Argentina revised its naturalization requirements by executive decree under President Javier Milei in 2025, imposing stricter conditions on the path to citizenship. The most significant change affects residency clock continuity: a single trip abroad can reset an applicant's accrued residency to zero, a consequence that may not become apparent until after travel has already occurred.
Finland's Parliament voted 153 to 21 on June 12 to require naturalization applicants to pass a civics examination covering Finnish society, history, and culture, effective January 1, 2027. The measure drew support beyond the governing coalition, including from the Social Democratic Party and the Centre Party, and makes a passing score a statutory condition of citizenship.
Turkey's address-based population register counts 9,621 U.S. citizens as registered residents and 30,100 U.S.-born residents, a gap that reflects decades of naturalization and dual nationality among Americans who have put down roots in the country.
American naturalizations in Italy reached 824 in 2024, up from 280 in 2014, a five-year compound annual growth rate of roughly 15.6% per Eurostat data. In March 2025, Italy closed the descent route that produced most of those numbers.
Latin America has long offered Americans the most accessible second-passport landscape in the world, with Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Panama, Costa Rica, and most neighboring countries permitting dual citizenship without renunciation. The region accounts for the bulk of U.S.-citizen naturalizations abroad each year, including more than 125,000 Mexican-American dual citizenships granted in 2025 alone.
Austria granted 1,955 citizenships by descent in the first quarter of 2026, nearly all to overseas applicants using the restitution provision for descendants of Nazi-persecution victims, Statistics Austria reported May 11. Total naturalizations rose 21.2% year on year to 6,641, with the descent channel accounting for much of the increase.
Swedish citizenship grants to Americans collapsed from a range of 460 to 795 annually between 2014 and 2021 to just 35 in 2022, 2 in 2023, and 14 in 2024, according to Eurostat's MIGR_ACQ series. The decline is not a reflection of broader Swedish naturalization trends: Sweden recorded the EU's highest naturalization rate in 2024 at 7.5 acquisitions per 100 non-national residents, granting 63,000 citizenships that year. Americans simply stopped appearing in the count.
South Africa closed public comments earlier this year on a draft White Paper proposing a Skilled Worker Visa that would consolidate existing work authorizations into a single permit and replace the current permanent residency framework with a points-based system. If enacted, the overhaul would reshape how foreign nationals, including Americans, establish long-term legal status in the country.
From ancestral paperwork to investment schemes, US citizens are scrambling to secure a “Plan B” passport, often overlooking tax bills, conscription rules and divided loyalties that follow them across borders. How people qualify Most Americans who successfully add a second citizenship do it in one of three ways: descent, investment or naturalization. Citizenship by descent typically […]
Judges scrapped four key nationality provisions and an attached penal rule but upheld the 10-year naturalization timeline, deepening uncertainty for Golden Visa holders and thousands stuck in AIMA backlogs. Portugal’s Constitutional Court has struck down four controversial provisions of the country’s revised nationality law while preserving a 10-year naturalization horizon for most non‑EU, non‑CPLP applicants, […]
LGBTQ+ Americans are pursuing EU citizenship and long-term relocation to Europe in growing numbers, with Italian citizenship by descent, the Irish Foreign Births Register, German naturalization, and Spanish citizenship among the most commonly pursued routes, according to Citizenship.EU.
Introduction On June 9, Italians went to the polls to decide their own future, and overall, that of thousands of non-EU residents who have long contributed to the country and hoped for a faster path to citizenship. Among the reforms on the table was a proposal to reduce the naturalization requirement from 10 years to […]
