Dual citizenship

I wholeheartedly welcome the judicious decision of the Chief Adviser of the caretaker government of Bangladesh to amend the existing legal framework on dual citizenship of Bangladeshi Britons, so that they no longer have to forfeit Bangladeshi citizenship as soon as they become British citizens, unless they want to relinquish it voluntarily. Not having to reapply for retaining the Bangladeshi citizenship will, doubtless, be a privilege for the first generation Bangladeshi Britons to avert a bureaucratic quagmire replete with requirements, that oftentimes discourage them from venturing beyond a “no visa-required” (NVR) seal duly stamped on their host country passport before visiting the sending country as veritable outsiders looking in. It may, very well, generate a sense of entitlement among the post-immigrant generation in the Bangladeshi Diaspora and facilitate them to develop a “transnational social field” incorporating their country of origin. I will plead that this privilege be extended to the Bangladeshi-Americans as well.
Current immigration research in a globalised world is shedding new light on how dual citizenship serves the interests of both the sending country and the host country. Taking cue from Benedict Anderson's classic contention that nation is “an imagined community” and Homi Bhaba's no less contentious dictum that nation is “a narrative,” some researchers de-emphasize the primordial nature of nationhood to render our existence as contingent on a fluid and “translocal” context. Some of them even argue that while most of the host countries are gradually coming to terms with multiple allegiances of their citizens in an increasingly global world undergoing, as Anthony Giddens so aptly put, “dis-embedding and re-imbedding of social relations across time-space destinations”, the sending countries, in their turn, engage in constructing “deterritorialized” nationhood in the Diaspora by facilitating dual citizenship opportunities among the emigrants to continue to win and bank on their allegiances. Like many third world countries, Bangladesh also must play an active role in shaping the interplay between centripetal and centrifugal forces driving the immigration dynamics for Bangladeshi emigrants, especially in the first world countries.