Wednesday, April 11, 2018

The Jihadi Citizenship Story

This is a page-two story that got brought up over the past week in Germany within the Interior Ministry.  To be honest.....most folks don't think it'll go far.  Deutsche Welle covered the basics of the story.

The Interior Ministry of Germany wants the ability to confiscate German passports from people who are 'alleged jihadis'.  Now....no one is defining alleged in this case, or the process that would occur.....just the idea that taking away the passport and zeroing out the citizenship might be a 'tool'.

First, let's get to the key problem here....you can't take away a guy's nationality (to be a German)....it's written into the 1949 Constitution.  Article 16 is pretty strongly written, and there's just no belief that you'd find anyone willing to vote a change to that Article.

However.....if you said that dual-citizenship exists with this guy/gal, which Germany did vote and agree to allow....then you could modify Article 16 in some way to say that only one citizenship will exist, and if you were an alleged jihadi, then you'd revert back to the original situation.

Who holds two passports?  Well....no one is really sure.  That's another funny thing about the system, there is no real audit going on, and one would suspect that the government really doesn't want to know the number. 

The guess here (using the Census and other tools by the gov't) is between 1.9 to 4.3 million dual citizens....most coming from Poland, Turkey or Russia. 

The number of 'alleged jihadis' in this episode?  Unknown.  The Interior Ministry is simply opening up a political discussion, and suggesting that this might occur.  The odds of the SPD agreeing to this as part of the coalition?  Zero.  The odds of the FDP and AfD being willing to move up and support the CDU/CSU?  That's an interesting question.  They might be willing to do it.

My suspicion in the long-run....even if you did get Article 16 changed, and you could terminate citizenship to the dual-crowd affected....it'd likely be less than a hundred people.  In fact, the minute that this got near to passing....I think most of the affected crowd would run up....denounce the old citizenship, and attempt to be German-only. 

It is an interesting discussion, but it'll just lose steam after a while.

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