r/news • u/nicktheironblade • 17h ago
Italy ruling tells millions with Italian roots they have lost the right to citizenship | CNN
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/14/travel/italy-citizenship-law-restrictions-constitutional-court1.3k
u/Darth_drizzt_42 11h ago
South Philly in shambles
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u/TSonly 6h ago
New Jersey on suicide watch
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u/Darth_drizzt_42 6h ago edited 5h ago
I grew up in South Jersey, and if you took everyone at their word, 90% of the state is ✨in the mob✨, as if that's a cutesy fun thing and not a public admission of being part of a criminal enterprise. Funny story actually, my childhood buddy's mom's past time was trawling ancestry.com cause she was convinced/hopeful they had a claim to some duchy or some shit in the Tuscan hills. And of course mafia connections. Like lady, your grandfather came over from Sicily dirt poor cause the mafia made his life hell. If any of this was true you would either still be in Sicily or wouldn't be talking about it
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u/SouthJerssey35 4h ago
Absolutely 100 percent. Every single kid I grew up with at one point acted like they were in the mob. They all have Italy tattoos...and are quick to tell you how their grandmother cooked stuff differently than you.
Here's a list:
Gravy vs sauce - funny thing is ..they'll argue with each other all day long.
Yankees fandom - "I like the Yankees cause I'm Italian"...sure bud ...im sure it wasn't just they won everything when you were a kid.
Mispronunciations on stuff - Muzzarell, soprasot, ricoat...the list goes on
Nonna - It's 2026...there's no secret recipes. You're grandmom wasn't special or a good cook. We have the Internet. Garlic, oil, pasta, pasta water...we get it.
Mob ties - "yous better stop or I'll call my uncle pauley". Uncle Paul was a dentist and wouldn't hurt a fly. This one is the one I saw the most. I honestly am unsure if I know any Italian that doesn't claim it.
Flags - they flew Italian flags outside their homes for 40 years ...now they're maga guys who would shit their pants if someone flew a Mexican flag or something.
Limonchello - it sucks. Definitely not worth the hype. And they always say it so annoyingly.
Homemade wine - we get it...you bought bags of grape juice at the Italian market and let it sit in your basement. We get it...it's "strong". In reality it's absolutely horrible.
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u/Darth_drizzt_42 2h ago
God with your username and experiences there's a nonzero chance we went to middle school together. Blink twice if you know where Township is. The only thing I'll contest is that good limoncello rules.
The mispronunciations did bring back a hilarious memory though. I remember jokingly needling my best friend by asserting that the song Mambo Italiano (used in Olive Garden commercials) was just written for them, like the McDonald's jingle, and my buddy would get upset, swearing up down left and right that it's this indelible Italian cultural touchetone, like Danny Boy for the Irish. A year or so ago I randomly found that I was basically correct. It was written by an American guy and half the words are nonsense
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u/a-r-c 1h ago
pretty accurate lol
my uncle paulie literally is a dentist
limonchello tastes good tho idk why it caught a stray lmao
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u/Big_Rain2543 4h ago
I straight up asked a classmate of mine with the last name Gambino—sweet kid—if his family is the mafia. I was half joking but he did not answer. So anyway, I was cordial to him for the rest of high school.
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u/Possible-Nectarine80 5h ago
I spent 6 years working in NJ with a steamship line in North Jersey. Supposedly half the ILA was connected to the mob. The other half was the mob.
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u/EnthusiasmUnusual 11h ago
I've met quite a lot of Brazilians and Argentinians who live in Dublin and get EU citizenship through their Italian roots.
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u/GamingWhilePooping 8h ago
I'm brazilian myself, and worked for a company based in a city full of stereotypical italian descendants. It was boring to hear everybody talk about how their citizenship was progressing and how they wanted to go to Portugal, so they didn't need to learn another language.
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u/Vivid_Vanilla9327 16h ago
Somewhere out there, an Italian-American just dropped his cannoli in absolute shock
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u/nw342 15h ago
mama mia
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u/mistakehappens 14h ago
I can see the hand gestures that came with it.
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u/FlyBulky106 8h ago
Italian is a sign language with some vocalizations thrown in for good measure.
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u/demacnei 8h ago
The southern French like to do lots of hand talking as well. It’s a Mediterranean thing..?
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u/Puzzle-Necked 12h ago
I felt a great disturbance in the Forza, as if millions of voices in New Jersey suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced
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u/Educational-Wing2042 13h ago
A former friend of mine is a Trump supporter but loved to rub in that if things went bad he could just get Italian citizenship. Made this a satisfying read.
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u/JaneksLittleBlackBox 10h ago
A former coworker had a dual Canadian/American citizenship and said something similar when Trump won 2016. Can you imagine being such a piece of shit that you vote for and support someone you're kinda 50-50 on making things so bad you may have to utilize your other citizenship to GTFO?
I don't even despise MAGA enough to think of destroying my country for the point of sticking it to them, even if I had easy access to the fire escape after striking the match.
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u/ycaivrp 6h ago
My husband got his Italian passport maybe 10 years ago at my behest. All my kids all got registered and have their passports as well for a couple years now.
My MIL and sister in law all qualified for Italian citizenship back then. I even gave them all the paper everything translated. No action and last year they are no longer Italian after Oct. Oh well. My MIL doesn't care, she visits Italy a few months a year not a big deal but my Sister in law really wanted her kid to have EU citizenship.
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u/Stackhouse13 15h ago
Me. The Italian-American living in Tokyo who applied for Italian citizenship three years ago. Cannoli just fell into my sushi bowl.
I genuinely hope this doesn’t mess things up for people who are already in the pipeline.
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u/dancefreak76 14h ago
The law last year specifically notes that anyone with a pending application from the day before it was announced are to be grandfathered in with the old rules.
What especially sucks is that anyone recognized who doesn’t live in Italy no longer gets automatic recognition for their children.
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u/Minimum-Geologist-58 13h ago
I think the French do it fairly. Descendent citizenship is maintained as long as you don’t have a 50 year gap of not registering births, marriages, deaths overseas or in France, with France. Otherwise somebody at some point clearly wasn’t bothered about maintaining it and you don’t get to just pop back up in 100 years time.
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u/Frowny575 12h ago
That seems like the best of both worlds. Keep the door open, but with the catch records need to be maintained.
The old law seemed very open ended and while good at the time, has ended up being abused clogging up the courts. I could probably find a relative myself if I looked back far enough, but I'd be abusing the system considering my family has lived in the US for at least 150+ yrs.
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u/Snarfbuckle 5h ago
Otherwise somebody at some point clearly wasn’t bothered about maintaining it and you don’t get to just pop back up in 100 years time.
Somewhere an overseas French vampire screams Merde!
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u/andr386 15h ago
Even if you had zero ancestry in Italy you can still move there if you seriously plan to live there and find a job or create a business.
What people won't be able to do anymore is claim a passport because of their genes.
It's not like the door is closed to anybody.
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u/pishposh421 8h ago
It's much harder than most folks think to move to a country in the EU if you are a non-EU citizen, at least if you want to work. Employers have to prove that no qualified person in the EU is available to take the job before they can hire someone from outside on a work visa.
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u/betheusernameyouwant 15h ago
Italian-American who loves tokyo, in the pipeline. They let my application continue and im still waiting to be processed. Its been nearly a year so far.
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u/i_am_voldemort 11h ago
Where were you when citizenship is kill
I was at home eating plate of gagabool when phone ring.
Citizenship is kill
No
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u/Unfair_Ability3977 10h ago
I loved this part:
And three months before introducing the new decree, Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei, an ally of prime minister Giorgia Meloni, was granted citizenship by descent on a state visit to Italy.
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u/Agreeable-Boat3509 7h ago
Nothing brings a Conservative greater joy than pulling up the ladder they just climbed
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u/InterRail 4h ago
That was also his first and only time in Rome, and his sister also got it that same day (Karina Milei)
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u/Hexas87 14h ago
I know a Brazilian family that got Italian citizenship through their grandparents. They used that to work in UK.
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u/omgu8mynewt 13h ago
Before Brexit 2016 I assume
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u/TheHeroYouNeed247 12h ago
It's still much easier for EU nationals to live and work here than somebody from South America.
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u/maccaBanane 13h ago
Even with this new law it is still possible. Grand grandparent, not anymore
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u/SchemingVegetable 15h ago
Working for the local government we were literally flooded by requests, mostly from Brazil. Sure you can say this is classic Italian bureaucracy making things harder but it's so much work taken off the shoulders of city workers.
I assume it's going to get worse before it gets better, since they'll be flooded by requests from people afraid that things will get even stricter.
Once I've even had a Brazilian couple who spoke no Italian come to vote for the regional elections, I was the only person on site that spoke English and I'm not even supposed to explain the running parties for bias reasons.
Most of the people who got citizenship don't even look at Italy, they immediately move to another EU country with better salaries. In fact, it's a miracle the EU itself didn't ask Italy to stop with this since it was a pretty easy way to circumvent immigration.
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u/Romanista3 13h ago
On a side note, we're gonna have way less south americans in Serie A from now on. Clubs had it easy for the non EU spots
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u/tmuck29 12h ago
So the National team might get…. Worse somehow?
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u/iperblaster 11h ago
It may get worse before getting better... and it's difficult to have a worse national team than now
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u/Romanista3 12h ago
Depends if less south americans means more play time for the young italian or not. But that won't be enough, so many things need to change but italians are stuck in the 80s. The talent is there, but I've seen countless talents lost in the swamp of Serie B/C with obsolete coaches and abysmal infrastructures
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u/Regigirl33 13h ago
I am a naturalized Spanish citizen and I work at a public office, I’ve seen soooo many Venezuelan and Argentinian people (born and certainly raised, judging by their accent) who have Italian citizenship
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u/Kriztauf 11h ago
I know a bunch of Argentiniens who got their Italian citizenship and immediately moved to Spain or Germany
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u/iggsr 9h ago
and that says a lot about the current state of Italy. Not even the oriundi wants to come here... The young (Italian born) people are leaving for other countries in Europe.
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u/livsjollyranchers 9h ago
Yep. Italy's concerns about passport shopping are valid. At the same time, they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves why they're hardly ever the primary choice for these people to live in and make residence/a career.
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u/BigOs4All 9h ago
Could it be that if you're from Venezuela or Argentina you speak Spanish? I mean....Italian isn't as hard to learn if you speak Spanish as if you grew up speaking Mandarin but it's still a barrier.
Using Italian passport to live in Spain makes sense to me.
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u/livsjollyranchers 9h ago
That's reasonable, yes, but I'm willing to bet that mostly anyone of working age would still avoid Italy even if they spoke the language proficiently. All we have to do is look at native working age Italians leaving for other countries in large numbers.
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u/Tobar_the_Gypsy 12h ago
Something like 50% of Argentinians have Italian ancestry. A lot of Italians came over in the late 1800s and again in the mid 1900s.
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u/Awkward_Cheetah_2480 11h ago
The same waves and quantities came to Brazil, but the diluction by the population and size difs makes that percentile so high.
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u/Bigred2989- 10h ago
My job in Miami involves a lot of Western Union transactions and nearly every time someone shows me an Italian passport their country of birth is Argentina.
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u/cuentanueva 10h ago
Well, now they can just go to Spain for just 2 years and get it from there. It's not like it was too complicated before either.
It was "easier" (it still took years of waiting for the appointment and years after that for processing, but you didn't have to move) to get the Italian citizenship. And then you could go wherever which a lot of the time, was still Spain given the shared language.
Now, the easiest way is going to Spain for 2 years first... You'll still see plenty of Latin Americans in Spain, that will eventually get the Spanish citizenship instead.
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u/SmaugTheGreat110 11h ago
I honestly don’t mind the Venezuelans using a loophole like this. Their country has collapsed and people are starving to death. Any way out is a good way. Met an immigrant from there once and we chatted about it.
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u/Regigirl33 11h ago
Same. A lot of venezuelans work at my office too and they are all super nice and very hardworking. But I think it would make more sense that Spain was the one giving the citizenship, but what do I know, I don’t care as long as people who come don’t do bad things
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u/ioannsukhariev 10h ago edited 10h ago
But I think it would make more sense that Spain was the one giving the citizenship, but what do I know
spain can only give passports to people with spanish ancestry. a lot of portuguese and italian immigrants went to venezuela in the mid 50's so venezuelans are likely to have their ancestry, and there were also some germans and i'm sure other nationalities (i know of a dutch one and a japanese one) but in much smaller numbers.
edit: i'm reminiscing some memorable acquaintances.
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u/ArthurVx 10h ago
Also, many Brazilians (I'm Brazilian, by the way) apply for Italian or Portuguese citizenship not only for eventual residency, but also (and mostly, in my opinion) for visa-free travel to countries like Canada, Australia and, especially, the US (where applying for a visa is notoriously expensive, time-consuming and even embarrassing, while US tourists traveling to Brazil only need an e-visa).
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u/GoldSkulltulaHunter 8h ago
Came here to say this but you'd already done it. Can confirm that the top reason Brazilians apply for Italian (or another European) citizenship is having a "better" passport. But it also doesn't hurt to have an alternative if Brazil ever goes to shit - which we're afraid might happen every couple of years or so.
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u/ElPayoKundsen 11h ago
Well, Italians flooded south America during and post WW and they were welcomed. The descendants of those Italians had the right (by law) to become Italian citizens.
European countries tend to forget their citizens were welcomed in almost every country, and then stopped honoring their citizens descendants rights.
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u/razorhax0r 10h ago
Had to scroll way too long for this. Thank you.
I'm aware a lot of people abused the previous system and tried to circumvent rules to get an italian passport. This is wrong.
However, when europeans emmigrated to south america they were looking for opportunity they couldn't find in europe. They got naturalized easily there in order to build a life. They could freely navigate between south american countries.
Now when it's the opposite south americans are "invading and taking their jobs". Yeah sure.
Unfortunately no immigrant goes to Europe with the expectation of being accepted and welcomed the way europeans, japanese, lebanese and many other nationalities were welcomed in south america. There's a lot of racism and xenophobia to be expected, most of all nowadays. People talk loke europe is a welcoming paradise to immigrants and it's far from that.
Just make the system simpler if there are too many requests. It's a right by law isn't it?
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u/Tough_Bass 9h ago edited 7h ago
I feel like your argument is a bit disingenuous. Brazil and Argentina for example invited a large amount of people because of labor shortage. They did not do this because they had such a big heart. There is even a strangely racist aspect to it. They didn't just invite anybody with open arms, they wanted white Europeans. Look at the concept and policies of Blanqueamiento.
Now why should only people of Italian heritage have this right? There are so many people working very hard like the immigrants that came to the Americas, shouldn't they get first dip?
I think this system of getting citizenship just because you grand grand nonna was from Palermo is stupid, unfair and weirdly racist. Instead it should just be easier to get citizenship in general, especially if you work there not matter your ethnicity and heritage.
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u/MarioSewers 9h ago
Not to mention, that, somehow, not giving a shit about Italy and moving to Germany/northern Europe is the only reason they're doing this to begin with. If you don't care to live in a country, stay and integrate, you should not be a citizen, no matter where your grandma was born.
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u/Aureon 6h ago
Eeeh, this is a very reductionist way of thinking honestly
The existing law was basically - if you have a way of proving an italian ancestor, and some money for a lawyer, you're welcome
The fair way to 'give back' what you're discussing would be reasonable and easier immigration pathways from countries with a relevant old diaspora, not a document-existing lottery for people with 1/32th Italian blood who accidentally lucked out enough to find a validated copy of a 1890 birth certificate
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u/sca34 9h ago
Welcome is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You can get your copy of “are Italians white?” On Amazon if you want to check what I am talking about. In addition, European citizens might have been welcomed to go and work in the American continent, they were certainly not handed a passport, they were definitely not given free healthcare and education and they definitely had to pay their fare share before eventually being naturalised. People can still do that in Italy, they just can’t skip the queue, that is all.
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u/gbmaulin 10h ago
I had my application in Germany delayed for a year and a half back in 2017 when they allowed people with ties to Germany through their maternal side apply. Almost all of the new requests were from Brazil lol, I don’t know how they’re so on top of it
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u/YoungLittlePanda 11h ago
In Argentina it's seen as simple reciprocity.
The country received literally millions of Italians and Spanish citizens with open arms when their countries were under the yoke of war and poverty throughout the early and mid 1900s. They went there looking for a better future for themselves and their families.
Today, it is the sons and grandsons of those people who are looking for a better future. Doesn't it sound unfair to deny them that?
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u/IlSace 13h ago
Yeah I'd be okay with this if the Americans who obtained citizenship this way came here to live and contribute to the country. Instead it's only a small fraction since most go to Spanish or Portuguese speaking areas as they don't actually speak Italian.
In my city there are many Peruvians though, I wonder wheter they're citizens or not.
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13h ago
I was in the middle of the process and can't finish since the 2025 law passed.
I planned on living in Italy. I took every Italian class I could at my local university, and had been talking with my relatives there in only Italian over the last couple of years.
So, now I'm stuck in the USA watching us destroy our country and the world. The complete lack of hope I feel now is staggering.
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u/giamboscaro 12h ago
This law is still not strict enough. Loads of people that do not know any italian, never set foot in Italy, know nothing about the culture, will get a free italian and thus european passport. To me that’s crazy. Meanwhile a friend of mine, moved from Moldova to Italy when it was a very young kid. Has done all the schools and uni in Italy, worked in Italy, completely and fully italian in speaking and culture. And he managed to grt the citizenship at like 23 years old. And it was not a smooth process. Things that just don’t make sense.
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u/gimmedatrightMEOW 10h ago edited 10h ago
Making it so other people can't recognize their citizenship doesn't make it any more fair for your friend. They should make it so people like him have a path without making it so people who were considered citizens before are are cut off from their path. That's not more fair .... It's just more unfair for more people
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u/jemappellelara 9h ago
Once I've even had a Brazilian couple who spoke no Italian come to vote for the regional elections, I was the only person on site that spoke English and I'm not even supposed to explain the running parties for bias reasons.
This is a very critical point. I lived in Germany for some time and it is German law that official documents and interactions be in German to avoid complex legal misunderstandings. It’s basically a liability issue if a government employee speaks to you in a language besides the native language due to the chances of mistranslation. I imagine this to be the same in Italy where Italian can only be spoken when dealing with bureaucratic matters, and maybe it’s not as strict as it is in Germany but I definitely see dealing with several groups of people who don’t speak Italian can become a liability legally speaking.
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u/stink3rb3lle 13h ago
it's a miracle the EU itself didn't ask Italy to stop with this since it was a pretty easy way to circumvent immigration.
The EU is not concerned with white immigrants
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u/shezofrene 16h ago
people complaining about this in the comments have never been to italy apparently. this was a hated and highly abused procedure.
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u/Ohtar1 14h ago
Barcelona is full of argentinians with Italian nationality that have never lived in Italy
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u/eagleal 14h ago
Yeah it was mostly abused to get an italian passport and enter the EU freely.
On prev legislation you could have filed for citizenship by providing papers where you proved some ancestors hundreds of years ago was italian n-generation origin.
You can see how easily people could fake descendant proofs, as you had lawyers systems that sold these in latin america.
The courts were so flooded reaching peaks of 80k requests/month that italian citizens living in Italy had to wait more than a year to get an appointment to request a passport. The government had run out of passports
They just made a law limiting it to 3 generations of descendants. They’re still people whose grandparents were required to have Italian citizenship. Not even that restrictive. Most countries have to be your parents.
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u/Slayriah 12h ago
A parent ir grandparent has to be exclusively an Italian citizen at the time of your birth. my grandparents had naturalized as Canadian citizens by the time I was born. I assume there are many Italian citizens living abroad who have children after they naturalize. those children are not considered Italian citizens anymore
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u/Kujaichi 11h ago
I assume there are many Italian citizens living abroad who have children after they naturalize. those children are not considered Italian citizens anymore
I mean, why should they?
I'm not Italian, but it makes complete sense to me that those people shouldn't be able to get a passport.
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u/Slayriah 11h ago
well Italy has recognized dual citizenship since 1992. most countries recognize a citizen’s offspring as citizens as well
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u/vidro3 10h ago
but they were not a citizen any longer after they naturalized to another country
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u/Cicero912 9h ago
You dont have to give up citizenship to naturalize in Canada, or the US for that matter.
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u/eagleal 9h ago
Yeah but if their parents didn't ask for italian citizenship because have been born and live abroad, then they have children, we're speaking of a timeframe of at least decades been born and living abroad.
What country does even allow such a thing? Italy was unique in this regard but this brought a lot of stress in the welfare and institutions for the citizens actually paying and living in Italy.
Foreign nationals living abroad, have permanent Senate dedicated seats. Which is something not even people residing in Italy have.
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u/Tardislass 10h ago
You aren’t a citizen if your ancestors back in the 1800s immigrated from Italy. Sorry.
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u/mellofello808 14h ago
Makes sense since they speak Spanish.
If I qualified for Italian citizenship without strings, I would probably move to Spain as well.
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u/Ohtar1 13h ago
Of course, I don't judge them. But I don't know if it makes a lot of sense for Italy as s country to have a law that allows that
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u/ChetHolmgrenSingss 12h ago
This is not what the process is supposed to be for. Why should Italy help a Brazilian or Argentine flee to Spain or Portugal?
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u/livsjollyranchers 9h ago
Most of the disdain appears directed to South Americans though if we're honest.
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u/Eyeseeyou1313 2h ago
That's the funny thing about Europeans, they talk shit about South Americans but when war, famine, and dictatorship struck their countries they all fled to SA and were welcomed and housed, given the same rights, now South Americans want the same treatment, and they hate it. It's midn boggling.
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u/DysphoriaGML 14h ago
I am an Italian who studied abroad, and I met more sud americans with italian citizenships while studying than italians. i am not lying
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u/Blitzdog416 11h ago
WBC team Italy in shambles
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u/Housequake818 9h ago
First thing I thought of. Good luck to Italy in future WBC, Olympics, etc.
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u/highwayuni2 15h ago edited 15h ago
My partner had been waiting for his citizenship for years when he had been living in Italy from the age of 15, went to school there, learned the language, paid taxes and worked for Italian companies. Even to this day (nearly 17 years later) he doesn’t even have a passport because the bureaucracy is a mess.
Meanwhile there were so many people that were granted their citizenship who had never/barely stepped foot into the country. It was a major loophole that needed closing
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u/InterRail 11h ago
Milei (argentinas president) got his citizenship in 1 day during his first trip to rome.
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u/SustainableTrees 13h ago
I got it in three months, living in Italy for that time only, and when I had never been in the country before. Just because my great grandfather was born In Italy in 1898. On top of that, it costed me only 18 euros the procedure (marca de bollo). It was very unfair indeed to ppl like your partner. But one cannot blame us looking for a better life either, especially when it was completely legal.
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u/stink3rb3lle 13h ago
Speaking from very recent US experience: making the citizenship process more difficult for some people doesn't make it any easier or more sane for others. Especially when it's being undertaken by folks who are sympathetic to fascism.
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u/Basicallysteve 14h ago
Maybe they should just make it easier to get citizenship for people like him instead of making it harder or impossible for others
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u/Illustrious_Land699 13h ago
Giving citizenship to someone just because his great-grandfather was from that country is wrong regardless. Those who want to come and live in Italy can still with benefits, benefits that they ignore because their goal is to take advantage of their passports in other countries.
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u/danirijeka 13h ago
making it harder or impossible for others
They can get their citizenship like the others then, no?
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u/highwayuni2 14h ago
Oh I 100% agree with this! And it’s a shame for people that have genuine intentions.
However there still is the issue of investing money, time and staffing into processing these citizenships for a large proportion of people that will never set foot in the country and contribute back. Or even move to another European country with their new EU visas.
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u/ensalys 13h ago
Why should a country grant citizenship to people who have no actual connection to the country, who've never even been there, don't speak the language, nothing?
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u/carmelos96 16h ago edited 14h ago
Mellone plans to take aim at the new law in his separate April 14 hearing at the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest legal authority, whose opinion trumps that of the constitutional court.
No, the Court of Cassation isn't the highest legal authority (at least on constitutional matters), it's the court of last resort for civil and criminal matters.
Edit: The case in question is pretty interesting. 8 venezuelan citizens filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and applied for Italian citizenship because of an ancestor born in Turin in 1837 (!!!) and emigrated to Venezuela an unspecified year after 1861 (the year Italy was unified and therefore the guy automatically obtained Italian citizenship, while before he was a citizen of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia).
I get why they'd like to get the Italian citizenship now, but frankly, the Venezuelan situation hasn't been good for years and they had this idea too late..
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u/ModernirsmEnjoyer 13h ago
Coverage is low quality. Any quick reference material checking will fix the mistake that Court of Cassation is above the Constitutional court. And the way they spinned this story is unprofessional
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u/Additional-Tackle-76 12h ago
Some poor bastard in Jersey just fell to his knees at the deli
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u/Junior-Adeptness-730 13h ago edited 13h ago
Italian here. This procedure was idiotic and absolutely total crap. People with great great grandparents who left Italy at the end of 1800 would have the right to get the Italian citizenship in a matter of months, without living there or having ANY relevant contact with Italian administration and without even speaking Italian! While there are immigrants living here, studying here, speaking Italian rather fluently, working there and paying taxes as everyone else having to go through crap administration for more than 10 years to get their much deserved citizenship. There are entire generations of children of immigrants being born in Italy and spending their whole life here who reach adulthood and still cannot vote or have normal rights because they're still trying to get their citizenship accepted.
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u/Gibbons_R_Overrated 12h ago
Yeah, speaking as someone who used to qualify but not anymore, I think it was idiotic too. The fact that I could've gotten italian citizenship because my great-great grandfather who left in 1892 was italian always seemed stupid. That's like if one of my descendants tried to get british citizenship in 2158
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u/MrJoePike 10h ago
Born in the USA Italian father and grandfather who emigrated after the first and before the second WWs. Never saw a need to get citizenship as I never had plans to live there. The use of citizenship to get to the EU always seemed a dishonest loophole to exploit. Always a special place to me as it’s my father’s place of birth. But what is my fathers is not mine to claim.
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u/araset 16h ago edited 8h ago
Finally, the way it was before practically allowed people with literal great-great-great grandfathers to obtain citizenship without ever setting foot on Italian soil. All while people who worked and paid taxes here for 10+ years faced significantly harder hurdles to get citizenship. Now you got to have a least an Italian grandfather to claim citizenship, and if you ask me it's still too little if you haven't ever worked or lived here.
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u/CherenkovGuevarenkov 15h ago
And now they removed the hurdles for the people that payed taxes, right?
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u/digiorno 14h ago
No this was always about trying to make sure immigrants could be more easily exploited by the business class. Now instead of people immigrating as citizens, they immigrate on visas. The corporations and fascist party played into the feelings that it was unfair for descendants of the diaspora to be recognized for citizenship in order to gain support from moderates. But at the end of the day this was a maneuver by the capital class to help prop up their economy with cheaper labor.
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u/PhaseExtra1132 13h ago
Europeans government constantly complain about not having a replacement rate. That they don’t have enough young people to fill the economy. So why is it an issue with allowing the folks with Italian ancestry come in and fill the gaps?
Also if there’s a huge issue with not allowing the other folks become citizens why again is there an issue with demographics? Just allow both groups a pathway to citizenship that’s simple. Bam no issues with lack of population.
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u/Illustrious_Cut1730 9h ago
My beef with this Italian citizenship is that people who never lived in Italy or speak language can get a fairly easy path to citizenship by claiming Italian roots.
Meanwhile people who lived in Italy for decades cannot get it as easily. And children of immigrants who are born in Italy are not automatically eligible for citizenship.
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u/the_eluder 8h ago
That is a problem, because what if the countries where the immigrants are from don't give citizenship to children who are born there? Most of the old world determines citizenship by parents (jus sanguinis,) where the new world determines it by birthplace (jus soli) and parents.
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u/notnatasharostova 7h ago
This is a legitimate issue, but it’s also bitterly ironic that certain European nations flooded the Americas with droves of immigrants seeking a better life, and then get angry when their descendants want to return for the same reason.
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u/eezipc 12h ago
Absolutely correct. There are literally 1000's of Brazilians living in Ireland using Italian passports.
They have no intention of ever living in Italy. They have no genuine connection to the country. It's just a way to get into the EU.
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u/oriolpug 11h ago
I live in Barcelona, according to official statistics Italians are the biggest group of foreigners here. In reality it's Argentinians and Brazilians who probably never set a foot in Italy and don't speak a word of Italian.
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u/fussyfella 13h ago
They are doing nothing that most European countries do not do already and limiting inherited citizenship to two generations (parents and grandparents) for those born outside the country. Applications for citizenship from people with tenuous links to Italy have been clogging up their civil service and courts for years and costing way more than the costs of processing those applications.
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u/lunarstudio 9h ago
What is happening is not really the “granting” of citizenship, but the retroactive denial of recognition of citizenship that many people were understood to already have under prior Italian law.
For decades, people born abroad to Italian citizens were generally considered Italian citizens automatically under the legal framework stemming from the 1912 law. Then in 2025, the government abruptly changed course through an emergency decree, with no warning, effectively cutting off recognition for people who had already spent years or even decades gathering documents, waiting on consulates, and spending large amounts of money on the process.
That is why many argue this is not just a forward-looking reform. It is effectively citizenship stripping. There are also arguments that this conflicts with broader EU legal principles against arbitrary deprivation of citizenship, even if no case has yet fully reached the CJEU.
As for delays, yes, some consulates and regions have huge backlogs, but that is not true everywhere. In some areas, including parts of Sicily and Campobasso, wait times can be far shorter. The deeper problem is that the Italian recognition system has long been inefficient and poorly streamlined, which even the government itself has acknowledged.
A more reasonable solution would have been to protect people already born under the prior framework while imposing any new restrictions only on future generations, or to limit consular applications while still allowing judicial cases to continue.
There are also other serious concerns:
The so-called “emergency” was questionable, since the corruption cited appears to have involved only a small number of officials rather than a nationwide crisis.
Many believe the law was politically motivated, especially to reduce voting from Italians abroad.
Italy is already facing population decline, low birth rates, and outward migration, so making it harder for descendants to reconnect seems counterproductive.
So the issue is not simply whether Italy can reform the system. It is whether it can do so by suddenly pulling recognition away from people who had long been treated as citizens under the previous legal framework.
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u/Vic_Hedges 12h ago
Countries have every right to decide who is considered a citizen or not.
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u/rory_breakers_ganja 12h ago
Yes, but then countries need to consider how it impacts the Schengen Agreement and do tighter screening up front rather than opening side-door policies for people abusing free movement.
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u/tokyo_blues 15h ago edited 11h ago
Good news overall. The end of the silly Jus sanguinis. We were being flooded with Brazilians and Argentinians with absolutely NO interest whatsoever in Italy, the Italian language, and Italian culture or society, who'd only ever set foot in the land of their great grandma to quickly grab that EU passport and fuck off to work in Germany or Luxembourg as newly minted European citizen with fresh access to highly paying jobs.
All of this was totally unfair to the "jus soli" Italian-born and raised sons and daughters of people who immigrated in Italy, settled, and contribute to the economy and yet faced and face many more challenges with getting the passport. These are the new Italians, regardless of ancestry.
Those Americans posting here and their whataboutist argument that Italians emigrated to their country in millions at the beginning of the century are completely missing the point. Those Italians didn't travel to Ellis Island or Sao Paulo to grab a passport which would allow them to continue their journey to e.g. a final destination country with high wages and to settle there by virtue of their new American passport. They stayed in New York or New Jersey and contributed to the economy, built bridges and railroads and worked in abbatoirs. If they moved to Brazil they contributed to Brazil's economy.
These modern Jus sanguinis-enabled passport grabbing Italians are after something else entirely. Best of luck to them, but their plan should not be of concern to the Italian public offices or a burden on the Italian taxpayers and public pension system.
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u/ninjaface 14h ago
This isn’t for people with an Italian parent who lives in Italy, right? Isn’t this for people who were trying to get citizenship through their grandparents?
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u/IamNobody85 13h ago
In case of my colleague, great great grandfather. He got his passport 2 years ago and does not speak any Italian at all, or has never lived in Italy, and as far as I know, doesn't intend to live there ever.
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u/danirijeka 13h ago
This isn’t for people with an Italian parent who lives in Italy, right?
A child of an Italian parent living in Italy does automatically obtain citizenship. Grandparents still work as long as at least one has/had Italian citizenship (a grandson of an exclusively Italian citizen is automatically Italian even if born abroad - parents just need to register the birth in Italy too)
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u/onilol 12h ago
Can you blame them tho? Italy is a bleak, low paying, bureaucratic, nepotistic and failing country still riding on its former glory days. Who would want to stay?
All of this was totally unfair to the Jus soli Italian-born and raised sons and daughters of people who immigrated to Italy, settled, and contribute to the economy.
I can't see how this is the case if they don't even stay in Italy? They aren't taking any jobs there and actually there is quite a lucrative market for lawyers. Yes they did flood the system but this just highlighted how absurdly bureaucratic and inefficient the system already is, here are 3 examples from the top of my head:
Spent 5 hours trying to get SPID as an Italian living abroad registered in AIRE, they requested a validated Codice Fiscale document. In one tab of the system it says I was registered, in the other one of the exact same system says I wasn't registered so I couldn't do the process, no option to contact anyone for help 🤷♂️
Getting my citizenship in Italy, filled the form in the post office, there is an explicit checkbox about requesting an extension of the stay for that specific process. Arrived at the booked appointment to the police station and the lady immediately dismissed me saying that reason for the extension didn't exist, I questioned her about it and she said "You come to my country and you want to teach me the law?" and proceeds to hand me a paper saying I have to leave the country in 30 days. My citizenship confirmation arrived 1 week later in the comune.
Requesting my mother's ricongiungimento familiare, a man in the comune asks for a crazy amount of documents that have to be validated, translated and stamped, refuses to listen to us as we say that nowhere in the government website could we see all those documents listed and reschedules the appointment 6 months ahead. The new guy asked for only 3 documents and while chatting he got pissed asking to know who the previous guy was.
If things were better in Italy people would stay, it's as simple as that. As long as each comune asks for a different set of documents for the same process you will have an absurdly bureaucratic system, it's as simple as that.
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u/oriolpug 11h ago
Can you blame them tho? Italy is a bleak, low paying, bureaucratic, nepotistic and failing country still riding on its former glory days. Who would want to stay?
Well, this might be true, but then why would that bleak country owe somebody a passport just because their great-great-grandma was born there?
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u/maverickandevil 13h ago
"a law introduced on March 28 last year by emergency decree states that only those with a parent or grandparent born in Italy will be recognized as citizens."
Wait is there a problem with this? People want Italian citizenship for being descendant from Caesar or something?!
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u/IntoTheMusic 7h ago edited 6h ago
Other countries see what's happening and are closing opportunities for people. Something similar happened prior to the Holocaust. As the Third Reich took control of Germany, Jewish and Polish people fled Germany only for every county to close their borders and send them back to Germany where they were murdered.
People in modern times ask why they didn't leave?? Well, they tried, but it was too late. The Ken Burns documentary, The U. S. and the Holocaust (2022), went into detail about it. Great documentary.
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u/pablo_the_bear 10h ago
I worked with Brazilian high school students coming to the US and as part of the process I used to ask who had dual citizenship. Typically kids coming to the US for university had dual US-Brazil citizenship. In this case about a quarter of the students had dual citizenship with Italy.
No one ever had any intention of going to Italy. Like many of these comments are saying, it was just the gateway to the EU.
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u/SubstantialPressure3 9h ago
The first page of the civil code, published in 1865 as the rulebook to Europe’s newest country, declared that a child born to an Italian citizen was an Italian citizen.
This founding tenet of the Bel Paese now looks set to change — ending diaspora dreams of returning to the mother country, and meaning that Italians who move abroad risk denying citizenship to their descendants.
The US may be facing something similar in the near future.
It should be a no brainer that a child of citizens of a particular country would automatically have citizenship of that country, just like their parents do. Or dual citizenship.
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u/MawsonAntarctica 3h ago
Is this because people might want to leave the country they are in for “gestures around” and all these European countries aren’t wanting to take random people in. Also, climate change is going to force a MASS immigration wave out of the Mid East into Europe into the next couple of years.
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u/lostredamus 14h ago
The whole EU should tighten up on this. Passport farming is way out of control
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u/Turphs 15h ago
Italian citizen by heritage did seem a bit broad. I'm no expert but in Australia we have laws saying if you serve in parliament you have to renounce all other citizenships. A few years ago some people got caught ignoring this which lead to wider investigations and some politicians seemingly got caught out with being counted as italian citizens by heritage even though they never got an Italian passport.
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u/ith228 12h ago edited 12h ago
The fake grandstanding in the comments so funny to me. If you could get a passport through a great grandparent you would do it too. And I have a hard time believing the Italian public would find a Bangladeshi-born, naturalized Italian more Italian than an Italo-Argentine with an Italian last name with Italian grandparents, even if they don’t want to admit it publicly. Not to mention handing a passport to millions of South American people with Italian surnames with similar Catholic traditions was an easy solution to its demographic crisis, it just didn’t pan out because Italy is so messed up they’d rather move to another EU country instead.
I will say the rule would still be in place had the South Americans hadn’t been using the hell out of it.
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u/DarkLordFrondo 10h ago
This is typical Italian mismanagement. When I applied for citizenship back in the day, I had to show that both my parents and all four of my grandparents were Italian citizens born in Italy. I don't take citizenship lightly and I did go through schooling to be B1 proficient. I listen to Italian music, watch Italian tv, and read books in Italian. I would like to one day retire in Italy.
The Italian government's complaints are a bit disingenuous. I pay for my passport. I maintain AIRE, the system for Italians abroad. No, I don't pay taxes because I don't make money in Italy. Hell, Italians in Italy barely even pay their taxes. I've even voted in elections, which are completely bullshit by the way. They make referendum items so obtuse and voting so clunky that I'm certain it is on purpose to limit power from the people.
Italy now has a population crisis and I will never want to move there because my wife will not be able to gain citizenship through me.
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u/socrtc21 11h ago
I think it's fairly common to hear from Italian descendants in Brazil that they would seek Italian citizenship. Whether for moving to Eu or making traveling easier to/within Europe. Not that's it's an easy and fast process, I've always heard it's a long wait, something around 7 years, as well as expensive and requiring consistent documentation. Unfortunately I feel like those measures always harm those who paid their citizenship for legit reasons, or that are already there, but I can see their point.
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u/Bright_Software_5747 11h ago
My understanding is that people can still claim it up to the parent and grandparent level, it’s just beyond that which is no longer possible, since people were claiming it for great great great grandparents and what not. I think that’s a fair change that puts Italy in line with other European countries where it’s usually up to 2 generations.
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u/thedailyrant 13h ago
Happened to those of us with right to British citizenship in the early 2000s. Went from anyone with a British grandparent to anyone born before July 1983 with a British grandparent.