RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazilians account for 85 percent of the citizenship recognition procedures based on descent (jus sanguinis) conducted in Italy.
The data are from the Italian Ministry of the Interior and have been forwarded to Italian news outlet ANSA by the National Institute of Statistics (Istat). In 2017, the last year with available statistics, 8,252 people obtained their citizenship by blood right in Italy, of which 7,014 were from Brazil.
Next are the Argentinians, with 549 individuals (6.7 percent), followed by Moroccans, with 109 (1.3 percent), Americans, with 69 (0.8 percent), and Venezuelans, with 65 (0.8 percent). Citizens of other nationalities account for 5.4 percent of cases.
The figures only include applications for citizenship by right of descent submitted in Italy itself, and exclude data relating to proceedings begun in Italy’s consular network abroad. To obtain citizenship on Italian soil, applicants must take up residence in the country during the application process, which may take several months.
When all types of citizenship are taken into account (by the length of residence, marriage or other grounds), Brazilians are ranked third.
In 2017, Italy registered 146,605 citizenship acquisition proceedings (technical term used by Istat), of which 27,112 were Albanian (18.5 percent), 22,645 Moroccan (15.4 percent) and 9,936 Brazilian (6.8 percent).