My Journey — Getting Italian Citizenship through Descent
Part 1: It begins…
TLDR: I kept putting off my attempt at getting Italian citizenship, so I thought that by writing about my progress, I would be holding myself accountable (while also practicing my writing). “See world, I’m going to do it, so please make me feel bad if I get lazy and give up.” — Randy
I’ve wanted to try getting Italian citizenship ever since hearing that Italy has a “Jure Sanguinis” (or Citizenship by Descent) program. For those of you who haven’t heard about this before, Italy recognizes Italian citizenship for people of Italian descent, regardless of where you were born, with only a couple of important caveats. These limitations have to do with how laws of Italian lineage have changed throughout the years, and I plan on talking about them specifically in a follow-up post.
But why Italian citizenship? Before we get to personal reasons, there are a couple very practical reasons why Italian citizenship is attractive.
1) Since Italy is part of the EU, Italian citizens are also citizens of the European Union. This allows the right to movement and residence in any state within the EU, as well as Switzerland. Ever want to live in Europe without having one of those pesky work visas already lined up? Become an Italian citizen!
2) The Passport Index (https://www.passportindex.org/) lists the Italian passport as one of the strongest in terms of its mobility score. If you hold an Italian passport, you can enter 133 countries without applying for a visa. This is significantly higher than the USA (105) and is only one behind the leaders (Germany, Finland, Spain, and Switzerland) with 134. Want to travel somewhere without getting one of those pesky visas? Become an Italian citizen!
In addition to these practical reasons, if you have Italian heritage, you might feel some sort of connection to Italy. Or at the very least, you might want to feel some connection to it, to connect to your roots. So far, in my life, I’ve been inside the border of Italy (in Milan) for roughly 8 hours on a layover from Riga to Toronto. And I don’t speak Italian, at all (although I recently learned that the singular form of spaghetti is spaghetto). But yet, there’s still this sense of knowing I need to go back and really explore the country.
So I started to get excited. Maybe I could get Italian citizenship. All I had to do was start investigating. Learn the steps along the path. And I started to look into it. I did. Unfortunately, like with anything else that isn’t strictly life-or-death, things started getting in the way. Like work. Or a global pandemic. Or moving half-way across the world from Australia to Canada while in the middle of a global pandemic. Or Wandavision. Because life has a way of keeping you busy, my plans for Italian citizenship fell by the wayside. I got lazy.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The process is not a walk in the park. If you’ve ever done anything with literally any government ever, you know that there is a lot of red tape. And you also know that, behind that red tape, lies another 537 layers of red tape, each thicker and crustier than the last. I recently had the pleasure of dealing with government bureaucracy while getting my Canadian permanent residency, and it was not a fun experience. And the US and Canada speak the same language (minus the word “about” and “alumin(i)um”). Without knowing Italian, and with all my documents in English, there would certainly be some roadblocks along the way.
So how would I motivate myself? How could I push myself through all of the inevitable hurdles along the way? I asked myself this question for a while before I eventually settled on the answer.
Tell people that I’m going to do it.
Being self-conscious has its perks now and then. There’s nothing worse than having people think you’ve failed at something. So come on, peer pressure, welcome aboard! My current plan is to write a new post every month or so, documenting my progress. While this process is for me, if anyone winds up getting anything useful out of this series, all the better. I think it would be great to see others begin their journey on this exciting (if a bit daunting) ocean. Arrivederci!
