The practice, many legal historians believe, dates to the 1600s and 1700s, with European rulers encouraging migration to the expanding American colonies. Those colonists, though, wanted any of their children born overseas to retain European citizenship. So even as the colonial boundaries shifted “you’re a citizen as long as you’re born within the domain of the king, of the monarch,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. “But the leg

Germany has seen a rise in the number of people seeking German citizenship since it made it possible in mid-2024 for people to have passports from multiple countries and reduced the required time of residence to five years from eight. The statistics come from 14 of Germany’s 16 federal states, with data still lacking from the eastern states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt, according to Welt am Sonntag. Several municipalities reported that naturalization numbers we

An increasing number of Jewish Americans with family histories shaped by the Holocaust are applying to restore German citizenship—to have the option to move to Germany should conditions in the US deteriorate further. Once unthinkable: At 103, Holocaust survivor Ruth Gruenthal has reclaimed the German citizenship the Nazi regime stripped from her because she was Jewish. After surviving Nazi persecution and rebuilding her life in the US, Ruth became a psychotherapist and raised