NEW YORK – The talk naturally focused on homeland news when we visited Tuesday the staff of Filipino Reporter, the oldest (at 31 years) and biggest circulated FilAm newspaper in the US eastern seaboard.

Publisher Bert Pelayo and his wife Linda were on hand in their sixth-floor office at the Empire State building on Fifth Avenue. In their work places chasing the deadline for the weekly paper were the editorial and business staff.

Bert was our defense reporter in the pre-martial law Manila Times when he decided to move to the US. A fresh recruit from the college paper, I was then covering diplomatic row, my first beat.

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TERRORIST TARGET: With the taller World Trade Center twin towers having been blown up by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, the 102-floor Empire State is now Manhattan’s tallest building, rising 1,453 feet (443.2 meters) to the tip of its lightning rod sticking toward the sky. We guess that makes it a logical terrorist target.

Still a Filipino under his Stateside veneer, Bert sounded fatalistic observing that whatever strikes wherever whenever, there is hardly anything we could do about it. All one has to do is be careful, he noted.

That is exactly what security details, metal detectors and all, are busily doing at the lobby. The entrance is always crammed with tourists wanting to go up to the top deck for that exhilarating view of, huh, the world.

In the crowd, we’re sure, is a listless lover pushing his or her way to the top as in that poignant ending episode in “Sleepless in Seattle,” or the much earlier one in “An Affair to Remember.”

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STUCK IN CONGRESS: As expected, Bert asked if President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, his cabalen, is running in 2004. Yes, she is, we dared to foretell. That opened a long discussion on who else are likely to run and what their chances are.

And what’s the status of the dual citizenship bill? Like most Filipinos we’ve met in the States, Bert asked the question. We reported that the bill was still languishing in Congress, and that we’re not sure if it would pass.

We explained that dual citizenship does not mean that all Filipinos who had taken another citizenship in their adopted country (the US, for example) would win back their Filipino citizenship and all rights and privileges pertaining to it.

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CONSTITUTIONAL INTENT: We speculated that Filipinos who had emigrated and had been naturalized abroad may not qualify for dual citizenship. Reason: Part of naturalization is usually the renunciation of one’s prior or native citizenship.

We offered the interpretation that a Filipino who has formally renounced his citizenship cannot automatically qualify to win it back with the mere passage of the dual citizenship law – unless the law itself throws the door wide open.

Our understanding of the law’s intent is to give substance and meaning to the constitutional provision that a person born of a Filipino parent is a citizen of the Philippines (Article IV, Section 1[2])

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LAW SUPERFLUOUS?: In short, a child is a Filipino by jus sanguinis (Latin for “right of the blood”) if at least one of his parents was a Filipino at the time of his (the child’s) birth.

Even if the same child was born in the US, for instance, and is therefore an American by jus soli (“right of the soil”), he is also a Filipino in the eyes of Philippine law. He holds dual citizenship.

(We have learned lately, however, that the US government has made significant exceptions to the jus soli rule. Children of Filipino and other foreign diplomats, for instance, born in the US are reportedly no longer recognized here as US citizens.)

In effect, the proposed dual citizenship law will simply recognize the fact of concurrent Filipino citizenship at birth. But if that were its only substantive effect, the law may be superfluous.

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REVERSE ROUTE: In our view, however, a Filipino who has formally renounced his citizenship (as in a naturalization process in his adopted country of residence), or has lost it by serving in the armed forces or the government of a foreign power, does not automatically qualify for dual citizenship in the Philippines.

We hold that to regain his Philippine citizenship, a former Filipino has to apply for it and go through a reverse naturalization process.

The difference this time around, we suppose, is that he will not be required to renounce his foreign (such as American) citizenship – thereby enabling him to keep both citizenships.

That is, provided the country where he resides allows dual or multiple citizenship. If that other country does not allow it, the Filipino wanting to regain his lost Filipino citizenship will have to discard one and not keep both.

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BUILDUP ON: The escalation is on for drumming up a clamor for President Arroyo to run in 2004. Regardless of who was behind those “GMA 2004” posters seen under the flyover of Nagtahan bridge leading to Malacanang and elsewhere, they are a harbinger of what is to come.

Presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye need not protest too much and make a big fuss for the MMDA to pull down the posters. Let’s remove them because of the clutter, not for anything else. Anyway, the message has been delivered.

Don’t get bored, but expect more of such surveys reporting that the approval ratings of GMA continue to go up. There will be manifestoes and resolutions everywhere urging our President to run and continue the good work.

Soon, Cardinal Sin will also get into the act. But the person to really watch is President George W. Bush, who has been reported by Malacanang to drop by on his way to or from the next APEC meeting around October.

It seems to us, though, that there was something amiss — protocol-wise — in the early announcement of Bush’s visit. If his supposed call on GMA has not been firmed up, its announcement in Manila could be seen as a move to pressure him to show up.

Imagine the big embarrassment if the busy US president fails to make it! Those things happen.

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LOSING GAME FOR ALL: The protest rallies against the Supreme Court on the issue of presidential legitimacy may prove to be counter-productive for former President Joseph Estrada.

Even diplomacy has to be backed by force or the threat of it. But there is a danger here that the SC justices, who are quite sensitive, would just stiffen and deprive Mr. Estrada the legal breakthrough he wants.

We think the best tack is for Mr. Estrada to avoid embarrassing the venerable justices and instead quietly explore back channels to try working out some compromise.

Actually, Mr. Estrada as well as Mrs. Arroyo and the Supreme Court justices are in the same predicament. The raging controversy will not spare anyone of them. They, and the institutions they represent, cannot come out of it unscathed.

There is a way out for all of them — we have discussed this before (see Archives) — only if they wake up to the fact that they cannot win everything. The problem is that Mrs. Arroyo and Mr. Estrada cannot see it that way, because their lawyers have been assuring them of total victory in court.

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CLOSING FORUM: Regarding last week’s closing of the State department exchange program for senior editors and columnists from East Asia pertaining to the US approach to terrorism, some readers have told us that the televised coverage of the final forum can be accessed at the www.cspan.org website.

We have to explain here that because of time limitations, we were not able to amplify many of the points raised. But overall, we think the consensus among the seven East Asian journalists was discernable in the program.

One message was for mighty America to listen to the rest of the world.