Italy Closed Its Citizenship Window Overnight. Poland and Romania Haven't, Yet.

I tell every client the same thing once they've made the discovery: your great-grandparents might have been citizens of a European country, and that country has a real path for you to claim citizenship by descent. Get moving fast.

Italy is proof this gift can disappear almost overnight. I had a client filing for Romanian citizenship who made it in one week before the mandatory B1 language certificate requirement became law in March 2025. He filed just in time. That single week is the difference between a straightforward filing and a much harder one.

What Actually Happened in Italy

Italy took it a step further. It didn't just add a requirement. It cut off the pathway itself for millions of people around the world with Italian ancestry, including some who had already started gathering documents.

Here's the cold fact: for decades, Italy allowed unlimited jure sanguinis, citizenship passed down through any number of generations with no cap. In March 2025, that changed. The new rule restricted eligibility to parents and grandparents only. Italy's Constitutional Court upheld the restriction in March 2026, which means this wasn't a temporary political move that could get walked back. It was tested, and it held.

People who had a real, documented claim the week before had nothing the week after. That's the entire argument for why "I'll get to it eventually" is the riskiest plan available to anyone sitting on a family history like this.

The Pattern, Country by Country

Italy and Romania aren’t the only ones. Hungary introduced a language interview requirement that stops most diaspora applicants before they start. Portugal closed its Sephardic pathway to new applicants in May 2026. Ireland caps transmission at the grandparent level unless a parent registered in the Foreign Births Register before certain windows closed. Poland is a different case worth watching for a different reason: in October 2025, Poland's government began drafting amendments to its citizenship law, including a citizenship test and extended residency requirements. Those proposals target naturalization, the path foreigners use to become Polish citizens by living in Poland, not citizenship confirmed by descent. As of now, the by-descent process I used myself isn't part of what's being tightened. But it's a live reminder that citizenship law in these countries isn't static, and a government actively rewriting its citizenship rules for one category is a government worth watching closely, not one to assume will leave every other category untouched forever.

Part of what's driving this is scale. Governments across Europe are seeing a surge in citizenship-by-descent applications from people in the US, Canada, and elsewhere looking for a second passport tied to their family roots. The consulates and ministries processing these cases are overwhelmed, understaffed, and backlogged by years in some cases. Romania's own citizenship authority, ANC, is still working through files from 2021 and 2022 as of early 2026. A system under that kind of sustained pressure doesn't usually respond by staying open the same way forever. Somewhere, a rule tightens, a requirement gets added, or a program closes outright, and it's rarely the country you'd have guessed in advance.

None of this means Poland or Romania is about to close. It means the opposite of "you have plenty of time." These two are still open right now, which is exactly why finding out where you stand today matters, not because the door is closing tomorrow, but because nobody gets an advance warning when it does.

Where This Leaves You

If you’re not sure whether your family history makes you eligible for Polish or Romanian citizenship by descent, the fastest way to find out is the 2-minute eligibility quiz on this site. If you'd rather understand what the process actually costs before anything else, that's a fair place to start too. Time may genuinely be part of the equation here, and checking costs you nothing.

Sources: Fragomen's October 2025 analysis of Poland's proposed citizenship amendments (which explicitly do not apply to descent confirmation), Italy's 2025 citizenship-by-descent restriction and its 2026 Constitutional Court ruling, Portugal's May 2026 closure of new Sephardic-descent applications, and Ireland's Foreign Births Register rule are documented policy changes. Always confirm current requirements directly with the relevant consulate before making filing decisions.