Citizenship, new applications put offices and courts in crisis

The sharp increase in requests for recognition of citizenship by ius sanguinis is causing difficulties for municipal offices, consulates and courts, i.e. the entities to which foreign citizens can turn to obtain an Italian passport. In fact, the recognition of citizenship (a right established as early as 1865 to guarantee the children of emigrants to maintain ties with Italy) can be enforced administratively with a request to the municipality where the Italian ancestor resided if the applicant also resides in the same municipality or, if he or she resides abroad (and this is the vast majority of cases), by turning to the territorially competent consular office.

If the administrative channel takes a long time, one can turn to the court. The judicial route is then the only viable one if the ancestor was a woman, since before 1948, the transmission of rights was only by paternal route.

The same survey carried out in recent months by Anusca with the support of Istat (see the article above) was prompted by requests from municipalities concerned by the increase in procedures: from 2021 to 2023, the files processed by the 5,019 municipalities that responded more than doubled, from 23,569 in 2021 to 49,815 in 2023, with 61,328 citizenship recognitions (in one file there can be several requests from descendants of the same ancestor).

Abroad, consulates and embassies are under stress, especially in Brazil and Argentina, with very long waiting lists: in some locations we are talking about more than ten years to get an appointment. According to the Anusca-Istat survey, in 2023, 68.5% of new Italian passports were issued to Brazilian citizens and 19.9% to Argentine citizens. "It is a wave linked to the descendants of emigrants between 1876 and 1925," explains Giancarlo Gualtieri, ISTAT head of the Foreign Presence and Integration of Citizens with Migrant Background area. In the Americas there were almost nine million, of which 3.5 in Brazil and Argentina, countries where the economic and political crises are pushing people to get their Italian passport back because it opens the door to the European Union and allows easier access to the United States. In the future, the flows could remain substantial'.

Given the hassle of consulates and embassies, many foreign residents apply to the courts: until June 2022, the only competent court was Rome; the reform of justice then decided to decentralise these disputes on the territory, entrusting them to the immigration sections of the courts according to the municipality of birth of the parent or ancestor.