Afroyim v. Rusk
The Supreme Court ruled that Congress cannot strip a person of American citizenship without that person's own consent, striking down a law that automatically canceled citizenship for voting in a foreign election.
The decision overturned a nearly ten-year-old precedent and established that the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship guarantee protects people from having their citizenship taken away by the government, even through laws Congress considers within its foreign-affairs powers.
“Citizenship in this Nation is a part of a cooperative affair. Its citizenry is the country and the country is its citizenry.”
The majority explains why citizenship cannot be revoked by the government against a citizen's will.
How it got here: A federal trial court and the Second Circuit ruled against the man, upholding the law under Perez v. Brownell; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to reconsider that precedent.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A man born in Poland immigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 1926. He moved to Israel in 1950 and voted in an Israeli parliamentary election in 1951. When he later tried to renew his U.S. passport in 1960, the State Department refused, citing a federal law that stripped citizenship from anyone who voted in a foreign political election.
The question before the Court
Can Congress take away a person's American citizenship just because he voted in a foreign country's election, even though he never gave up his citizenship on his own?
Why it matters
Naturalized and native-born Americans living or traveling abroad, voting in foreign elections, or engaging with foreign governments no longer risk automatically losing their citizenship through an act of Congress. The ruling protects citizens from having their legal status revoked without their own choice, a protection especially significant for immigrants and dual nationals.
What changes now
The ruling is a final decision on the merits, not a temporary order. It directly reversed the lower courts' judgment and overturned the Court's own nine-year-old precedent in Perez v. Brownell. Going forward, Congress cannot revoke a person's citizenship through legislation like the one at issue unless the citizen voluntarily gives it up; the petitioner's citizenship was restored as a result.
What this does not decide
The decision does not address every method by which citizenship might end, such as fraud in the naturalization process, which the Court noted elsewhere can still be undone. It focuses narrowly on Congress's inability to impose involuntary loss of citizenship through ordinary legislation.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Harlan
“The construction now placed on the Citizenship Clause rests, in the last analysis, simply on the Court's ipse dixit, evincing little more, it is quite apparent, than the present majority's own distaste for the expatriation power.”Harlan's central objection that the majority's ruling lacks a solid legal foundation.
Justice Harlan argued the majority provided almost no reasoned rebuttal to Perez v. Brownell and instead relied on an incomplete historical survey that, properly examined, actually supports Congress's power to expatriate citizens who intentionally act to dilute their allegiance. He reviewed pre- and post-Fourteenth Amendment congressional debates and statutes, including wartime expatriation laws passed just before the Amendment, arguing they show Congress believed it retained this power and that the Citizenship Clause was meant only to define who becomes a citizen, not to bar Congress from ever ending that status.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first asked whether Congress has any general power—whether written into the Constitution or reasonably implied from it—to take away a citizen's citizenship without that citizen agreeing to give it up, and concluded that no such power exists anywhere in the Constitution's text.
- The Court rejected the idea, relied on in its earlier decision Perez v. Brownell, that Congress could draw such a power from being a sovereign nation, reasoning that in America the people themselves are sovereign, not the government, so the government cannot claim an inherent right to sever its own relationship with its citizens.
- The Court reviewed historical debates in Congress from 1794, 1797, and 1818 over proposals to define when citizens lose their status, finding that lawmakers at those times repeatedly expressed doubt that Congress had constitutional authority to declare any act an automatic forfeiture of citizenship.
- The Court read the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—which says all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens—as creating a permanent status that lasts unless the citizen personally chooses to give it up, rather than a status the government could cancel at will.
- The Court concluded that allowing Congress to revoke citizenship under an implied foreign-affairs power would let a temporary group of officeholders take away the citizenship of a group of citizens, a result the Court found fundamentally at odds with the amendment's purpose of securing citizenship permanently.
- Because the challenged statute allowed the government to cancel citizenship without any voluntary renunciation by the citizen, the Court held that the law conflicted with the Fourteenth Amendment and could not stand.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Overrules Perez v. Brownell (356 U.S. 44)
The Court explicitly overturned this prior decision that had upheld Congress's power to strip citizenship for foreign voting.