On January 20, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” This reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would rescind unrestricted birthright citizenship in the United States.
Originally ratified to secure the citizenship rights of Black freedmen after the abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment has been almost universally interpreted as guaranteeing birthright citizenship to anyone born on American soil, regardless of their immigration status or that of their parents. Trump’s executive order (though it has been at least temporarily blocked by district judges in multiple states) would deny citizenship to the American-born children of undocumented parents or parents on temporary visas living in the United States.
While the Trump administration claims that such a move would safeguard the “priceless and profound gift” of U.S. citizenship, we need only to look abroad for a foreshadowing of the impact a rollback of birthright citizenship would have on American society as a whole. As scholars of immigration, race, and national identity in Italy, we have spent over a decade studying the far-reaching consequences of withholding citizenship from the children of immigrants.
Italy has some of the strictest citizenship laws in Europe. Immigrants to Italy from outside the European Union must wait an entire decade before they are eligible for naturalization as Italian citizens. And the Italian-born children of Italian immigrants are not granted citizenship at birth—even if their parents are legally resident in the country. Instead, they inherit the citizenship of their parents, and only become eligible for naturalization during the one-year window between their eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays. Even then, Italian citizenship is not guaranteed for these young people, as they are subject to constantly changing, overly-complicated bureaucratic requirements as well as seemingly endless application processing times.
Until late March of this year, anyone with an ancestor alive in Italy after 1861 could be eligible for Italian citizenship by descent; however, the Italian government recently introduced a law that, if ratified, would permanently block people with only distant Italian ancestry from claiming citizenship. Still, today it is easier for a person living abroad who has one Italian grandparent to “re-activate” their Italian citizenship than it is for a young person born in Italy to immigrant parents and who has spent their entire life in Italian schools, speaking Italian and partaking in Italian culture.
This law has damaging consequences not only for immigrant families, but for Italian society generally. Scholars estimate that at least 1 million young people with immigrant parents who were born and raised in Italy have been left disenfranchised, unable to fully participate in what is for many the only country they have ever known. Italy’s system of descent-based citizenship has created a massive underclass of people who cannot vote in national elections and who face significant barriers when seeking to travel across borders or pursue careers in fields such as medicine, law, and education.
Citizenship by descent is predominant in Europe, and no European countries have automatic birthright citizenship like the United States. Yet Italy also took steps to tighten its citizenship laws further in 1992. This was a response to Italy’s transformation into a destination for immigrants from the Global South. By making it easier for descendants of Italians abroad to become citizens, and harder for a growing community of immigrants and their children to naturalize, the government doubled down on a narrow, and deeply racial, construction of “Italian-ness.”
Citizenship has long been used to regulate the racial borders of national membership, in Italy and beyond, so it is no surprise that citizenship rights are a key target of the current global far-right resurgence. In Italy, the development of citizenship law was shaped by the simultaneous processes of national unification, mass emigration, and colonialism on the African continent. The fledgling Italian nation enacted its first citizenship law in 1912, which enshrined citizenship through descent as an effort to sustain diasporic bonds of “blood” with the millions of Italians who had emigrated in search of economic opportunity abroad. Additionally, between 1909 and 1940, a series of increasingly restrictive racial policies were enacted that limited access to Italian citizenship for the children born to Italian men and African women in the Italian colonies of the Horn of Africa. In fact, the Italian fascist government began enacting racial laws in the African colonies before they were implemented in the Italian metropole against Jews.
The echoes of this history, in which citizenship is used to marginalize groups deemed “foreign” or “Other,” reverberate in debates over citizenship in Italy today. Politicians opposed to the expansion of citizenship rights claim that birthright citizenship would lead to uncontrolled immigration, especially from Africa. In 2017, a right-wing newspaper decried a citizenship reform proposal as creating “ItaliAfrica,” and in 2018 (the 80th anniversary of the Italian fascist racial laws), current President of the Senate Ignazio La Russa claimed that birthright citizenship would transform Italy into “Africa’s delivery room.” That same year, Lombardy’s governor Attillo Fontana declared that welcoming asylum-seekers could lead to the elimination of the “white race” in Italy. These comments recall the racist language of “anchor babies” often used in arguments against birthright citizenship in the United States, as well as broader global ethnonationalist fear mongering about an impending “ethnic replacement” in the West.
Italy’s declining fertility rates have been met by state-sponsored efforts to incentivize white Italian families to have children. To that effect, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s brother-in-law, Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida, recently warned that as births decline, Italians cannot be replaced with “someone else.” But at a time when the Italian welfare state is crumbling because of plummeting birth rates and a graying population, the expansion of citizenship rights to immigrants and their children provides a ready-made solution. Just as in the United States, families with immigrant backgrounds in Italy pay taxes, support the pension system, and contribute to the GDP (often to a greater degree than their recognized Italian counterparts), and their labor fills vital gaps in the economy. Of course, one’s right to stay in a country should not be predicated on their economic productivity—but an expansion of citizenship rights would be nothing short of a boon to a long-struggling country.
For decades, activists have been organizing for a reform of Italian citizenship law that would facilitate access to citizenship for immigrants and their children. The most recent effort on this front has taken the form of a national referendum, scheduled for June 8–9, 2025. This referendum was introduced to Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation by popular petition, earning over 600,000 signatures in about one month. It would halve the time required for Italian naturalization from 10 to 5 years (a return to the timeframe of Italy’s earlier 1912 nationality law). If the referendum passes, it would also provide an easier pathway to citizenship for the children of immigrants, who would then be able to apply for Italian citizenship through their naturalized parents.
The tortured story of Italian citizenship may seem far removed from U.S. politics. Yet the Trump administration is poised to roll back the very same citizenship rights that have been the aspiration of millions of immigrants and their children in Italy since the 1990s. And just as in Italy, attacks on birthright citizenship in the United States must be understood as part of a white supremacist effort to narrowly define national membership in racial terms. (After all, what does it mean to claim descent-based citizenship in a country founded on land stolen from its original, Indigenous inhabitants?) We should learn from the Italian example, and not repeat the same harmful mistakes here. Just like immigrant families in Italy today are mobilizing for a more just citizenship regime, birthright citizenship in the United States was only won through abolitionist struggle by the enslaved, their allies, and their descendants.
As the question of birthright citizenship heads to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Italian voters decide on a new citizenship law, let’s remember to honor these transnationally connected struggles.
