For the better part of a decade, I have been tracking how many people in the United States acquire European citizenship through ancestry each year. It started with Luxembourg — a country smaller than Rhode Island, where I hold dual citizenship and where my company, LuxCitizenship, has helped more than 3,500 Americans navigate the process. Luxembourg publishes detailed citizenship data through its national civil registry, and over the years I have built what is probably the most complete public record of that trend in existence.
But to understand what ancestry citizenship looks like at real scale, I needed a comparison
— and the obvious one was Italy. Italy has one of the oldest and most well-known citizenship-by-descent programs in Europe. Between 1820 and 2004, approximately 5.5 million Italians emigrated to the United States. Today, roughly 16 million people in the United States report Italian ancestry — the fifth-largest ancestry group in the country. If any country’s data could put the broader ancestry citizenship movement into perspective, it was Italy’s.
The problem was that the data did not seem to exist. Italy’s citizenship-by-descent applications are processed at consulates abroad, and consulates do not publish their processing statistics. I spent years looking.
Then I found it.
Italy’s statistics agency, ISTAT — the equivalent of the U.S. Census Bureau — publishes detailed annual demographic data drawn from AIRE, the official registry of Italian citizens living abroad (Anagrafe degli Italiani Residenti all’Estero). Every Italian citizen who lives outside Italy for more than twelve months is required by law to register. When someone in the United States is recognized as an Italian citizen — whether through descent, marriage, or any other pathway — they show up in AIRE.
And buried in ISTAT’s demographic balance tables, broken out by country and by year, was exactly what I had been searching for: new citizenship acquisitions in the United States.The data is magnificently detailed, and it tells a story that deserves a close read.
What the Data Shows
Here is what AIRE reports for Italian citizens in the United States over the past three years:
| Year | New Italian Citizens in the US | Total Italian Citizens Registered in the US |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 8,018 | 333,126 |
| 2023 | 6,987 | 315,974 |
| 2022 | 3,981 | 301,847 |
Source: AIRE demographic balance via ISTAT. Note: ISTAT’s country-level AIRE demographic balance data in its current format does not precede 2021.
The three-year trend is worth reading carefully, not just the headline figure.
The 2022 number — 3,981 — is the lowest in this dataset and likely reflects the lingering effects of COVID-19. Consulates slowed or shut down during the pandemic, and fewer appointments meant fewer processed cases. By 2023, the system was catching up: 6,987 new citizens, a 75% increase, suggesting consulates were working through a piled-up backlog. By 2024, the number crossed 8,000 — a full doubling from two years prior. Over the same period, the total registered Italian citizen population in the United States grew by more than 31,000 people, an increase of over 10%.
Those are striking numbers. But they need more context than almost any other country’s data, because Italy is an outlier in nearly every way that matters.
Why Italy’s Numbers Don’t Mean What You Think
Interest is one thing. Eligibility is another.
Since the 2024 US presidential election, there has been an unmistakable surge of interest among Americans in moving abroad and obtaining second citizenships. Google searches spiked. Media coverage exploded. At Citizenship.EU, we saw it in our own traffic.
It would be tempting to look at Italy’s 8,018 new citizens in 2024 and connect it to that trend. But the connection is almost certainly not there — and understanding why reveals something important about how Italian citizenship by descent actually works.
Italian consulates in the United States have maintained appointment waiting lists measured not in months but in years. In some cities, applicants have waited five years or more just to get a consular appointment. The 8,018 people who became Italian citizens in 2024 did not decide to apply in 2024. Most of them likely filed their paperwork in 2019, 2020, or 2021. The number tells you more about Italy’s consular processing capacity finally catching up than about anything happening in the present moment.
This decoupling between application and outcome is unique to Italy at this scale. In most European ancestry citizenship programs, the gap between starting and finishing is measured in months. In Italy, it has historically been years — sometimes many years. Italy’s annual citizenship numbers are always a lagging indicator, reflecting decisions made long before the moment in which they are counted.
Even 2025’s numbers, when published, will almost entirely reflect applications started before the November 2024 election.
The Complexity Problem
There is another reason Italy is an outlier: the process itself is unusually complicated.
Italian citizenship by descent requires applicants to document an unbroken chain of Italian citizenship from their emigrant ancestor to themselves — birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, naturalization records — for every person in the line, sometimes spanning five or six generations.
For families that came to the United States in the late 1800s or early 1900s, this is rarely straightforward. Names were routinely anglicized at the border, misspelled by clerks, or simplified over generations. The surname in a village registry in southern Italy may not match any document in the United States, and every discrepancy has to be reconciled with official records on both sides of the Atlantic.
When applicants could not get a timely consular appointment — which, in many US cities, meant waiting years — tens of thousands turned to the Italian courts instead. By some estimates, as many as 60,000 court cases were pending in 2025, driven primarily by consular backlogs rather than disputed claims. This adds yet another layer of processing delay and makes Italy’s annual numbers even harder to read in real time.
16 Million Italian Americans, 333,000 Italian Citizens
Of the roughly 16 million people in the United States who report Italian ancestry, only about 333,000 — around 2% — are registered as Italian citizens. Not every Italian American qualifies: the family line may have been broken by a naturalization at the wrong time, or a female ancestor may have transmitted citizenship during a period when Italian law did not recognize that right. Many who do qualify have never pursued it, and for those who have, the consular backlogs meant the system could only process a fraction of the demand.
That 2% figure also reflected something remarkable about the old system: Italy’s citizenship-by-descent program, open since 1992, had no generational limit. If you could prove an unbroken line of Italian citizenship going back to the founding of the Italian state in 1861, you could claim citizenship — whether your ancestor left one generation ago or six. That is no longer the case.
The Reform That Changed Everything
In March 2025, Italy passed Law 74/2025 — the most significant reform to Italian citizenship by descent in decades. Going forward, only people with an Italian parent or grandparent can claim citizenship. Claims through great-grandparents or earlier ancestors are no longer accepted unless the application was filed before March 27, 2025.
In March 2026, Italy’s Constitutional Court issued a preliminary ruling on a challenge from the Court of Turin, finding that the generational limits did not violate the constitution in the specific case before it. But this was not a comprehensive ruling on every aspect of the law — only a press release has been made public, and a broader constitutional challenge is still expected. The legal landscape remains unsettled even as the law is in force.
Applications filed before the March 2025 deadline will continue under the old rules, so Italy’s new-citizen numbers for 2025 and 2026 could remain elevated as those cases clear. And under the new rules, the program has not stopped — people with Italian parents or grandparents continue to qualify. At Citizenship.EU we still receive dozens of qualifying inquiries per month. The volume is dramatically smaller than before, but the program is far from extinct.
The Reform That Changed Everything
In March 2025, Italy passed Law 74/2025 — the most significant reform to Italian citizenship by descent in decades. Going forward, only people with an Italian parent or grandparent can claim citizenship. Claims through great-grandparents or earlier ancestors are no longer accepted unless the application was filed before March 27, 2025.
In March 2026, Italy’s Constitutional Court issued a preliminary ruling on a challenge from the Court of Turin, finding that the generational limits did not violate the constitution in the specific case before it. But this was not a comprehensive ruling on every aspect of the law — only a press release has been made public, and a broader constitutional challenge is still expected. The legal landscape remains unsettled even as the law is in force.
Applications filed before the March 2025 deadline will continue under the old rules, so Italy’s new-citizen numbers for 2025 and 2026 could remain elevated as those cases clear. And under the new rules, the program has not stopped — people with Italian parents or grandparents continue to qualify. At Citizenship.EU we still receive dozens of qualifying inquiries per month. The volume is dramatically smaller than before, but the program is far from extinct.
What Comes Next
After the pre-reform backlog clears, the math changes. The pool narrows from potentially millions with distant Italian ancestry to those with an Italian-born parent or grandparent. About 1,300 people born in Italy still emigrate to the United States each year, and their children and grandchildren will continue to qualify — a meaningful pipeline, but a fundamentally different scale.
Italy’s registered citizen community in the United States — now over 333,000 — will not shrink. People who hold citizenship keep it. But the pace of growth will shift. Globally, more than 6.3 million Italian citizens live outside Italy — nearly 11% of the country’s population.
The 8,018 new Italian citizens in the United States in 2024 may represent something close to a high-water mark — the culmination of a three-decade system that allowed descendants of Italian emigrants, no matter how many generations removed, to reclaim their ancestors’ citizenship. That system has been fundamentally redrawn. The program continues, but the numbers going forward will tell a different story.
Sources: Italian citizenship and diaspora data from AIRE (Anagrafe degli Italiani Residenti all’Estero), published by ISTAT. US ancestry data from the American Community Survey,
U.S. Census Bureau. Italian emigration history via Wikipedia. Italian citizenship reform from Citizenship.EU. Constitutional Court ruling via Boccadutri International Law Firm. Global AIRE figures via We the Italians.