Italy Closed the Ancestral Citizenship Door — And Thousands of Americans Are Now Trapped Inside

The Day the Law Changed

On March 28, 2025, the Italian government issued an emergency decree — effective immediately, without warning, without a grace period — that fundamentally rewrote the country's citizenship rules. What had been an open-ended birthright, tracing back to 1865, was abruptly capped: only descendants with a parent or grandparent born in Italy would qualify for citizenship by descent, known as jus sanguinis (law of blood), according to CNN's reporting on the law's one-year anniversary.

The decree, sponsored by Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, was codified into Law 74/2025, also known as the Tajani Decree. The government's stated rationale was managing spiraling consular backlogs — some decades long — and preventing what Tajani described as abuses of the citizenship process. Italian consulates were processing cases for people whose last Italian ancestor lived in the 19th century, having no living connection to the country beyond genealogical paperwork.

The rule had existed, essentially unchanged, for 160 years. The Italian state had always considered citizenship to pass automatically through bloodlines as long as no ancestor formally renounced or lost it — typically by naturalizing in a new country before 1912, when Italy still stripped citizenship upon acquiring another nationality. For millions in the diaspora, many descended from the 16 million Italians who emigrated between 1861 and 1918, this was considered a birthright.

Then, overnight, it wasn't.

The Constitutional Court Slams the Door

For those who believed the emergency decree was unconstitutional — and legal challenges came quickly — March 2026 brought a final, crushing answer. Italy's Constitutional Court held a public hearing on March 11, 2026, reviewing a challenge referred by a Turin tribunal. The tribunal had questioned whether Law 74/2025 violated the constitutional principles of equality (Article 3), legitimate expectations, and protections against retroactive deprivation of rights.

The following day, March 12, 2026, the court issued a press release: the objections were "partly unfounded and partly inadmissible," according to reporting by IBTimes Australia. The full written judgment was still pending as of late March 2026, but the court's summary communiqué left little ambiguity. Law 74/2025 stands.

Professor Corrado Caruso, one of the lawyers who argued against the law before the court, told CNN: "It was an extremely clear, harsh intervention, so I had a hope that it would be judged in breach of some constitutional points, but that wasn't recognized by the court."

The state's legal team had successfully argued that distant descendants had never technically been born with citizenship — only with an expectation of citizenship — and that if they had not officially claimed recognition before March 27, 2025, that expectation had simply lapsed. The court agreed.

Stranded: The Americans Who Moved for a Citizenship That No Longer Exists

The cruelest edge of the law cut against a specific group: people who had already moved to Italy and were mid-process when the decree dropped. The law contained protections for approximately 60,000 applications filed before March 27, 2025, at consulates and courts — those cases proceed under the old unlimited-generation rules, according to IBTimes Australia. But people who had moved to Italy and registered with local authorities, beginning the residency-first pathway to citizenship recognition, found themselves in a different category: stranded.

Kellen Matwick is one of them. A freelance video editor whose great-grandparents emigrated from central Italy to Pennsylvania, Matwick moved with his wife Jacqueline and their two children — aged five and two when they left — from Arizona to Turin in August 2024. Their plan was to live in Italy, integrate the children while they were young, and complete the citizenship paperwork from within the country.

"We said, 'Let's do it the right way,'" Kellen Matwick told CNN. "We treated it like an actual move, chose the city we actually wanted to go to. We said, we'll get an apartment, have the kids learn Italian, live a real Italian life. We did everything they wanted us to do."

The Italian residency-based citizenship pathway is not a shortcut. Arrivals must secure a long-term rental contract, then register with a local authority — a 45-day process. They must obtain a residency permit from the police. Only after all of that can they present citizenship paperwork to local authorities for formal recognition. The full process can take months to years, according to CNN's account of the procedure.

When the law changed, Matwick had completed early steps but had not yet reached the recognition stage. Without citizenship recognized, he exists in legal limbo: unable to apply for jobs, unable to travel freely, and unable to access healthcare through the Italian national health system, according to CNN's reporting. Returning to the United States is not simple — the family sold belongings, quit jobs, and bought one-way tickets.

"It didn't seem like a risk," Jacqueline Matwick told CNN. "The process has existed for decades."

Citizenship lawyer Marco Mellone, quoted in Ground News's aggregation of the CNN report, noted that the court's ruling "doesn't mean the new law is 100 percent valid and forever" — but offered little immediate relief for those caught in limbo. Families in Matwick's situation had two practical options when the law changed in 2025: wait and see what the Constitutional Court decided, or go home. The court has now decided. Going home, for many, means starting over with nothing.

Scale of the Change

The diaspora affected is vast. An estimated 80 million people globally claim Italian descent, according to IBTimes Australia. The largest populations are in Brazil (approximately 32 million), Argentina (approximately 25 million), and the United States (approximately 20 million). Before the 2025 reform, virtually all of them could have theoretically pursued Italian — and by extension European Union — citizenship, provided they could document an unbroken chain of ancestors who never formally relinquished Italian nationality.

The EU passport is the practical prize that made the long, bureaucratically demanding process worthwhile for so many diaspora applicants: free movement, the right to live and work across 27 member states, access to European healthcare and social systems. Italy's new law closes that door for all but the closest descendants.

The reform's supporters argue it restores integrity. Critics, including diaspora groups and immigration lawyers, argue it severs cultural and ancestral ties that Italy itself cultivated for over a century — ties that brought billions in consular fees, Italian-language school enrollment, and cultural investment — and then discarded overnight without warning to the people who had built their lives around the assumption that those ties were permanent.

What Remains

The picture for those excluded from jus sanguinis is not entirely closed. A handful of legal avenues remain, though each is narrower and slower than what existed before.

The Palermo civil court ruled in February 2026 in favor of certain Italo-Argentine applicants who had been blocked by consulate delays, allowing recognition under the old rules in cases where applicants could prove documented good-faith efforts to file before the March 2025 cutoff, according to IBTimes Australia. The decision is fact-specific and does not establish a broad precedent.

Italy's Supreme Court (Court of Cassation) is scheduled to hear arguments on April 11, 2026, on a separate retroactivity question: whether the 2025 law can affect people whose citizenship claims arose before the decree. The outcome of that proceeding may provide limited relief for a subset of cases, according to IBTimes Australia.

Separately, a bill passed by Italy's parliament in January 2026 — Bill 1683 — will shift adult jus sanguinis cases to a centralized Rome office starting in 2029, with annual processing quotas and fixed timelines. For now, consulates continue processing cases through 2028, but only under the stricter eligibility rules. Those now ineligible under jus sanguinis can pursue residency-based naturalization (typically requiring 10 years of legal residence in Italy), marriage to an Italian citizen (reduced to two years of residence), or — under a window expiring December 31, 2027 — reacquisition of citizenship for those who lost it through certain pre-1992 naturalizations, according to IBTimes Australia.

For the Matwicks and others like them — already in Italy, already committed, not yet recognized — none of those paths close the gap left by a 160-year tradition being ended without warning on a single March afternoon.