More adult and underage foreign nationals who acquire Italian citizenship
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Data on Italian citizenship acquisitions have seen a sharp increase in a decade: they have gone from 29,000 in 2005 to 66,000 in 2010 and to 100,000 in 2013. As of 2013, the growth was remarkable, up to 178,000 new Italian citizens in 2015. By taking into account this progressive growth, Istat (Italian National Institute of Statistics) has estimated 205,000 new Italian citizenship acquisitions in 2016.
38% of the new acquisitions were obtained by minors and 50% by people under 30 years old. These percentages refer to the high number of young people who were either born in Italy or reunited with their parents, who had acquired Italian citizenship through residence, therefore becoming Italian citizens for automatic transmission; the percentages also refer to those who became Italian by choice after reaching the age of majority. This results in a growing number of new Italian families, as more and more families of foreign origin choose the Italian citizenship.
The 2015 data show that today, among the main non-EU nationals, residence, transmission and election represent the main ways to acquire citizenship, while in the early Nineties it was by marriage to an Italian citizen. For some communities, most new citizens are very young: 58% of Egyptians became Italian by transmission/election, just like 57% of Pakistanis and over 52% of Tunisians and Bangladeshi.
Acquisition of Italian citizenship of non-EU citizens for modality of acquisition of citizenship and main country of origin. – Year 2015
Source: ISMU elaboration on ISTAT data