Moderator:
Mark Krikorian, Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies

Panelists:
Stanley A. Renshon, Ph.D., City University of New York

Peter J. Spiro, Esq., Hofstra University

Amitai Etzioni, George Washington University

MR. KRIKORIAN: Good morning. I'm Mark Krikorian with the Center for Immigration Studies. We're a think tank here in town that examines and critiques the impact of immigration in the United States.

One of the unexamined consequences of immigration is this matter of dual citizenship. The question has long been ignored or confined to a narrow group of specialists, and what really makes it relevant nowadays is not just high levels of immigration, but the combination of immigration with cheap and easy transportation and communications. Unlike a century ago where immigration was widespread but the links that immigrants would keep with their home country were much more difficult, today on the other hand we have about 31 million immigrants in the United States. More than a million people immigrate to the United States each year. The 2001 legal immigration number is expected to be actually something like 1.5 million, just legal immigrants, not even counting illegal immigrants, and 90 percent of them come from countries that allow some form of dual citizenship. In addition, Mexico of course has changed its law to permit a form of dual citizenship.

What makes the issue perhaps urgent even is that during the current war against terrorism we have seen, and over the past ten years, the terrorist war against the United States, we have seen a significant number of American citizens, both naturalized citizens as well as some native-born, who have participated in this war against the United States.

In order to remedy this almost complete absence of discussion, certainly in Washington a complete absence of discussion on the issue, the Center for Immigration Studies has published the paper that we're releasing today, "Dual Citizenship and American National Identity." Our hope is that this will be the start of more extensive policy-related discussion here in Washington, rather than a narrower discussion you find in academia of the issue.

The panel today will feature the author and two respondents. I'll introduce everybody and then have them make their presentations. The author of the paper is Stanley Renshon. He's a political scientist and a certified psychoanalyst, so a political psychologist or a student of political psychology. He's a professor of political science at the City University of New York and an author, a prolific author. 

One of his most recent books is High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and the Politics of Ambition, which won a number of awards both in political science, related to political science, and psychology. His new book, which I'm afraid — did you bring? — I forgot, I left it at the office — editor of a new book called One America: Political Leadership, National Identity, and Diversity.

Responding to Professor Renshon's presentation will be Peter Spiro on my left, who is a law professor at Hofstra University and is one of the people who have in fact written about the issue of dual citizenship quite extensively. He's written and spoken on it, and from a different point of view from Professor Renshon.

The other respondent is Amitai Etzioni, to my right, professor at George Washington University, a sociologist whose own biography actually calls him the "guru of the communitarian movement." I believe, I think — correct me — I think he invented the term "communitarianism." He will also comment on Dr. Renshon's paper.

Stanley.

PRESENTATION OF STANLEY A. RENSHON, PH.D.

DR. RENSHON: Mark, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to be here and to talk about a subject that I think is not only important but likely to become increasingly important.

For the past decade America has primarily debated immigration along economic lines: Do immigrants cost the United States more than they contribute, or do they "pull their own financial weight? It's a useful question, but far from the most important in my view.

More recently, before 9-11 the economic debate has been supplanted by President Bush's initiative to "regularize" our borders with South America and particularly Mexico, a plan which included, and still does, a change in the status of an unknown and very large number of illegal immigrants. He has assigned Secretary Ashcroft to examine the legal implications of this proposal and he has asked Secretary Powell to look into the security issues that regularization would involve. Since 9-11, for obvious reasons, security issues have trumped legal issues, but regularization is still very much on the President's agenda.

There is a great deal to admire and appreciate in President Bush's leadership and, with due respect to that fact, I must say his initiative for regularization, even though heavily weighted in the direction of security issues, misses the most fundamental and crucial dimensions of our immigration dilemma.

These can be summed up in two terms: cultural coherence and integration. "Coherence" refers to the fit or the lack thereof of the different elements that constitute the core foundations of a society, while "integration" refers to the degree to which different members of that society are a part of it. These two essential elements are indeed fundamental for any well-functioning society.

Yet in the last three decades both our social and cultural coherence and our integration are increasingly subject to powerful centrifugal forces. This I regret to say is true even given the apparent, but increasingly frayed, solidarity of post-9-11 America.

The nature of these centrifugal forces is well illustrated by the issue of dual citizenship. What exactly is dual citizenship? Well, at its most basic level dual citizenship involves the simultaneous holding of more than one citizenship or nationality. Those two terms, by the way, are not synonymous. "Citizenship" is a legal term referring to the rights, obligations, and opportunities that adhere to a person as a member of society. "Nationality" refers more to the psychological attachment that one has to that particular country.

That a person can have all or many of the rights and responsibilities that adhere to a citizen in each of several countries may strike us as paradoxical, but it is in fact true. How do you get dual citizenship? Well, people used to talk about four ways. There are really now essentially five.

Number one, you can be born in the United States to immigrant parents. As you know, any child born in the United States is a U.S. citizen.

Number two, you can be born outside the United States to an American citizen and a citizen of another country. That person becomes a dual citizen.

Third, a person can become naturalized as a citizen in the United States and that act may be ignored by the country of origin. That is, a person who becomes a naturalized citizen and any country that he came from or she came from just simply ignores that. This is true even though the United States requires that those naturalizing in our country "renounce" their former citizenship. In the case of the United States, the failure to take action consistent with that oath carries no penalties and other countries can and increasingly do as a matter of policy simply ignore that oath.

Fourth, a person can become a citizen of the United States, can lose their citizenship in their home country, but regain it automatically by going back to that country. In a sense, they are functional dual citizens for purposes that this paper is about.

Finally, the newest form of dual citizenship is what I term "cluster citizenships." That's when groups of countries in one area have arrangements for dual citizenship either with each other or with other countries. An example would be Latin American countries which have arrangements with Spain for dual citizenship or the new EU Community in which everybody is a member of everybody else's citizenship regime.

The United States does not formally recognize dual citizenship, but neither does it take any stand against it. It could. Other countries regulate dual citizenship quite strenuously. So for example holding citizenship, maybe citizenships in several other countries, brings no responsibility. Serving as an official in the government of another country brings no responsibility. Serving in the armed forces of another country, even if that country is engaged in war against the United States or acts of conflict against our allies, brings with it no consequences from a citizenship standpoint in the past.

So you might say well, that sounds like that's sort of surprising, but you say: So what? Why does it matter? Well, the paper is designed to lay out some of the reasons why maybe it does matter.

Let me begin with some numbers. In the past, very few countries were willing to grant their citizens dual nationality, but that was then. There are now by my count 92 countries that recognize dual citizenship and many increasingly encourage it. Many of these countries send large numbers of their nationals to the United States. How many? Let me just give you some figures. Historically, of the 22 million plus immigrants legally admitted to this country between 1961 and 1997, almost 17 million are from dual or multiple citizenship countries.

Official immigrant figures for the years 1994 to '98 show that 17 of the so-called top 20 — that's the top 20 sending countries; that's 85 percent — have some form of multiple citizenship. Thus, of the 2.6 million plus immigrants from the top 20 sending countries, 2.2 million or 86 percent are from multiple citizenship sending countries. This of course only refers to the top 20, not the others of course.

Still you might ask, so what? My answer is this: The psychological implications and political consequences of having large groups of Americans holding multiple citizenships have rarely if ever been seriously considered. This I fear is policy by ignorance. Yet the issues raised by these facts go to the very heart of what it means to be an American and a citizen. It also holds enormous implications for the integrity of American civic and cultural traditions.

Is it really possible to be a fully engaged and knowledgeable citizen of several countries? The evidence suggests it's not. Is it possible to follow two or more different cultural traditions? The evidence suggests it is difficult. Is it possible to have two possibly conflicting core identifications and attachments? The answer, the evidence suggests it is not.

But even if such things were possible, the question we need to ask as a matter of immigration policy is whether these things are desirable. Consider the question of multiple loyalties and an American nationality identity. Most advocates subscribe to the "why not one more" theory. We are reminded that we are, as in my own case, sons, husbands, fathers. We are labeled as Caucasian and western. We are working class by background and upper middle class by socioeconomic status. We are Jewish, we are Reformed, New Yorkers, Manhattanites, and Upper West Siders. We are professors, scholarly writers, psychologists, in my case a psychoanalyst and a neo-Freudian. Economically, we are caring capitalists, politically we are moderate, and culturally we are conservative. And we, I, are Americans and northerners.

Post-modern theorists see us as comprising a virtually unlimited and replaceable set of selves that can be adapted or abandoned at will. Liberal political theorists and their allies count up all the categories by which we may be understood and conclude that adding one or a few more will make little if any difference.

The first basic fallacy of these arguments is that a person's core identity elements are infinitely malleable. They are not.

The second is that all identifications have equal weight. They do not. The "why not one more" theory fails to distinguish between the elements of personal identity that form a central core of one's psychology and those which are more peripheral. I am, for example, much more a father than a Caucasian, much more a political moderate than an Upper West Sider, and I'm definitely more of an American than most of the categories on my list.

The idea that individuals can integrate multiple conflicting basic orientations towards life may well prove a form of cultural deceit. It is apparently easier for some in the privileged elite to disregard the primary attachments that most citizens have to their own countries and which the United States should and needs to as a matter of policy foster. In doing so, these people seem to have confused sophistication with a new form of modern rootlessness. Such people may go anywhere, but they belong nowhere.

This is the opposite of civic engagement. The American ideal of civic republicanism is, after all, the citizen, not the subject. It has been well understood in political theory that democracy makes many demands on its citizens. They need to be informed about the issues their societies face, temperate in their deliberations of them, and restrained in actions designed to further their own preferred solutions.

Living in a country, as we do, facing complex and divisive issues arising from our increased diversity and the threat of terror and war requires even more from our citizens. Yet advocates consistently minimize the difficulties of being fully engaged, knowledgeable, and effective citizens in one political system, much less two.

Some endorse the philosopher Michael Sandel's view that whether one chooses to carry out one's commitments as an America citizen or his citizen responsibility to another country is a matter of personal moral reflection and choice. This is consistent with a profoundly robust view of citizenship entitlement and an equally profound but very narrow view of citizenship responsibility, and it has the most profound consequences for what has been for over 200 years the foundation of American republican democracy. That is, an informed and engaged citizenry.

At a time when America's civic connections and institutions are by almost any measure struggling and depleted, is it wise to argue in favor of making citizenship and the responsibilities thereof wholly operational?

Regretfully, both citizens and immigrants fail badly on indicators of deliberative knowledge. The so-called "test" for citizenship requires knowledge of a number of disjointed facts that require little, if any, knowledge of the traditions, political or cultural, that have shaped this country. Many thousands of new citizens require translations on ballots on which they must cast their vote. It is hardly likely that these citizens have followed the complex pros and cons of the policy issues they are asked to decide, since they don't well understand or speak the language of the debates.

Some ask whether it is legitimate to hold immigrants to a standard unmet by citizens. It's a fair question. Many studies underscore it. For example, a recent study of seniors at our most elite institutions — that would be Princeton and Brown and Wesleyan and places like that — found that 71 percent did not know the purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation, 78 percent were not able to identify the author of the phrase "of the people, for the people, and by the people." Yet 99 percent could identify Beavis and Butthead and 98 percent could correctly identify Snoop Doggy Dogg.

Any serious discussion of the implications of dual citizenship for the United States must take into account a fundamental fact of contemporary American life. It must consider the extent to which the fundamental personal, institutional, and cultural understandings that have provided the "unum" for this country's "pluribus" have increasingly become matters of contention. I'm referring of course to the cultural wars. But think for a moment about the list. There are history wars, there are military culture wars, there are school wars, there are classic wars, there are family wars, and the list of wars goes on and on.

Some believe that the creed, that commitment to American virtues of democracy, is all that we need to unite us. I believe they are profoundly wrong. Why? Who doesn't believe in democracy? Who is against opportunity? One is reminded, I am reminded, of the classic study I read in graduate school which showed that 99 percent of the American public supported free speech, that is until asked about the first controversial application.

Moreover, a focus on the creed ignores the fact that people do not unite solely, perhaps even primarily, around abstract principles, but rather emotional attachments. This means feelings of connection, respect, and even love for the country of which one is a part and to which one belongs.

Patriotism is the missing link, the 800-pound gorilla in discussions of American national identity and integration. Such feelings obviously cannot be legislated, but they certainly can be encouraged and they most certainly can be retarded by indifference to how well our new citizens become fully integrated into and attached into American society.

But American society is not the only thing that's changed that makes dual citizenship different these days now. American character or American psychology is also in transition. It seems clear to me that the origins of American national culture can be traced to the twin motivations behind the establishment of the first two colonies and the psychology necessary to realize them. The twin motivations are economic and social opportunity on one hand and personal and political freedom on the other. The psychologies that made them possible were symbolized and reflected in the frontier, which required pragmatism, principled tolerance, independence and self-reliance from those people living there.

Immigrants now arriving into American culture arrive in a country where not only the basic legitimacy of the culture's institutions and practices are at issue, they arrive as well in a country in which the basic psychology to sustain the founding principles of freedom of opportunity are eroding. Strong, independent minded convictions and the courage to maintain fidelity to them, a capacity for, not unprincipled tolerance, but tolerance bounded by principles, the ability to stand apart and be self-reliant are increasingly rare in public life both among citizens and leaders. The culture of complaint, victimization, dishonesty and avoidance are inconsistent with traditional psychological forms in American politics.

Now, there are a couple of other ways in which dual citizenship issues are different now than they were then. Consider the hyphenated Irish or American Jewish identity. Does this mean that a person is Irish-American, emphasis on the "Irish"; an Irish-American, emphasis on the "American"; an Irish-American, dual emphasis, that is "Irish" and "American"; or an American of Irish descent?

Each of these permutations reflects a psychological identification with and an arrangement of some of the basic building blocks which form our identity. It seems very unlikely that for most Irish or Jewish- Americans their "home country identifications" were equal to or more important than their American identity. Moreover, had any of their fellow countrymen suggested that they should do so, that is put their home countries well before their American identity, my guess is in the past the answer would have been a clear absolute no.

They might have been interested in aspects of their home countries, but most, if not all, would say that they were Americans first and primarily. This is less and less the case today.

Consider further the hypothetical case in which the Irish and Jewish-American equivalents are of "black" or "Chicano," "Hispanic" where available. Assume that they had back then the equivalents that are available now for Hispanics or blacks. Let's call those characteristics "white" in quotes and "Europeans." In fact, those terms were available then, but they would never have been embraced by Jewish or Irish-Americans. Such an embrace would have decoupled one's identify from any specifically stated identification with America.

Can anyone seriously argue that such an identity would have been chosen as Ruben Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of Michigan found in a very large survey of new immigrants in California? He found that almost 50 percent, 50 percent of his respondents, select a racial or pan-ethnic identity and that another 8 percent on top of that select an identity which was exclusively allied with the country of origin.

Can you imagine a random sample of Jewish-Americans or Irish-Americans, second-generation children, in which you would find 50 percent of those self-selected identifications that did not include an "American" element? I think not.

Now, the claims of states on their dual citizens have led to conflicts in the past, an issue that has been raised, I think terrifically, by Professor Spiro to my left. It is true, as he argues, that we are no longer likely to go to war with England over their kidnapping of our citizens, as was the case in the War of 1812. I think it's 1812, if that's correct.

While international military conflicts that engage a test of loyalties of dual citizens cannot be easily ruled out, the real problem is not war, but social cohesion. Do dual loyalties equal conflicted loyalties? Well, loyalty is a complex concept and an even more complex emotion. Psychologically, it is basically an attachment to or a sense of identification with, feeling towards, a person, place or thing. This can run from the shallow to the profound, from the episodic to the immutable, from the singular to the diverse.

Primary nationality, the one that we are born to, begins to take root very early, even before the child is born. The history and practices that brought a particular couple together are themselves influenced by cultural expectations and understandings that they acquired while growing up in their home country. How they prepare for their child and how they relate to her is also conditioned by these same factors. And of course, the parents speak to the child in their own language, soon to be his, and as he grows up are the guides and interpreters of the culture he must learn to traverse.

Being embedded in and attached to one's country of origin begins early and lasts long, according to most studies. That is why people are willing to die for their country, why great national accomplishments bring pride, why the symbols of the country — the flag, the Constitution — carry such great emotional weight and political power. It is why a New York Times reporter covering the attitudes of Africans, African immigrants in this country, could write: "Many African immigrants say that, whether they are here for 12, 20, or 2 years, Africa is and always will be home." It is why the Funeraria Latina transports 80 percent of its bodies out of the United States. It is why Lan Samantha Chang, a novelist writing in response to the Wen Hoa Lee case, could say in a New York times op-ed piece entitled "Debunking the Dual Loyalty Myth": "True, many immigrants have strong ties to their country of birth, but cultural or familial ties are on a different level from political allegiances. I love China, but I am a citizen of the United States."

Precisely.

I'm now reaching my conclusion.

By the way, I'm not raising the issue of disloyalty, but rather conflicted loyalties. I want to be very clear about that.

Becoming an American is simply not a matter of agreeing that democracy is the best form of government. It is a commitment to the psychology and the way of life that flows from it, and it ultimately entails an appreciation of and a commitment to and, yes, even a love for all that this you stands for and that it provides.

It is easy to view America instrumentally. Just how easily is illustrated by a 2001 study conducted by the Council of American-Islamic Relations of members of their mosques. In answer to the statement "America is a technologically advanced country and we should learn from that," 82 percent say yes. However, in answer to the statement "America is an example of freedom and we should learn from that," only 35 percent say yes.

America is a place of enormous personal freedom and great economic opportunities. It has always recognized that many arrive here seeking those treasures, which are in short supply at home. The fear that self-interest will come at the expense of developing appreciation and genuine emotional commitment to the country has I think been the subtext of attempts to ensure that new arrivals "become American." 

America reached its present state of political, economic, and social development by providing enormous personal freedom and opportunity. In doing so, it leveraged personal ambition as a tool to transform individuals' socioeconomic circumstance, and in the process it helped develop and reinforce the very psychological elements and attachments that were consistent with personal success and civic freedoms in the United States.

We have made the same tradeoff with new immigrants. We take immigrants in and take the chance that we can leverage their self-interest, which is entirely fine, and transform it into authentic commitment. Immigrants coming here agree to reorient themselves to their new societies and away from their old one. This involves some basic things: learning to be at home with English, understanding the practices and institutions that define American culture and politics. As they are successful, immigrants can then reflect on the ways in which their particular search for freedom and opportunity fit in with the history, with all its vicissitudes good and bad, that have shaped the ideal and the promise of America.

It is only at that point that the transformation from self-interest to genuine emotional attachment can be made. Thus oriented towards their new home, immigrants can become a part of the fabric of American cultural and political life. I understand, and I work with people that have left a life behind, and it is difficult. But generations of earlier immigrants thought the sacrifice worthwhile.

Dual citizenship, with its associated bifurcation of attention and commitment, changes that traditional and successful recipe. Immigrants increasingly come from countries that encourage dual citizenship for their own self-interested purposes. It may be to ensure remittances. It may be to organize people here for policies that they want at home. Modern technologies, as Mark mentioned, abet this process.

These developments set the stage for a direct conflict of interests among new immigrants, many of whom retain deep attachment to their home country, and more long-term and traditional and integrated citizens. Given the distribution geographically of new immigrants, it is possible that whole states in the United States and certainly some localities will have a substantial portion of dual citizens with active and deep connections to their countries of origin and countries that are organizing to make use of those.

In a democracy, especially one facing issues of cultural coherence and integration, the costs of admitting and allowing large numbers of dual citizenship citizens with multiple loyalties and the increasing capacity to maintain those ties are not so favorable. In a time characterized by enormous worry about the decline of social capital, it's something that we ought to be thinking about. Should we allow Americans to serve in the foreign government of other countries? My answer is no. Should we allow them to serve in some capacity in the armed forces of other governments? My answer is no. Should they be allowed to vote in other countries? My answer is unequivocally no.

No country, and especially no democracy, can afford to have large numbers of citizens with shallow civic and national attachments. No country facing divisive domestic issues arising out of its increasing diversity, as America does, benefits from large-scale immigration of those with multiple loyalties and attachments and doing nothing about it. No country striving to reconnect its citizens to a coherent civic identity and culture can afford to encourage its citizens to look elsewhere for their most basic national attachments.

Thank you.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Stanley.

I'll have Peter go first and then Professor Etzioni.

PRESENTATION OF PETER J. SPIRO, ESQ. HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY

MR. SPIRO: Thanks, Mark. I'll be brief so we will have a little time for discussion, because I think the disagreements here are pretty dramatic. But in some brief remarks, I just want to raise three basic points:

First, looking at what the harm is or what the supposed harm of dual citizenship is. On this I disagree with Stanley. I think that there really is no harm in the status itself. Much of my disagreement with Stanley is on how we frame the question. We're focused here on the status of dual citizenship and not larger questions of immigration and assimilation.

Then secondly, I want to look at actual benefits of dual citizenship from both the individual's perspective as a matter of individual rights, but then also from a classic national interest perspective as well. That is, that embracing dual citizenship can benefit the American national interest, traditionally framed.

Then finally, I just wanted to say a couple of things about where this may stand as a policy matter, both in the domestic and international arenas.

So first on the harm. What drew me to the subject in the first place is what has clearly been a very deeply entrenched historical distaste for dual citizenship, really almost to the point where it is reflexive. There's a fascinating history to dual citizenship and at one time a quite intense disfavor of the status. Just to give you a sampling of official views from the nineteenth century, we have the prominent American diplomat George Bancroft in 1849 observing that:

"A country should as soon tolerate a man with two wives as a man with two countries, as soon bear with polygamy as that state of double allegiance which common sense so repudiates that it has not even coined a word to express it."

We have Theodore Roosevelt in 1915 calling the "theory of dual nationality" a "self-evident absurdity." Then the first Senator Henry Cabot Lodge: "I cannot assent for a moment to the proposition that such a thing as dual citizenship is possible."

So there was, certainly in contrast to contemporary attitudes toward dual citizenship, a very hostile position, equating or making it out to be a question of morality. The source one would expect maybe of this historical disfavor would be sensational tales of spies and saboteurs and divided loyalties in wartime. In fact, one finds none of that. There is not a single case that I've come across of a spy who was a dual citizen and, if one thinks about it a little bit, for fairly obvious reasons, that spies are going to be the last ones to advertise such other loyalties.

But not even in wartime — and here this has some resonance in the current situation, that at the beginning of World War Two there was actually quite a large number of dual Japanese and American citizens and German and American citizens. Actually that didn't create that much of a problem. They just had to pick and they did so, and that choice was usually or often in the form of which armed service they enlisted into. But the status itself before war broke out did not cause any additional problems or threaten our security in any way that forcing them to have a single loyalty wouldn't have. So that's where one might have expected the historical disfavor for dual nationality to be found.

In fact, it's really the much more prosaic institution of what was known as diplomatic protection and the fact that states used to claim exclusive jurisdiction over their citizens as a matter of international law and also as a matter of power projection, and it used to be the case that manpower was critical to a state's international position by way of staffing armies. So dual citizenship in the nineteenth century context was akin to putting individuals in a situation similar to contested territory, and states ended up fighting over their claim to individuals and these dispute could be quite intense. As Stanley noted, it was a major cause of the War of 1812.

Then through the nineteenth century one finds issues involving dual citizens at the center of disputes between the United States and all the major European powers, so that this was really the stuff literally of state of the union addresses. One has a series of addresses from President Grant in the 1870's decrying the fact that the Germans and others what had naturalized into the United States would then return to their homeland and try to use U.S. citizenship as a shield against obligations of their other country of nationality.

So that's the source, and the world then could not tolerate the instability that dual nationals posed. In a world where states used routinely to go to war with each other, this was a source of instability that was intolerable. Of course, that's not the world today. When it comes to relations between states, the world is not an unstable place, an unstable place in that sense, in the sense that states are ready at a moment's notice to go to war with each other.

It's also not a world in which states claim exclusive jurisdiction over their citizens. Here's where the human rights revolution comes into play. It used to be the case under international law that states could treat their subjects as they pleased. There were no international law constraints on the treatment of a state's own subjects. That of course is no longer the case under the now fairly well entrenched international regime of human rights.

So what I think was the central historical threat and risk posed by dual nationals has now evaporated and what disfavor or distaste lingers is really just a reflex from that intense earlier disfavor.

The challenge that I pose to those who continue to oppose the status is: What exactly is the concrete harm posed by the status of dual citizenship? I can come up with a couple of fairly minor problems. We had a case a couple of years ago of a teenager who murdered another teenager in Maryland, who then claimed Israeli citizenship. Under Israeli law, Israeli citizens cannot be extradited. So he made his way to Israel and that was that.

That was a problem in which dual citizenship posed a problem. It's one fairly easily corrected by way of amending extradition agreements.

There may still be a problem of having dual citizens in high-level policymaking positions that directly implicate their other country of nationality. There are still some zero sum contexts in which old- fashioned loyalties could pose a problem. You wouldn't want a dual Mexican and American citizen serving as our ambassador to Mexico. But those problems can be handled really on a standard conflict of interest basis, in the same way that we don't have high government officials dealing with corporations in which they own stock. So to the extent that there are problems, concrete problems, posed by dual citizenship, they're fairly manageable.

Mark started off this session alluding to citizenship as it's played out in the terrorism context. I'm just not sure that the recent episode has changed these calculations in any way. To the extent that you get somebody, for instance, like John Walker who goes and fights for the other side, we now have criminal laws that deal with that. It's not something that has to be dealt with as a matter of citizenship. Of course, John Walker was not a dual citizen to begin with, so it's not directly implicated here. It's hard to know — I don't think a single one of the hijackers or others involved in this held the status.

Now, that leads me to the focus of Stanley's attack on the status. Here I'd say that when we talk about questions of conflicted identity we're talking about something other than citizenship status. Many of the problems, really most of the ones that Stanley has highlighted, are problems having to do with migration and the conflicted identities that no doubt come with moving from one's homeland and settling in another country. But those are all problems that one finds and can deal with outside the citizenship context. One is going to have to face those conflicts whether or not one retains citizenship in one's homeland or abandons that citizenship and naturalizes as a United States citizen or naturalizes and retains original citizenship.

Now, when we look at questions of other states trying to influence U.S. policy, of course that does not depend on a formal tie of citizenship, and of course it's also part of the great American tradition under which ethnic groups work politically to the benefit of home country interests. But Mexican immigrants in the United States, for instance, can work as a lobby in the United States in favor of Mexican interests without retaining their Mexican citizenship. So in some ways it's a red herring when we're looking at the particular issue of dual citizenship.

The one way in which it might make a difference has to do with rights of political participation. Here I think it is significant that we do live in a world in which there is, if not universal agreement, some dominance to democratic principles and certainly universal awareness of democratic principles, so that one is much less likely in the contemporary context than in the nineteenth century context to find an irreconcilable conflict between different approaches to government.

So that in the nineteenth century context, when democracy was really one of many competing legitimate systems of government, including for instance monarchical systems, one might face a problem in having an individual party to both systems. Today democracy is in the view of many the only legitimate system of government, so that the likelihood of that conflict has diminished greatly. And even those who come from states that remain non-democratic are themselves likely by the fact that they're migrating to the United States, likely to adhere to democratic approaches of governance.

So that, for instance, those who come from Iran are by that fact alone unlikely to adhere to the theocratic system of government in that country and we're unlikely to have a conflict that would be posed by somebody who was attempting to actualize both a theocratic form of government as well as a democratic one.

Then also I think Stanley's right to focus on these questions of the possibilities of multiple locations of commitment. Here I think that if we just draw on our own experience we see how multiple locations of commitment are quite possible at all levels. If we think of states as another form of association, then it should as an intuitive matter resonate that it is possible to belong to more than one polity at the same time, as of course those of us who are American citizens all do in our state citizenship as well as in our national citizenship.

So as for harms, I think that really we don't face any persistent or unmanageable harms from the status. Very briefly on the benefits: From the perspective of an individual, citizenship can be conceived as an expression of identity, and to the extent that we embrace dual citizenship it's a way of facilitating the multiple forms of national identity that many of us have.

One can think of this in terms of the First Amendment, although we won't apply the First Amendment literally to the situation. Think of it as a right of free association, that we would all abhor a rule under which we're not allowed to join other civic forms of association. A rule against dual citizenship is that kind of a rule.

So in terms of identity it's a benefit to the individual. It's also a benefit in terms of democratic participation norms. That is, if individuals have interests in more than one polity, as many immigrants do — they hold property back home, they have relatives back home, they have interests in immigration schemes that allow dual citizenship, as well as interests in the country of settlement, the United States — then to allow dual citizenship allows them to have a voice in both the systems in which they have an interest. So that's from the individual's perspective.

From a national interest perspective, embracing dual citizenship facilitates naturalization. Much of Stanley's presentation seems to be premised again on immigration questions. Dual citizenship involves people who are here as permanent residents already, so when we're looking at assimilation questions we're facing those questions outside of the citizenship context.

To the extent that some immigrants are deterred from naturalizing if they have to give up their original citizenship, dual citizenship becomes a way of facilitating their assimilation into the political system. So that's one national interest perspective.

The other is to the extent that they are assimilated politically into the United States and inculcate our constitutional values, they are then able to put those values to work back home. So that this becomes, dual citizenship becomes, a strategy for enlarging global democracy.

This is actually coming into play in the context of the Dominican Republic, where I think there's quite a strong argument to be made that dual Dominican-Americans, especially in New York, have been critical in reinforcing democracy in the Dominican Republic.

So that's the affirmative benefits in dual citizenship.

Just to close on the policy side, the fact that when Mexico changed its law to allow dual citizenship and posed the potential of several million dual citizens and there was not a peep in Washington about this being a problem indicates where we are, that dual citizenship is really a commonplace now, it's a fact of the world, and there's really no plausible way in which we can reverse this quite dramatic trend.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Peter.

Professor Etzioni.

PRESENTATION OF AMITAI ETZIONI, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

MR. ETZIONI: Let me first thank you, Mark Krikorian, for this opportunity. This is not the first time and I assure you it won't be the last time that you in a sense courageously provide opportunities to discuss issues which some people would consider too controversial to engage in. I think we need to talk about them, whatever our conclusions.

I really think Professor Stanley Renshon made a very strong case on the issue, precisely because the question is not technically if you have two pieces of plastic or whatever in your briefcase. I should stop here long enough to say I'm a recovering dual citizen, because I've had two passports for the convenience of travel to countries that might give me a hard time.

But it's a question of if a dual citizen stands in a much bigger status to passports. It does raise the question of affiliation, of loyalty, of commitment in a very special way. Actually, all I want to say is talk about this issue that I'm going to refer to as "layered loyalties." There are many ways to think about them.

For one second, talk about political loyalties, not cultural, not tastes in music or cuisine, but political loyalties. If you look at the history of the United States, originally people's political identification and loyalties was clearly to their own community, to their colony, or to their state. Then a nation was forged in the formal sense, but initially political loyalties were multiple, but the dominant one in case of conflict was to the individual's community, not to the country at large.

As Professor Renshon said on immigration, that he was not talking about disloyalty, he was talking about conflict of loyalties. But conflict is often resolved by recognizing that if there is a conflict between two demands which one deserves to get priority. I'll come back to this issue. This is what I mean by layered. It's not that you want to wipe out the other loyalty, but you want to have a principle, which will guide you in case there is a conflict.

So, historically most likely during the Civil War the prime loyalty was not to the nation. In fact, as thousands of people observed before me, one of the major issues of the Civil War was not only slavery but the preservation of the Union: Exactly where is your governing loyalty?

There's a tiny historical tidbit, which captures it very nicely. The Supreme Court until the Civil War referred to the United States in the plural. The rulings said "the United States are." It was only after the Civil War that they started talking about "the United States is," recognizing that it had become one nation. In 1850 Samuel Schuster stood up and said, "I speak not as a citizen of Massachusetts, but as an American," in effect recognizing that there was some peculiarity in this new prime loyalty. By the way, someone takes the next step; he says: "I'm not a citizen of America; I'm a citizen of the world," which again of course speaks exactly to this question, where would be our prime political loyalty on the issue of what happens when there is a conflict.

It is crucial for any nation. So for instance, to go back, those of you who can go back to the Cold War days, the number one issue with communists was who were they listening to, where did they take their orders, was it from Moscow? It was put in a very witch-hunting way, but the issue was a legitimate one.

When President Kennedy ran for office the issue was, are you going to take your orders from the Pope? So the sense of where is your prime loyalty has been raised consistently and it has been serving as a criteria of a polity which can require its members for its very being and identity and safety, that the prime loyalty in the case of conflict would be to the nation.

Professor Renshon talked about are you an Irish American or are you an American from the Irish community. That's exactly the issue. He correctly recognizes that hyphens are fine, there is no attempt to abolish secondary affiliations, with the reservation that they are secondary.

To push this one last time, I was on television in a debate with a representative of a very small group of Hispanic Americans, the Association of Latin America Americans, and he said to me that in the case of war, let's say Panama or Grenada, Americans of Hispanic origin should not have to serve. Now, this notion to most people is a problem, because why? What's the underlying issue? It's again that sense that you have to serve in your country's army, and the notion that you should be exempt because of other loyalty is not part of what we find acceptable for citizens.

Professor Spiro said that in World War Two it didn't matter with the Japanese- or German-Americans; if they wanted to serve in the United States Army or if they wanted to serve in the Japanese or the Germany army, they had their choice. I think today if the same issue would arise, let's say with respect to Afghan Americans, and they would say, you know, I think I decided to serve in the Taliban army, there would be a rude awakening I think for most of us, because that's exactly what we consider incompatible with membership in the community.

So the long and the short of it is that the passport is not what's at issue. There are business people who have six passports because it makes it easier for them to travel and to do business in many countries. But to the degree that it becomes, and for many it is, a symbol of where their loyalties are and their unwillingness to invest all their loyalties in one nation, it is an issue.

I also must say I differ from the notion that a nation is similar to a civic association, I belong to Hadassah or Lions, I belong to whatever. The nation has exactly this quality of an encompassing community which demands loyalty of the kind the Red Cross or whatever does not.

So let me just close by saying another group to which I belong, of course, are the communitarians. We have this image of the society which is like a mosaic. We all grapple with images. Some people would say the melting pot and everybody gets melted down into one big grey mush. Some people talk about jazz, where everybody keeps their voice and they stay compatible and they make a lot of noise together.

The mosaic has the following merit as an image: It recognizes that you can have different pieces, different sizes, and different colors, and it makes it more beautiful than if they all were the same size and the same color. It also has a framework as a group which holds it together and from which comes — and it strains it a little — the framework itself can be recast.

The issue becomes what belongs to the pieces, what belongs to diversity, and what everybody has to buy into. We expect all the sub-communities to pay homage to democracy, and I agree we expect this from everyone. Basic human rights? Well, when you come to strong religious communities actually that's not such an easy assumption. But surely we expect everybody to have their prime loyalty to the larger overarching community to which they belong.

For those of you who are not political scientists, it's okay, I assure you. There may be even some small hidden benefit. You may not be aware that this at the moment is a big hot topic in political science, because people who are down on the nation and hope — and we can all pray for it, I guess — that we will give up any national affiliations and become members — as Martin Nussbaum calls for, we become world citizens, and therefore we'll all share and share alike. That becomes then a litmus test. If you are against dual citizenship, you are a nationalist and you're not in favor of a world brotherhood.

So let me hasten to say, no, I'm perfectly willing to see the building of more encompassing communities, but until we form these larger communities and until they provide the kinds of things citizenship does, which is not around the corner, I'm afraid, I think you have to have layered loyalties and encourage people to choose by their citizenship what their prime loyalty is.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Professor Etzioni.

I understood earlier that you guys had one or two points you wanted to respond to, and then we'll go to questions.

DR. RENSHON: Professor Etzioni, I wanted to recommend to you a concept, not a metaphor, and the concept is blended amalgams. I think it does fit what we want to say because it's not simply an arrangement of parts that when you look at it has a pretty picture, but rather the nature of the cohesion of the parts, and that's why I called it blended amalgam. Just something to think about.

Anyway, for Peter Spiro I just want to say that the idea that we're members of state, local, and national communities to me is a point in favor of my position. All those places are all American. All those places share a culture. All those places share a history, a language, and so forth. So to me it's an entirely different operation to say you're a member of — you grew up in Atlantic City and you moved to New York and you're an American as well, the same way you grew up in Mexico or Iran or something and now I came here at 25 and now I'm an American.

I'm not interested in denying people the opportunity to have multiple attachments. I think they are, as you say, a matter of life and fact. But I don't think that because that is true it necessarily follows that we as a country don't have a responsibility the shape the way in which we think of citizenships in the direction of encouraging people to have their primary attachments to the United States.

Thank you.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Anyone have questions? We'll take some questions from anyone who wants. I have a couple of my own. Go ahead.

Can you identify yourself?

MS. SANDS: Peggy Sands.

I'm interested in this very fascinating subject, immigration. I've raised bilingual, multinational children and I'm very much for this. But being from southern California, I am extremely concerned about numbers. I think when we talk about individual cases and benefits and advantages and some disadvantages, it all seems to wash out in the end to something that is an enriching experience. But when you start talking about the numbers that we're seeing in southern California of one nationality, Mexican, coming in, where the schools — where many elementary schools, even in my own home town, are predominantly Mexican — until they stopped the bilingual ed thing, the schools would be taught in the Spanish, which if you speak another language you know it's a cultural thing. That means that certain cultural attitudes are being imposed on a culture that are not North American.

This is where I think there is a problem. I'd like you to discuss not the individual, but I think the massive immigration and massive dual citizenship that really then does challenge the dominant citizenship, the dominant culture.

MR. SPIRO: Well, the first answer would be that's again about immigration and not about citizenship, that those challenges are posed by the presence in the United States of people who don't share the dominant cultural characteristics of the United States.

MS. SANDS: But let me just add then that dual citizenship is definitely encouraging this, definitely. There's many, many quotations of people saying they're coming up and becoming citizens because they know they can keep their citizenship. So it's a fact.

MR. SPIRO: Well, that may be. But you still have these issues, for instance, of bilingual education regardless of whether the individual is naturalized or not.

But on the second point, I guess I'd want to challenge Professor Etzioni, and that is this question of conflicted loyalties. Again, I think we need to concretize that challenge and pose the cases in which there actually are conflicted loyalties.

To take the Mexican example, I've no doubt that there are many challenges posed by large-scale immigration from a single country in a concentrated area. But as a matter of conflict of loyalties, I just don't see more than a limited number of areas in which that has happened, in which an individual actually has to choose between a loyalty to one country over loyalty to another.

MR. ETZIONI: I think it is a fair way to proceed. I must say before I proceed that my late wife was Mexican and so my children are, so I feel close to the subject. My wife used to say that Mexico was going to get Texas back without firing a shot, and I think it possibly will get all of Texas.

But it is right that we are not at war with other countries and therefore the question of who are you going to shoot, in what direction, is not one we face very often, hopefully not, though it becomes — it has a certain symbolic merit if you come around and say, if there's a war, I don't want to serve. It indicates way beyond what do you do if there actually is a war.

But the underlying issue I think is a correct one that it's technically not tied to citizenship, but practically, practically, it is. So if you have a million people going to San Diego and saying, I'm going to get a green card and become a citizen because it's going to make it easier for me to come and go and get jobs here, but I really want to keep my Mexican identity because that's really my prime identity and I'll try and maintain my culture and my traditions and be involved in Mexico, I refuse to participate in this society, I will not do civic things, I will not volunteer or do anything above what I have to do for my job, I'll go to Mexico because that's my community, you're making what people would call bad citizens, not in the sense that you violate, that you're not paying taxes, which you also have as a problem, but you just don't do what we expect of a good citizen in a country in which you are here for employment economically because your loyalty lies elsewhere.

In fact, I would be expect that people who have that sense would be much more likely to transmit attitudes to their children which delay their becoming good dual citizens — I mean, hyphenated Americans.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Stanley, do you have a comment?

DR. RENSHON: Professor Etzioni, I must compliment you on the very calm way in which made your points. I'm taking notes psychologically so I can emulate that. That's very nice.

I of course support those points, and I'm going to make another, quite different point that gets back to what Professor Spiro said about the long history of immigrant communities trying to influence U.S. policy, and it is apropos to the question that was raised about Mexico. It seems to me there is a profound and fundamental difference between having Irish Americans ask America to do something about Ireland and a large group of Country X's citizens in the United States asking the United States to do something which will have profound internal domestic cultural significance.

So it's not like we're being asked to change our policy toward Country X on any number of various things, which is fine and dandy, but rather that we're being asked to change the internal politics and culture of the United States, and that's a wholly different idea as far as I'm concerned.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Yes.

MR. MITCHELL: Brian Mitchell, Investors Business Daily.

This sort of follows up just what you said, Professor Etzioni, because we talk about conflicted loyalties, but the problem often appears in most cognate terms when it comes to conflated interests, where ethnic minorities in the U.S. tend to conflate the interests of their foreign country with the interests of the U.S. and argue that the U.S. should adopt a certain policy.

Professor, you said this could be fine and dandy, but it does create security problems for the U.S. at times when it has to choose between Greece and Turkey, when we have a very active Greek lobby in this country and Turkey it could be argued presents a much greater strategic advantages.

Another example is Israel. Of course, that plays into the whole issue of the current conflict that we're in and what part is played by a number of Israeli Americans who actually hold citizenship there, serve in the army there, then come back over here and advocate that the U.S. continue to support Israel and in fact basically back Israel in all that it does.

So it seems to me, and this is fairly well recognized — Samuel Huntington of Harvard has written:

"You really can't understand American foreign policy without understanding the influence of ethnic minorities."

But many do in fact have these passionate attachments that George Washington warned us against regarding entangling alliances.

It seems to me that this goes right along with dual citizenship because, after all, people have dual citizenship because they have another nationality and you really can't separate the two, as Professor Spiro seems to want to do, to say that, well, this is a legal issue, this doesn't affect the question of nationality.

DR. RENSHON: I would just say that I think it's a very big mistake to look at this issue too narrowly. I think there are reasons why you might, if you had a certain point of view, want to look at it narrowly, but I think it is an issue that needs to be looked at more broadly because it has broad consequences.

You know, one of the things I say in the paper is that there are matters of scale. It really truly does matter if you have 50,000 of Country X's members here and 25 million of Country X's followers here. It also matters that you have governments which are increasingly looking at their nationals as key actors, not for America's interests, but for their own interests, and are organizing themselves state by state and city by city to further those interests.

One example if you want to get into it is the whole issue of driver's licenses or identification cards, in which you have consulates opening up all over the United States that are pushing, and it is the policy of the Mexican government for that to be pushed, to be able to present Mexican identification cards as the equivalent of an authentic document, which would allow you then, at least until it's changed, to get such things as a driver's license and a bank account and so forth and so on.

There's a whole other argument here that I have not gotten into which I will simply mention, which is the idea — and I'm sorry to say that President Bush seems to be a person who believes this — that illegal immigration or undocumented immigration is a victimless crime. What I want to say is that the whole tendency to push to shape our laws and push them back is an example of the Moynihan argument of defining deviancy downward. We are defining citizenship downward. We are defining our moral culture downward. There's a whole argument. There are consequences to all of these things.

I'm simply saying that asking people to accept what heretofore has not been accepted for some people represents an advance, for some people it represents a problem. My point is that it's something we want to look at as a country very seriously and not simply say, well, it's happening, therefore it is and ought to be.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Yes. Could you identify yourself.

MS. SANDERS: Emily Sanders, House Judiciary Committee.

You mentioned that dual citizenship facilitates naturalization. Could you elaborate on that? I have trouble following that.

MR. SPIRO: It's a deterrence to naturalize for some if by naturalizing one has to abandon an original citizenship. So that by accepting dual citizenship more people will acquire U.S. citizenship because they can keep their original citizenship. That's actually been fairly well documented at certainly the micro level, that there are individuals who would not naturalize if they had to give up their original citizenship.

Now, a lot of that is because of the sentimental attachments, and Stanley gets into this a little bit, that immigrants who come here, even though they're here for good, still maintain dreams about going back home and, even though most of them don't, they want to retain that option. So it becomes — their interests are in the U.S. This is where their life is now, but they want to — they cling to really their place of birth. So that's how it fits into the naturalization discussion.

DR. RENSHON: If I may, I want to comment. Actually, in my paper I report a study by a psychologist by the name of Yang and he looked at macro data and he found that dual citizenship actually retards naturalization. But I want to accept —

MR. SPIRO: That just can't be the case.

DR. RENSHON: Look at the data.

MR. SPIRO: There are other factors having to do with nationality.

DR. RENSHON: I'm sure, but just look at the data. And I'm going to accept your point and to say that I think it is true that when countries allow dual citizenship there is more naturalization in the United States. But I'm interested in what kind of naturalization. It seems to me not enough to simply say we've got ten new citizens if we have ten new citizens who are doing it primarily so that they can get the benefits of American life and are not willing to take on the responsibilities of American life.

So rather than ask how many new numbers of people do we have, that's all hunky-dorey, but I want to ask a different question, which is whether the citizens we're getting are really the kinds of citizens that we would like to encourage. That to me is the more important question.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Let's take a few questions without responses and then everyone will sort of having a chance to say their last piece. Yes, sir, and then you, just quick questions.

MR. GOMEZ: Pepe Gomez. I'm with Photographics. Actually, I want to make just a few points.

My opinion is that in sense of — I have dual citizenship with Spain because my father's from Spain. I was born and raised in Chile. I'm living here because I married an American woman that I met in college, who is also a dual citizen, from the United States and Brazil. So the story goes along.

What I'm going to say is every time I go to Chile, because my family lives there, my parents, I go there and I crave on a Sunday morning a cup of espresso from Starbucks and a bagel. And I'm seeing these differences because, doctor, what I hear from you is a lot of data that can be passed on from many places. My wife is a doctor of psychology. Data can be played and turned in different ways to make any point, basically.

I just want to make — one difference is, my grandmother was born and raised in Spain and is Jewish. Irish Americans and Jewish Americans are a completely different ballgame. One is a religion, another one is a country where you come from. What I'm saying is, when you refer to Jewish Americans you're referring to people from Israel, you're referring to people from Spain.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Thanks a lot. We've got other questions. Sir, you in the back, quickly.

MR. BILLAUER: Guy Billauer, American Jewish Committee.

I have a question. The discussion revolves around the pros and cons of dual citizenship, but are there any recommendations in terms of acculturation? And if you can refer some to multiculturalism and some to this new discussion about the pros and cons of multiculturalism?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Is there one other question?

Yes, sir, quickly.

MR. TAYLOR: I think it was Professor Renshon, you mentioned, did you say it was the Latino group that exports the bodies?

DR. RENSHON: I'm sorry, I can't hear you.

MR. TAYLOR: I believe it's you that said there was one ethnic group, I believe you said Latinos, exported —

MR. KRIKORIAN: It was one particular Hispanic funeral home that exported its bodies.

MR. TAYLOR: The deceased bodies.

DR. RENSHON: Yes.

MR. TAYLOR: Do you have any statistics on other ethnic groups compared to those? I thought that was very interesting.

DR. RENSHON: Very good point, and the answer is no.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Stanley, you're going to have the last word. Peter, do you have anything?

MR. SPIRO: Yes. I think it's instructive to have this reminder of the fact that — and this is contrary to Amitai's conception of the world — that nation states are no longer encompassing communities, and it really is commonplace now to find people marrying people of other nationalities or moving and working and settling in other countries.

So that I think it was once the case that states did represent these communities that were largely insulated from each other and that isn't the case, and that's why as a policy matter this just has to be accepted. There are too many dual nationals now. It is a commonplace. It's a fact of life, and that to the extent that it poses problems we just have to address those problems as they come up.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Professor.

MR. ETZIONI: I very much agree that that is the issue: Is the nation state dead? Does it no longer constitute the primary community? I think the definition of a nation is a community invested in the state. Do we have now other new political communities which succeed the nation state? Even in Europe — certainly not in the United States — the reference was that there are marriages to other nationalities, as distinct from other ethnic groups. I don't know if that amounts to one-tenth of one percent of Americans. So the notion that we all marry out there, I'm sure you didn't really mean to imply that.

But the United States, because of its size, is distinct. But even if you go to Europe today, where they are rapidly moving to try to fomenting the United States of Europe, the notion that the prime loyalty of citizenship, your sense of community, is European is a wonderful, wonderful dream, but which has a very limited reality.

Young people used to say, especially in Germany in the prior period, oh, I'm a European. But then they dropped that very, very quickly and their prime loyalty continues to be to their country and their secondary loyalty, a very thin one by the way, to Europe.

So we may dream about the day in which the nation state will be dead. For now, it commands in fact increasingly loyalty. When it doesn't, what we do is nations fall apart. You get, like we got in Timor and many other places, a horrible war because there is no nation and your prime loyalty is to some sub-community, which is a condition of civil war.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Stanley, you have the last comment.

DR. RENSHON: I have to say the death of the nation state is an idea that only a theorist could put forward with a straight face. As you think about that, think about 9-11. Almost every American in this country was riveted to one place and one place only, which was the country's national institutions and government, for a very profound, important reason.

So thank you.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, everyone, for coming. I hope that this will just be the first installment, and recommend to your boss we have some Congressional hearings on this issue. There's never been a hearing, there's never been a resolution, there's never been a bill, there's never been any discussion of this issue in any policy context, and I hope that we'll hear more about it.

Thank you very much.