Parents race to lock in citizenship options for children before rules tighten further

A child’s citizenship often looks fixed at birth, decided by the country named on hospital paperwork and the passports the parents carry. Immigration lawyers and mobility advisers say the opposite is true: citizenship remains one of the few parts of a child’s future that parents can still shape, and the window for shaping it closes at 18.

Three forces determine what passports a child can claim: where they are born, known as “jus soli” or the “right of soil”; who their parents and grandparents are, known as “jus sanguinis” or the “right of blood”; and whether a family pays for citizenship, known as “jus pecuniae” or the “right of money”. Advisers say two of the three are narrowing across wealthy nations while the third keeps growing, which rewards families who act while children remain minors.

Birthplace remains the advantage that can be secured only once, at delivery. A child born in a country with unconditional birthright citizenship becomes a citizen the moment they arrive, regardless of the parents’ own nationality. That right is now concentrated in the Americas. Roughly 33 countries still apply unconditional jus soli, and nearly all sit in that hemisphere, spanning Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina and most of the Caribbean.

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Elsewhere, the doctrine has retreated for decades. The United Kingdom ended unconditional birthright citizenship in 1983, Australia closed its version in 1986, and Ireland scrapped its own by referendum in the mid-2000s. The United States remains an exception. On 30 June 2026 the Supreme Court struck down an executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship for children of temporary and unlawful residents, ruling that virtually anyone born on US soil holds citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. Several Latin American countries pair birthright citizenship for the child with fast residence routes for the parents; Brazil grants citizenship to any child born there and lets parents apply for permanent residency straight away, naturalising after one year.

Descent claims move faster than most parents expect, and lawyers warn they are shrinking. Many countries pass nationality automatically from parent to child, so a parent who has never claimed a second citizenship through their own parents or grandparents may be sitting on an entitlement their child could inherit once it is formalised. Timing matters: in several countries, whether a child qualifies depends on the parent’s status at the time of birth, so securing a citizenship before a child arrives, rather than after, can decide what passes down. Advisers also stress registering a child’s birth with the relevant consulate promptly, since an unregistered claim by descent becomes harder to prove once witnesses and records age.

Italy illustrates how quickly ancestral routes can close. Long regarded as the world’s most generous descent regime, Italy capped citizenship by blood through Law 74/2025, and its Constitutional Court upheld that cap in March 2026, ending the principle that Italian nationality could pass down an unlimited chain of generations. Italy’s highest court, sitting as the “Sezioni Unite”, heard arguments on 14 April 2026 over whether an ancestor who naturalised abroad while their own child was still a minor cuts off the bloodline for everyone born after them; a ruling was pending at the time of writing and will govern thousands of pending claims. Italy’s reform does allow a parent to pass citizenship to a minor by declaration, but only within fixed windows: three years from birth for children born after 24 May 2025, and an extended deadline of 31 May 2029 for children who were already minors when the law took effect.

Canada has moved the other way on one measure while adding a new condition on another. Bill C-3 removed the first-generation limit on citizenship by descent in December 2025. For a child born abroad after 15 December 2025, however, a Canadian parent who was also born abroad must show at least 1,095 days, or three years, of physical presence in Canada before the birth. Canada also raised its evidence bar in June 2026, briefly ordering some recipients to surrender certificates built on informal genealogy records before reversing course days later and telling most holders to keep their documents.

Residence and schooling build ties an adult applicant cannot buy or backdate. Portugal’s revised nationality law, in force since 19 May 2026, now grants citizenship at birth to a child born there only if a parent has completed five years of legal residence, up from one year previously, a change that can split siblings born either side of the threshold. Portugal also doubled its naturalisation requirement to ten years for most applicants, seven for EU and Portuguese-speaking nationals, counting the clock only from the date a residence permit is issued. Its new descent route for great-grandchildren of Portuguese nationals likewise requires five years of residence and a “genuine connection” to the community, the kind of link a school-age child builds simply by growing up there. Language works the same way: Portugal’s naturalisation process requires an A2 language exam and a civics test, a bar that a child raised speaking the language clears without effort while it stalls many adult applicants for years.

Investment routes remain the one lever built specifically for families. Grenada’s citizenship-by-investment programme requires a non-refundable donation of $235,000, covering a family of four, plus roughly $25,000 per additional child, and permits dual citizenship without residence in the country. Advisers caution that a citizenship added for a child does not automatically cascade to grandchildren, since transmission depends on the destination country’s own descent rules.

Every added passport carries obligations alongside benefits. About 60 countries still conscript, and a dual-national child can fall within a second country’s call-up rules on reaching the relevant age. A child who holds US citizenship, by birth or descent, carries lifelong US tax-filing obligations regardless of residence, short of renouncing it, while some countries require a person to choose a single nationality at the age of majority. Lawyers recommend auditing every citizenship already held in the family, tracing both family trees for unclaimed descent, then layering residence, schooling, language and, where useful, investment, while mapping the obligations that come attached. Handled early, they say, a child’s citizenship becomes a portfolio the child can use for university, work and mobility, rather than an accident of birth that hardens the moment they turn 18.