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Collection of signatures in Italy regarding a popular referendum (doable with 500k signatures, they arrived at 400k this morning) to lower to 5 years the requisites for citizenship.
Proposed thanks to the usual eternal alliance between the Radicals (free marketers, Atlanticist and pro-US liberals) and the socialists-left wing parties.
If the Constitutional Court permits it, it will be another cultural war. Enormous error of the right wing government (as usual) to not reinforce the institute of citizenship, as always the right is reactive and not proactive.
You can already pay a firm to find your "italian ancestors" about 10k to become a dual citizen.
I don’t know why you put Italian ancestors in scare quotes to make it seem like you can just invent lineage. You have to document your actual, unbroken family line and if your Italian ancestor was female it requires a lawyer to file a so called 1948 case. Furthermore if anyone ever renounced Italian citizenship or became a citizen in their new country before giving birth to your next ancestor, you don’t have a case.
Nope, they "find" your ancestors for you. That is what you pay for. Mr. Chippy fry hidden post history 3 posts person.
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Any more info on this? I’d be very interested in getting an EU citizenship.
There are a ton of websites like this, https://moccialegal.com/ They have contacts in the communes that will find "your italian heritage" and get the paperwork started. It can take up to a year to go through the process. If you actually have Italian heritage you can do it yourself in about 2 years or so or pay someone about 5k. Many firms only collect from you if you get citizenship so it can be a risk free proposition for you (another reason why everyone gets in) https://www.italiandualcitizenship.net/money-back-guarantee/
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It’s called jure sanguinis and it’s not as easy as they make it seem. Though you can pay someone to do it for you. DIY it can be done for under $2k. There’s a subreddit dedicated to the process which has a great wiki.
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Reaching the threshold of signatures will likely just be enough to put the proposal on the ballot. The Italians still have to vote on it. Given that they have elected a far-right prime minister running on an anti-immigration platform, I think I know which way that vote would go.
Also, I don't think getting the citizenship after five years (subject to other conditions, such as being in the country legally and passing a language and civic knowledge test) is totally unreasonable. Few conflicts people flee are over within a decade. Deporting someone after seven years of residency seems much crueler than deporting them within six months of arriving. Perhaps best reason to deport long-term residents is them being involved in serious crime, but I think the number of migrants who start raping after peacefully working in a bakery for seven years is probably not all that high.
On the flip side, dealing with the foreigner's office is terrible even for the highly qualified workers Europe needs, I have colleagues who have been in that situation. Most bureaucracy is limited in its badness in that citizens will eventually complain to their elected officials. Not so for the foreigner's office. Canada offers naturalization after three years, the US after five, even Germany after eight years. If Italy only offers the citizenship after a decade, that will be a competitive disadvantage.
I’m not sure five years is long enough, as it simply will act as an attraction to those looking to migrate. Anything short of a decade to my mind is too short for that reason. Look at it this way — if you’re expecting that you can easily get into a European country work a minimal job for a couple of years and then be a full citizen and perhaps even have the right to bring family in on the back end, there’s something to jump at. And if that timeframe is shorter than other European countries, they’ll all come in through Italy and use their Italian citizenship to bring everyone to Europe and have free reign of the place.
In yet another failure of attempted federalism, I expect the EU is going to have to unify citizenship rules, or at least specify minimums, to prevent something like the old Irish corporate tax rules.
Well, the current minimum residency for EU citizenship is Malta with 'just move here and invest'.
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There shouldn't be a way to obtain citizenship in etnostate other than blood. I don't see any benefit for the state and the citizens from it being otherwise. It works well in the gulf. And the people there aren't even refugees - and refugees will be ready for worse bargain.
I suppose that by 'blood' you mean ethnic heritage, not service in the foreign legion or occult rituals.
I think ethnostates are overrated. Italy is not genetically uniform, and there is certainly no neat genetic cut-off between German-speaking South Tyrolese and the people living north of the Austrian border. The Sards form their distinct ethnic cluster. None of this matters very much, and few would think that Italy would benefit by granting South Tyrole to Austria and give independence to Sardinia so that Italy can get closer to being an ideal ethnostate.
Being an ethnostate is compatible with being a static agrarian society. Defend your borders, don't let the filthy foreigners in, raise a lot of pure-blooded kids to carry your ethnicity forward. (Take care not to get conquered, though.)
Being an ethnostate does not seem feasible for empires (Rome, Britain, US were/are all notably multi-ethnic), nor does it seem very beneficial for modern globally competitive information societies. Even societies in East Asia which we might perceive as ethnically homogeneous, such as Japan, South Korea or Singapore (not a bastion of wokeness) have naturalization laws requiring residency of 5-10 years. Technically, you don't have to let in foreigners to become technologically advanced, you can also just grant professorships to your own citizens who studied abroad, but this will reduce your applicant pool by ~90%. And societies which are seriously xenophobic might place little value in young people living among foreigners for a few years.
The adjective to describe the gulf states is not 'successful', but 'rich'. The smallish populations inhabiting them simply won the geological lottery, and used their undeserved wealth to import serf while denying them the wealth tied to citizenship. (Political participation is reserved strictly for the elites, of course.) This makes some cruel sense from the point of view of the native population. But unless you are suggesting that being an ethnostate affects the odds of fossil fuels being found in your land, their example can hardly be adapted to other states who have to compete for their GDP. Also, money can prop up a lot of things which would not be stable otherwise, it bribes their own citizens to stay quiet and also buys a lot of fancy tanks which can keep the serfs in check. I am not convinced that Saudi Arabia will be a good place to be twenty years after the oil is gone.
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Marrying and having children with a citizen seems like it would give someone sufficient attachment to the nation.
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Italy is already at a substantial competitive disadvantage in attracting highly skilled immigrants because wages are so much lower than equally wealthy economies and no one else in the world speaks Italian. Spain can skim off the best from Latin America, every educated person in the world speaks at least some english(which is what the Germanic countries mostly use for business), and France has its own little Franco sphere.
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Meloni is hardly "far right". Her views on immigration broadly track with those of the median Italian.
I actually think Melosi is quite far-right on immigration, she just can't do much due to European laws, and after Brexit, even far-right political parties no longer talk about their countries leaving the EU.
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Well, in her youth, she was a member of the MSI, which was explicitly neo-fascist. Her current party, the FdI shares a lot with them in both membership and logo.
I will grant you that if she is following the classical fascist playbook, she is doing a piss-poor job of it (not that she could get away with it), so describing her government as fascist is probably not helpful.
Still, I think that it is helpful to keep peoples political ancestry in mind a bit, and her roots are not in some moderate Christian conservative right, but in the fascist far right.
If we reserve the phrase 'far right' for parties who are explicitly campaigning on building death camps, then it will not be a very useful phrase because almost nobody, including the NSDAP would qualify.
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What's the current requisite?
The requisite is 10 years of residence. The proposer of the referendum says it is too high (I suppose that for them everything that is not open border is too high)
UK is 5 years, of which at least one needs to be as a permanent resident. US is 5 years as a permanent resident, or 3 if you are married to a citizen. So this isn't going to put Italy too far out of step with the rest of the world.
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