NATURALIZATION. – It may be considered as the effect of a prior abandonment of the political body of which a subject was originally a part, and the consequent insertion into another political community to whose citizenship he did not originally have a right deriving from either *ius soli* or *ius sanguinis*, the two titles usually recognized. Two acts contribute to forming this status: the first, called expatriation, and the second, consisting in an election, from which, through the intervention of the sovereign authority, a new social and political bond arises. Once such a bond is established, the individual is said to be naturalized, that is, admitted to become part of the State as one of its members by birth.
Naturalization thus has a narrower meaning than assimilation, since the former applies exclusively to the foreigner, whereas the latter may apply to full citizens of a different nationality, toward whom public authority exercises a special action to unify them with the majority. Though distinct in content, scope, and effect—one being juridical and the other social—the two processes may sometimes coincide in practice, since the foreigner who is naturalized is subjected to a gradual assimilative action. The problems thus raised must be considered separately.
The insertion of an individual into a political community originally foreign to him may occur either through general laws that provide for cases in which a foreigner acquires citizenship without further intervention by the sovereign power—such as by residence, election, recovery of lost citizenship, or marriage of a foreign woman to a citizen—or through a positive expression of sovereignty or its delegated organs concerning the individual in question. In law, the term *naturalization* is used solely to denote this latter method, and naturalization is consequently defined as the juridical institution formed by the norms governing cases in which a foreigner acquires citizenship through the special intervention of the State’s powers. The laws governing this institution vary from country to country, depending on whether they aim to facilitate the influx of foreign elements—as in the American continent to promote settlement—or to restrict it within certain limits. It is worth noting that some legislations distinguish between *great naturalization*, which together with citizenship grants the foreigner all political and civil rights enjoyed by native-born citizens, and *small naturalization*, which grants citizenship along with only administrative rights.
The issues of interest to Catholic doctrine regarding naturalization concern both the individual’s faculty to sever the original social bond in order to join another political organization and the powers of the State in this regard. Their solutions can be reduced to three: two extreme and one intermediate. Among the extreme positions, the first is the liberal view, which, resting on the absolute autonomy of the individual, asserts the unconditional right of the citizen to expatriate and denies the State any power to interfere in its exercise, except in cases of supreme emergency. The second, inspired by the dogma of the State’s absolute sovereignty, attributes to the State discretionary power over the citizen, which it may always use to forbid the breaking of the political bond that ties him to it, thus denying expatriation. The intermediate solution recognizes the individual’s freedom to change citizenship but subordinates it to the common good of the society of origin and tempers the State’s powers with the limits imposed by the rights of the human person. Catholic doctrine finds this latter view consistent with its principles.
The bond uniting a man to a particular political community is not of a physical nature but essentially moral, consisting in the adhesion of wills to a common collective purpose, for the attainment of which social cooperation is accepted. As such, it may be severed by an act of the same will, a concrete manifestation of the more general right to freedom applied to the specific object of choosing a new civil coexistence. Moreover, while social cooperation and hence a political bond are necessary for the attainment of the ends of life, these ends may be achieved within any political community; thus, no necessity arises from this higher exigency to belong to a particular one. Man consequently has the faculty to change his place of residence and assume a new citizenship after renouncing the one he held, if reasons of life or convenience prompt this choice.
Nevertheless, the exercise of this faculty remains conditioned by the more universal exigencies of the common good. Man incurs debts toward the community that gave him birth, nourished and educated him, and toward it he has not only duties of affection but also of cooperation and service, to contribute to its well-being, defense, and prosperity. The necessities of life or personal preferences, which in theory justify a change of citizenship, in practice come into conflict with these duties, to the fulfillment of which man is bound, thus limiting his right to personal freedom.
The care to ensure that these social obligations are duly satisfied falls to public authority, the guardian and promoter of the common good. Within the exigencies of this good, the State has the faculty to intervene to regulate the freedom of expatriation, subjecting it to certain conditions or to the prior performance of certain services, without however suppressing II. For the same reason of safeguarding the common good, the society into which the foreigner intends to transfer has the power to regulate naturalization, though never to force the will by covert or overt oppressive methods. It must also be noted that the State’s power finds an insurmountable limit in the individual’s original right to possess a nationality or citizenship, from which he may only be deprived as a penalty for a grave and proven crime, and never for ideological or political reasons. The most recent violations of this sacred right of the person, committed for political reasons, have created a genuine international problem with the mass of stateless persons, relegated almost to the margins of civil life, the study of which occupies the United Nations Organization.
As regards assimilation, which is connected with nationality, inasmuch as even the naturalized foreigner may be subject to it, it is not possible to exclude the right of the State to provide for the slow and peaceful absorption of ethnic minorities or immigrants into the unity of its culture and traditions. The perfection of the social entity results from the synthesis of partial perfections in being, in acting for the end, and in kinship, which will be all the higher the closer the unity of minds and wills, and this, in turn, will reach a high degree of cohesion if it is based on the same culture and the same traditions. To strive for its attainment is therefore an end to which public authority may legitimately direct its provisions, provided it does not exceed the bounds by compressing just freedom and the rights of nationality. As St Thomas already taught, commenting on the text of Aristotle’s Politics, “the State must be composed of a single people, for a single people has the same customs and the same habits, which foster friendship among citizens, because of the similarity that prevails among them: States composed of different peoples have been destroyed because of internal dissensions aroused by the diversity of customs, for one part, moved by hatred against the other, sided with the enemies” (Comm. in Polit., III, 3).