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In 1916, armed insurrectionists revolted against the chief ally of the United States. The rebels surrendered quickly, but were punished severely: 15 were executed, and 3,500 faced imprisonment. Curiously, the British government spared one of the rebel leaders, propelling him to take a central role in an ongoing and ultimately successful campaign to subvert British rule. Even more curiously, nearly fifty years later, in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson welcomed this aging insurrectionist-who had abandoned his belief in the use of force against the British only a few years before-to the White House on a state visit. Johnson's greeting to Eamon de Valera, by then the president of the Republic of Ireland, immediately suggests why he was spared: "This is the country of your birth, Mr. President . . . this will always be your home."1 Although de Valera, the American-born son of an Irish mother and a Spanish father, lived in the United States for fewer than three years, both the British courts and Johnson after them understood de Valera to be an American citizen-despite his expatriation, despite his participation in armed political struggle, and despite his ascent to the leadership of a foreign government.
Until recently, the notion that the country of one's birth determines one's citizenship had as powerful a hold in Ireland-where it was encoded in the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State, the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Acts of 1935 and 1956, and from 1998 to 2004 in Article 2 of the Irish Constitution-as it has in the United States, where it is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.2 Nonetheless, in 2004, a referendum was called-and passed with a nearly 80 percent majority3-removing the constitutional provision of territorial birthright citizenship for the children of noncitizens.4 This monumental change in the citizenship regime of the newly prosperous Ireland of the "Celtic Tiger" marked a radical departure from the shared history, embodied in de Valera's personal story, that joined Ireland to the United States. At the same time, the citizenship referendum also highlighted both continued and new interconnections between the two nations. In the debates leading up to the referendum, both the American legal example and the historical experience of legal and illegal Irish immigrants in the United States figured prominently. And...