Story Time (How We Ended Up Pursuing Dual US-Italian Citizenship)
To Do List:
✅ Decide to Move to Europe
❎ Get visas for the Netherlands.
❎ Get visas for the Portugal
✅ Decide to Pursue Italian Citizenship
Have you ever wondered if you were eligible for Italian citizenship? If the answer is no, then you and I used to have something in common.
As an American with great grandparents who were Irish and English immigrants, until recent years I had spent, quite literally, none of my time daydreaming about pursuing it.
So how did we get to the point where we are now two months out from moving to Italy to apply for citizenship, you wonder? Well, luckily for me, I have a husband whose family immigrated from Sicily. He’s a 10/10. I’m a big fan. Not necessarily because he’s Sicilian, just because he’s fun. The fact that his family tree holds the key to Italian citizenship is just an unexpected bonus point in his favor. Anyway, I digress…
Let us rewind a bit, shall we? A handful of years ago I started to look into my eligibility for Irish citizenship. It turned out to be a fruitless slog as our family records and history are…messy, to say the least. Additionally, Brexit - the ultimate British shenanigan, was reaching fever pitch levels of chaos and the processing times for Irish citizenship applications were getting significantly longer as Brits were seeking out ways to retain their EU status. I, having minimal time to commit to any further research, unceremoniously bailed on the idea completely. It was at this point that I first remember asking my husband about potential eligibility in Italy through his family. He had very little information about his ties to Italy and said that he didn’t think we’d be eligible. I took that at face value and moved on.
As it turns out, we most certainly were eligible, and applying back then probably could have saved a lot of time and saved me from the B1 language test that I’ll ultimately need to pass to gain citizenship through marriage - but, as the proverbial “they” proclaim: hind sight is 20-20.
Fast forward a few years and its now 2019, we had a toddler, a second baby on the way and a mortgage. On the surface it looks as if we’re pretty locked into the standard American family trajectory of a big house, with a three car garage and a bunch of kids. In reality though, we were rapidly tiring of the oddly touted grind and I was working a grueling schedule with a bummer of a commute. We were both well on our way to burning ourselves out.
Like most people, we love to travel and we do it as often as we are able. One day as we sat, sleep deprived and jonesing for a travel break, at our dining room table. We started reminiscing on how great our trip to the Netherlands had been and how great it would be to just pick up and move there. We started imagining what it would be like to get to experience the mythical European work:life balance, with our free time spent peddling a quintessential dutch bakfiets around the city with our kids chillin’ in the basket. Eventually, one of us posed the inevitable question “why don’t we just do it?”. Most people would laugh that question off as outlandish, but those who know us well would not be surprise that that seemingly unremarkable query proved to be the catalyst for an all encompassing lifestyle change. I mean, why not? Carpe Diem, right? With in a matter of days we had made a few inquiries about transfer to an office in Amsterdam and started researching what a move overseas would entail.
We fell in love with the city of Amsterdam
“We started imagining what it would be like to get to experience the mythical European work:life balance, with our free time spent peddling a quintessential dutch bakfiets around the city with our kids chillin’ in the basket”
A few weeks later our half baked plan was quickly and decisively cut down in its infancy as the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc globally. The chance to change offices fizzled and we pivoted. Maybe we could get a visa on our own? Once again we were met with a roadblock, and once again we pivoted. Maybe we can change destination? change visa? change jobs? Roadblock, pivot, roadblock, pivot (I’m sure you see the pattern developing). This continued in a Groundhogs Day-esque pattern until 2021, when we finally sold our home and most of our belongings. With that huge first step taken, there was no longer anything anchoring us to the US and we were then in a position to start aggressively seeking out a way to make our Europeans dreams a reality.
It was at this point that I decided to hedge our bets and simultaneously pursue two avenues of emigration. I put in a records request with USCIS for naturalization documents for my husbands great-grandfather so we could find out once and for all if we could pursue Italian citizenship. The turn around time on that search at that point was about a year and getting longer. So, while that was sitting in limbo, I cashed in on the free month trial on Ancestry.com and started collecting family records for my husbands family in case we were determined to have eligibility with Italy.
Concurrently, I started looking into the D7 visa for Portugal. Portugal ticked all of our boxes; Gorgeous climate (we’re from the northeastern United States so Portugals sunshine looked very appealing), lower cost of living (again, versus NY standards), incredibly high quality of life ranking, great schools for the girls with multilingual curriculums, and a fairly accessible visa program. As far as back up plans go, Portugal is a stellar one. I researched schools, apartments, bank accounts and made a plan of action. I found a service provider who would assist us in getting our bank accounts, and apartment and to get our application submitted.
Lisbon Portugal
“As far as back up plans go, Portugal is a stellar one”
Coincidentally, and ultimately serendipitously, that same week I stumbled upon a post in the Dual US-Italian Citizenship facebook group regarding the process and timeline to request a Certificate of Non-Existence (C.O.N.E). Up until that moment I had been unaware that such a form existed and that the turn around on it was a matter of weeks as opposed to the year the USCIS records search was taking. I immediately printed off the request form and expressed mailed it the next day.
Twenty one days later we had the reply in hand. The relief I felt when I read that our LIRA’s (last Italy-registered ancestor) search came back clean is hard to describe. Finally, we had good news! He had never naturalized, and we now had confirmation that we had an unbroken line of descent and were eligible for Italian citizenship.
And that, my friends, was the synopsized inception story to our dual-citizenship journey and the start of our year-long documentation process.
