treat Nevin and many of his colleagues as suspect, their dual status recast as disloyalty.

What do Republicans living abroad think about all of this? At the time of writing, Republicans Overseas UK did not respond to requests for comment. Seeking to clarify the bill’s legal standing, Ilan Wurman, a Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota specialising in birthright citizenship, presents a view that contrasts with the firm rejection from Democrats Abroad. The law surrounding dual citizenship, he explains, is murky—”a pretty esoteric topic” with surprisingly little precedent. “There’s surprisingly little law on all this,” he notes, acknowledging “a lot of history that doesn’t point in any obvious direction”. Historically, dual allegiances were unremarkable. “In the common law, dual allegiances were quite common,” Wurman explains. Yet this acceptance existed in tension: common-law cases described having two allegiances as “like serving two masters” and “an absurdity”, though “the common law never really resolved it”.

What Moreno’s bill reveals, ultimately, is the Trump administration’s deepening discomfort with the idea that identity can be plural, that one can be wholly American and wholly something else at the same time. It is a fantasy of simplification in a complicated world, an attempt to legislate away the reality that people contain multitudes. The choice it offers is no choice at all—it is an expulsion dressed up as principle.

This bill is a piece of political theatre that will almost certainly fail. According to a recent YouGov poll, 7% of Americans self-declared as dual citizens. And the First Lady and her son are Slovenian nationals. But its introduction matters nonetheless. It transforms a question that went unanswered for centuries—can one person hold two allegiances?—into a test of legitimacy. For Americans abroad, already accustomed to explaining themselves at borders and dinner tables alike, the message is unmistakable: your claim to citizenship has always been provisional, subject to revocation by those who believe belonging must be absolute. The bill may die in committee, but the anxiety it’s created will linger.