Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1967

Afroyim v. Rusk

387 U.S. 253 | 87 S. Ct. 1660 | 18 L. Ed. 2d 757 | 1967 U.S. LEXIS 2844

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Takeaway

In short, Afroyim holds that the Fourteenth Amendment prevents Congress from involuntarily taking away an American's citizenship; a citizen remains a citizen unless he or she voluntarily relinquishes that status.

Background

Beys Afroyim was born in Poland, immigrated to the United States in 1912, and became a naturalized American citizen in 1926. He moved to Israel in 1950 and voluntarily voted in a 1951 election for the Israeli Knesset.

When Afroyim sought to renew his U.S. passport in 1960, the State Department refused. It relied exclusively on § 401(e) of the Nationality Act of 1940, which provided that a U.S. national lost nationality by voting in a political election in a foreign state. Afroyim maintained that he had never intended to surrender his American citizenship.

Afroyim brought a declaratory-judgment action in federal district court. The district court and the Second Circuit ruled for the Government, concluding that Congress could impose expatriation for foreign voting under its implied foreign-affairs power. Their result followed Perez v. Brownell, which had upheld the same statutory provision. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to reconsider Perez.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Congress may, consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment, strip a citizen of United States citizenship for voting in a foreign election when the citizen has not voluntarily relinquished citizenship.

Holding

No. The Fourteenth Amendment protects a citizen from Congress's forcible destruction of citizenship; citizenship may not be taken away without the citizen's voluntary relinquishment.

Reasoning

Congress has no express constitutional power to take citizenship away. Nor does a general implied power flowing from national sovereignty or the foreign-affairs power supply that authority. In the American constitutional system, the people are sovereign, and the Federal Government has only powers granted by the Constitution or necessary and proper to execute granted powers.

The Citizenship Clause declares that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. The Court read that language as establishing a secure and continuing constitutional status, not a citizenship that Congress may cancel whenever it believes doing so would serve an otherwise valid governmental objective.

The Clause's history reinforced this reading. A central purpose of adding it to the Fourteenth Amendment was to ensure that the citizenship newly secured for formerly enslaved people could not be undone by a later Congress. That purpose would be defeated if Congress could use a general power, such as its authority over foreign affairs, to remove citizenship involuntarily.

Historical statements and decisions also supported the distinction between Congress's power to establish rules for naturalization and a supposed power to divest someone of citizenship once acquired. In particular, the Court relied on the principle expressed in Osborn v. Bank of the United States and United States v. Wong Kim Ark that Congress may confer citizenship through naturalization but may not abridge citizenship secured by the Constitution.

Voting in a foreign election may be deliberate conduct, but it is not itself a voluntary renunciation of American citizenship. Because Afroyim never voluntarily gave up his citizenship, § 401(e) could not constitutionally make him lose it.

Issue #2

Whether Perez v. Brownell, which upheld involuntary expatriation for voting in a foreign election, should remain controlling precedent.

Holding

No. Perez v. Brownell is overruled.

Reasoning

Perez had reasoned that involuntary expatriation was an appropriate means of advancing Congress's implied power over foreign affairs. The Court rejected that premise because an otherwise valid regulatory objective cannot overcome the constitutional protection of citizenship established by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Court noted that Perez had generated sustained controversy and that later expatriation cases had repeatedly invalidated other statutory provisions imposing loss of nationality without clearly endorsing a broad congressional power to expatriate citizens. Reconsideration was therefore appropriate, and the Court concluded that Perez was incompatible with the text and purpose of the Citizenship Clause.

Citizenship is not a minor privilege subject to withdrawal by a temporary legislative majority. Its loss can leave a person without the protection of any nation. The Court therefore held that constitutional citizenship belongs to the citizen unless the citizen voluntarily relinquishes it.

Dissents

Justice Harlan

Reasoning

Justice Harlan, joined by Justices Clark, Stewart, and White, would have adhered to Perez and upheld § 401(e). In his view, Congress's power over foreign affairs permits it to expatriate a citizen who intentionally engages in conduct reasonably regarded as prejudicial to American foreign relations or as demonstrating divided allegiance. Purposeful participation in a foreign political election could reasonably be treated as such conduct.

He argued that the majority did not adequately answer Perez's constitutional reasoning. The majority's assertion that Congress lacks any general power to expatriate without assent, he said, was conclusory, while the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause merely identifies the persons to whom citizenship initially attaches through birth or naturalization.

Justice Harlan disputed the majority's use of history. The early congressional debates and the dictum in Osborn, he maintained, were inconclusive and often rested on an obsolete theory that federal citizenship depended on state citizenship. By contrast, Congress enacted Civil War-era measures that purported to deprive unwilling citizens of citizenship, suggesting that lawmakers did not understand the Constitution to forbid involuntary expatriation altogether.

He also maintained that the framers of the Citizenship Clause sought chiefly to overturn Dred Scott, guarantee citizenship to freedmen, and establish federal citizenship independently of state citizenship. Senator Howard's statements and post-Amendment congressional practice, according to the dissent, indicated that the Clause was understood to leave Congress's otherwise valid expatriation authority intact.

For Justice Harlan, citizenship was still protected against arbitrary legislative action by the limits applicable to Congress's enumerated powers and by other constitutional guarantees. But the Citizenship Clause did not add an absolute rule that citizenship could be lost only through an express or subjective intention to renounce it.