Kay Xander Mellish explains Denmark's pending dual citizenship law, which would let immigrants keep their original nationality instead of renouncing it. She wants Danish citizenship to secure her permanent residence, give her daughter a Danish passport, and finally vote after years of paying taxes. The practical side is messier: two passports, two tax systems, two keyboards.
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Hello and welcome to the How to Live in Denmark podcast. I'm Kay Xander Mellish. There is big news this week for foreigners in Denmark. It looks like double citizenship will soon be permitted. Previously, if you wanted to be a Danish citizen, you had to give up citizenship in your home country. Meanwhile, Danes who had moved abroad, say to the U.S. or Australia, and became citizens there, had to give up their Danish citizenship. There's now been a proposal to get rid of all that. It hasn't been finally approved, but all the Danish parties say they'll vote for it, with the exception of our anti-foreigner friends in the Danish People's Party. Now, having been here for 14 years, I will probably apply for Danish citizenship. I realize I'll have to do a lot of studying about Danish history and learn things like the difference between King Christian IV and King Christian VII, but that's true of any country. I'm sure people wanting to be American citizens have to learn the difference between George Washington and George Bush. I want to be a Danish citizen for a lot of different reasons. Right now, my permanent residence permit expires if I'm out of the country for more than a year. That could easily happen if I travel or have a family crisis back in the U.S. Also, my daughter has no rights here. She was born here and has only lived here, but she has no independent residence permit or the right to attend university here. Under the current law, she'd have to apply for a Danish residence permit when she turns 18, And there's no guarantee she'd get it. If I'm a double citizen, it means she can become a double citizen. And if she's a double citizen, it means she can hold the Danish flag in her girls' marching band. Right now, she's not allowed. Most importantly, I've been paying Danish taxes for 14 years, and I want a say in how those taxes are spent. I want to vote. Now, I can vote on the local level, as can any foreigner who's been here for 4 years. That said, the Danish People's Party is trying to take that away from us. One of their candidates recently said, as an immigrant in a new country, you're busy with a bunch of other things as opposed to politics. If I moved to a hula-bula land in Africa, I also wouldn't be able to have an opinion on political matters and vote. If the Danish People's Party was not the second-largest party in Denmark, they would be comic relief. At any rate, having double citizenship will add to the large number of things I need to do double as someone with ties to 2 countries. Having double citizenship will mean that instead of trying to remember where I put my passport, now I can try to remember where I put 2 passports. I already pay 2 sets of taxes and wrestle with 2 sets of tax bureaucrats. Lots of fun. I have 2 driver's licenses and 2 sets of eyeglass prescriptions, since one country won't accept the others. In each country, I have 2 pensions, one public and one private. That means 4 pension plans, and I basically don't understand any of them. But those are the big things. There's also the small things, like having 2 different keyboards on my iPhone, one Danish, one English. Whenever I start typing something, the keyboard always seems to be in the language that doesn't match what I urgently need to say. Even worse, sometimes I need to mix languages, say, giving an English-speaking friend a Danish street address. That just about blows the iPhone's circuits. You can tell that the iPhone was designed by monolingual Americans. Another thing that drives me crazy is geo-targeted sites like Google or Hotels.com or TripAdvisor. They assume because I'm physically located in Denmark, I want all their services in Danish. No, I don't! You can figure out how to reset them into English or whatever language you choose, but it always takes like 15 minutes to find that little hidden tab that does it. Drives me nuts! Now, the Danish People's Party would suggest that if I wanted to get rid of all these double headaches, I should simply give up my American citizenship and commit myself to Denmark. In the newspaper stories I've seen about this issue, there are lots of comments from people named Knud and Bent and Axel and other old-people Danish names. They say things like, It's citizen, not cities-zen! That means one person, one country, one passport. How hard can it be? Or, I can't see why anyone would want double citizenship, or even 20 citizenships, for any reason except to have many identities they can use for crime or tax evasion. But I don't want to give up my American passport. I am an American, and I always will be an American. I live in Denmark, I speak Danish, I send my child to a Danish school. I'm pretty well integrated. But as a foreigner in Denmark, you're never entirely Danish. Even if Denmark has become home, there's still another home, at least somewhere in your heart. And that's How to Live in Denmark for this week. Check us out on Facebook on our Xander Mellish page, not Kay Xander Mellish. That's my personal page with lots of pictures of my kid and pixelated videos of '80s synthpop bands. Just Xander Mellish. You can recognize the logo. You can also find the old podcasts on iTunes. Please leave a review if you have the chance. Follow us on Twitter at How to Live in DK— the 2 is a number— or visit us at howtoliveindenmark.com. See you next week. Remember, the How to Live in Denmark book is available for download on amazon.com. You can read it on any phone or tablet. All you need is the Kindle app, and the Kindle app is free. The book's not free, but it's not very expensive either. If you read the book and enjoy it, please leave a review on your local version of amazon.com. It helps other people find the book and find the podcast.
