Italians living and having children abroad could find their own and their offspring’s citizenship is now in question due to a seismic change in Italian law.
Moving abroad to live in another country is an exciting adventure for many, made easier recently by the way the internet has transformed people’s ability to work from anywhere, sparking the advent of digital nomadism. But the knowledge that such travels could mean one’s offspring could lose their citizenship and no longer share the same nationality as their parents might be a dealbreaker. That’s the reality now facing millions of Italians, following a controversial legal ruling.
In 2025, Giorgia Meloni’s “Brothers of Italy” government put forward an emergency decree to restrict Italian citizenship for those born outside the country. The law was challenged in the Constitutional Court but has now been approved, putting an end to the citizenship through bloodline or “jus sanguinis” principle in place in Italy since 1865. It means that descendants of Italians no longer have the right to Italian nationality simply based on their parents’ citizenship. Instead, they must be born on Italian soil (“jus soli”).
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“I had a hope that it would be judged in breach of some constitutional points, but that wasn’t recognized by the court,” said Professor Corrado Caruso, one of the lawyers who challenged the shift, speaking to CNN. He will not be the only one disappointed. Millions of people who consider themselves Italian because they were born to Italian parents will find their sense of identity shaken.
The new rules state that only people with a parent or grandparent born in Italy can be recognised as citizens, bringing Italy into line with other European nations with a huge diaspora, like Ireland. But it goes further. The relative in question also must have been only Italian either when the offspring was born or when they died, if they passed away before the child was born.
Italy, again like Ireland, faced severe rural poverty and lost a huge proportion of its population to economic migration in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the little over half a century between 1861 and 1918, a whopping 16 million Italian citizens left to build lives and families abroad. And the exodus didn’t stop there. Even in the recent decade between 2014 and 2024, the Italian diaspora increased by nearly two million, from 4.6 million to 6.4 million.
Some of those would have been people reclaiming their Italian citizenship— in Argentina, during 2024 alone, 30,000 people claimed Italian citizenship, a 50% increase year-on-year. Critics of the new regulations point out that doing so is a costly and bureaucratic process, not undertaken lightly. They also note that recognising people as Italian is done without problem when it is politically expedient—to boost an Olympic team or flatter a foreign leader, for example.
Yet, jus soli proponents say so-called Italians living elsewhere do not contribute to the tax base, or work in Italian communities, where the older demographic is increasingly dominant and needs care. Many ghost villages have attempted to address this problem by luring in younger residents with well-documented campaigns offering houses that can be purchased for a euro, and even paying new arrivals to move in. Whether the new rules will bring back bona fide Italians who have left for elsewhere and now fear for their future rights, or prevent would-be revenants from making that leap, remains to be seen.
