The Borderless Divide: Residency, Citizenship, and the Future of Your Freedom

Residency is a Tool. Citizenship is a Weapon.

For years, I believed that blood was stronger than bureaucracy.

Like many Americans with Italian ancestry, I chased citizenship through jus sanguinis — the so-called right of blood. We gathered birth certificates, translated documents, and traced our lineage back to a great-grandfather born in “the old country.” On paper, I was eligible. The plan was clear: secure Italian citizenship by descent. That would grant me — and my children — an Italian passport.

Because Italy favors male-line descent, we intended to file simultaneously for all three of us. With EU passports in hand, we could access Ireland, and from there, the rest of Europe. It would save time, tens of thousands of dollars — potentially hundreds — and let us bypass residency-by-investment schemes entirely.

And then, without warning, Italy changed the rules.

In March 2025, Giorgia Meloni’s government issued a decree gutting the jus sanguinis pathway. The details are complex, but the new baseline is this: if your Italian ancestor wasn’t a parent or grandparent, if they ever naturalized elsewhere, or if your parents weren’t residing in Italy — you’re out. Retroactively. No matter how far along your application was. No matter what you’d already spent. No grandfather clause. No appeal.

Just gone.

That was the moment I realized:

Citizenship by blood isn’t a right — it’s a policy. And policies change.

The irony is brutal. The citizenship that once felt like a birthright turned out to be more precarious than residency.

What Lasts

Now, some will argue that the decree will be overturned — that it violates the Italian constitution or EU law. They may be right. I’m not an expert in either. There are serious legal questions about how the Meloni government handled the process, and credible arguments that the new law violates both EU citizenship protections and Italian due process. The legal fight isn’t over.

But politically? The writing is on the wall.

Europe is pushing back — hard — on all forms of immigration. Countries are overwhelmed by asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East. Crime, social fragmentation, and welfare strain are fueling a cultural backlash. The public isn’t always making fine distinctions between refugees, investors, and long-lost descendants.

The result? Programs are being slashed. Pathways are closing. And jus sanguinis, which once felt like a loophole into Europe, is now politically radioactive.

Spain, Portugal, and Greece are already rolling back residency programs. Ireland has begun tightening its investor schemes. Even Canada is under pressure (although Canada just announced changes to its Canadian heritage citizenship programs). Around the world, the window is narrowing.

What’s likely to remain when the dust settles?

Not blood. Not privilege. But process.

It will be process that determines access to passports. The most stable processes will be “natural born citizen” followed by naturalization. And the first step in a naturalization path — always — is residency and cultural integration.

If you’re building an escape plan, here’s the hard truth:

Residency might feel fragile. But it’s the only road to the kind of citizenship that lasts.

Blood, lineage, and descent are all just one populist decree away from vanishing.

That’s not an opinion. That’s precedent.

Now, that may be confusing to understand, but here’s what I realized given what happened with Italy.

A Thought Experiment in Collapse

Here’s the reality of what could have happened to me.

Let’s say I had been more on the ball, and I had obtained my little red passport earlier. Here I am in Ireland. Eh Cumpari! With my Italian passporto. Right? I was smart. Got my docs in earlier. Got my application in earlier. Maybe I did it the first time Trump was a lunatic. My whole family was in Ireland in 2023, and we watched America burn to the ground and Harris lose the election from a pub in Dublin, drinking a pint of Guinness.

And then, Meloni wakes up on March 28, 2025, and says: “No soup for you!”

So, I’d go, “Hmmm, ok, I still have an Italian passport, as do my children. My wife and I are legally married, and the EU recognizes that fact, thus, she has a right to reside with me,” (and we would have properly registered, etc., in Ireland that fact) “and so we’re fine.”

Right? Well, maybe.

And let’s say it got even uglier, and the Court of Campobasso’s opinion (which happened on May 1, 2025), had not confirmed that the Tajani decree (which is what the decree was that changed everything), did not apply retroactively to all the passports that had been issued to “citizens” before the decree.

Which it could have done. While I think the Court made the right call, it’s not like it's unprecedented for Courts to make the wrong one.

Suddenly, I’m holding a worthless passport. As I have explained to readers in other articles, passports are encoded with metadata that indicates how the passport holder was obtained: natural-born citizen, naturalized citizen, etc. It also contains all the passport’s data about the individual, and in the case of countries in the EU, that data is cross-referenced in real-time against databases by other EU countries, the US, Canada, Australia, and others.

Suddenly, my red passport is garbage.

Now, am I going to get kicked out of Ireland? Probably not. At least, not immediately. I entered with proper EU citizenship, and under various international treaties, as well as European Union laws, its citizens cannot be stripped of citizenship without significant due process. Ireland would likely not recognize Italy’s decision to invalidate those passports, as would be the case with most European Union countries. I’d also retain my American citizenship, and since we’d own property in Ireland, I’d have a business there, and my children would attend college and work in Ireland, there would be ancillary routes to explore.

But, to say the least, it would be a mess. It’s not something I would have wanted to figure out. I’d likely have to apply for a visa to be sure, or asylum (which I’d be eligible for under various treaties as a stateless person, technically, if Italy booted me out of my citizenship, possibly). It would throw my life into chaos—and ripple across the EU. Every country would be forced to deal with thousands of Italian “citizens” suddenly holding invalid passports.

Again, a mess.

That thought experiment convinced me: it’s not bloodlines that endure. It’s process.