A Europe for the few

Research – Text: Janine Louloudi, Maria Álvarez Del Vayo, Lucas Laursen, Ter García, Carmen Torrecillas, Adrian Maqueda
Data analysis – Illustrations: Civio 

At the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, the new occupant of the ministerial office presented his credentials a week ago. And it was exactly what anyone familiar with Makis Voridis’ path in the far-right, would expect. Appearing at the House Committee on Public Administration, Public Order and Justice (19/3), he was quick to announce that he personally made the decision to withdraw the provision of a bill that extended until the end of September the deadline for submitting applications for legalization of immigrants who have lived in Greece for more than three years and have found an employer (Article 205, para. 2) – a procedure that had been proposed by his predecessor Dimitris Kairidis, in an attempt to meet the pressing need for a workforce. He then announced that any further decision “should be linked to more restrictive policies to deal with illegal immigration from now on”. A few days later (27/3) during a visit to the ministry, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis would additionally state that legal immigration to Greece “must meet established labour market needs”.

Residence permits, initially temporary and then long-term, are the basic “paper” for proving legal residence in the country and the first step in the long process towards acquiring Greek citizenship for those foreigners who do not possess significant athletic or other qualifications to “offer exceptional services or serve an exceptional interest in the country” (Article 13 of the Code of Greek Citizenship), in order to receive honorary naturalization. Such naturalizations vary considerably, are usually quick and depend only on the political will of the government.

A very characteristic example is that of athletes who were naturalized in order to wear the colours of the Hellenic National Team, such as for example the Olympiakos basketball player Thomas Walkup, who received Greek citizenship in 2023 and participated with the Greek team in the 2024 Olympics. At least 25 athletes competed in Paris having received citizenship by decree of a European country, including Ekaterina Antropova, a Russian volleyball player naturalized by Italy in 2023, and Russian wrestler Dauren Kurugliev who gave Greece a silver medal.

However for people like Natalia, who has been living in Greece for the last 28 years, acquiring citizenship still seems like an elusive dream. She and her husband left Moldova in 1997, when the country was in a severe economic crisis, leaving behind two children. They both worked hard – she as a cleaner and housekeeper, her husband as a handyman –  and managed to bring over and raise their daughters here. The years went by, constantly renewing their residence permits, until in 2014 Natalia heard her daughters say, “Mom, we have our friends here, our studies here, we’re not going back.” It was around the time when the girls went to university, obtained Greek citizenship and encouraged her to apply for Greek citizenship.

“Citizenship unlocks the rights that individuals should have as full members in a state,” says migration researcher Jelena Dzankic, co-director of the Global Citizenship Observatory and a part-time professor at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy.

However, European countries only naturalise a small proportion of their foreign residents each year. According to the latest available figures, in 2022 the European Union, with a population of 448.4 million people, had naturalised less than 1 million people. In total, European countries host 41.2 million foreigners. Sweden naturalised the most in relation to its total population, followed by the Netherlands and Italy. Austria, Estonia and Latvia, on the other hand, naturalised the smallest proportion. Most citizenship decisions in European countries in 2022 concerned immigrants from Morocco, Syria and Albania.

The prohibitive terms

Among the factors influencing naturalisation rates, the terms requested by states for people to obtain citizenship play an important role. Firstly, the documentation of the total number of years of legal residence, ranging up to 10 years in Spain, Austria and Italy and 7 years in Greece.

At the same time, additional integration terms, such as certain years of work, language and cultural examinations, documents from the applicants’ countries of origin, are also required, which can act as barriers to entry. Persons applying for naturalisation through other channels, such as refugees or spouses of citizens, face similar requirements. There are also work or income requirements. In more than a dozen European countries, one of the requirements for citizenship is a stable source of income.

After a long wait, Natalia took her exams in 2023 to obtain Greek citizenship, spending money on the necessary documents and hours of endless studying without help. She managed to pass the exams, but her application was rejected as, working as a cleaner, she did not meet the minimum required annual income of 8,450 euros for the relevant period between 2014-2019. “I have been here legally since 1997 and all these years I have been living somehow, right? But not with what was required”, she explains to MIIR in frustration.

It took nine years from Natalia’s initial application to the announcement of the final decision on her citizenship. The corresponding time in Spain and Italy can be as long as ten years, while in Greece it is six years, although the law stipulates that the administration has 12 months to examine applications for naturalisation. There are currently more than 30,000 pending applications in our country.

Natalia, however, decided not to take the exam again, as she is now 61 years old and does not think she will ever be able to meet the income threshold. She will simply try to renew her residence permit, a process that the NGO Generation 2.0 Red estimates may take at least two years. That’s because in 2024, pending residence permit applications for third-country nationals reached 280,474, with about 32,650 new applications added in one year, from November 2023 to November 2024.

As Generation 2.0 Red reports in its latest report on Monitoring Administrative Procedures for Obtaining Citizenship (Report #2, May 2024 – August 2024)), “a key and insurmountable barrier for most applicants is the requirement to prove minimum income, which leads to many application denials. Acquiring citizenship for people who have lived in the country for years and have developed strong ties with it, should not depend on economic factors”.

In Greece in 2023, 4,931 decisions for naturalisation of migrants were issued (latest available data from the General Secretariat for Citizenship), of which 3,515 (71.28%) were positive. The majority of them (73.88%) concerned immigrants from Albania. However, three out of ten applications (1,416 in number) for citizenship were rejected.

Strangers in their own land

There are also thousands of pending citizenship applications in Greece in the case of second-generation immigrants, reaching 18,822 at the end of March 2022 (latest available data), with delays in the processing of applications exceeding four years.

In this case, citizenship is granted, at the request of the parents, either to minor children born in the country and enrolled in the first grade of primary school (strict conditions apply regarding the status and years of residence of their parents in the country), or to minor children who have completed nine grades of primary and secondary education in a Greek school or six grades of secondary education or have a high school diploma and a higher education degree. 

In 2023 the acceptance rate of second generation citizenship applications was 97.3% (7,514 positive decisions), in 2022 98.38% (6,867) and in 2021 97.03% (5,154).

In 2022, Italy and Spain were the two European countries with the highest total number of naturalisations (213,716 and 181,581 respectively) according to Eurostat. However, almost a third of these involve people born there. The proportion is similar in Austria (32.69%), but higher in Greece (53.93%), where more than half of the 12,733 people granted citizenship were born here.

The laws of EU member states tend to favour citizenship by descent (jus sanguinis) rather than by place of birth (jus soli), but several countries allow people born there to become citizens regardless of their parents’ nationality in special cases.

Five countries automatically grant citizenship to people born there to foreign parents who meet certain conditions, according to the Global Citizenship Observatory (Globalcit). Portugal offers citizenship to children born there whose foreign parents have lived there for a year. Ireland does so after three years. Germany does it after five years, from June 2024, while Luxembourg and France automatically grant citizenship to people born there who can prove they have lived in the country for 5 years when they turn 18. In France, more than a quarter of the approximately 114,500 naturalizations in 2022 involved children aged 13 to 17 whose parents filed an application for their naturalisation, despite the provision for automatic citizenship at age 18.

In contrast, fifteen other EU countries do not allow the automatic naturalisation of children born there to foreign parents, but offer simplified procedures, such as reducing the time required for prior legal residence. There is no common rule: while in Spain, parents of children born in the country can apply for their child’s citizenship after one year of legal residence, in Italy they cannot apply until the child turns 18. Sweden requires three years of residence, not only for children born there, but for all minors residing in the country, regardless of their place of birth.

In all these countries, the first barrier to naturalisation is the acquisition of legal residence. “When children are born to parents who are in an irregular situation, they are also in an irregular situation,” explains Diego Fernández-Maldonado, a migration lawyer for the civil society organisation Caritas in Madrid, Spain. Economist Christina Gathmann of the Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research, calls it a “missed opportunity” that most countries do not recognise birthright citizenship for children of foreign parents: “Europe is falling behind or not thinking about the benefits, because very few countries in Europe have birthright citizenship.”

Stateless and deprived of rights

There is another category of people that nobody talks about. It concerns at least 381,000 foreigners, according to UNHCR figures, living in the EU without official citizenship, a situation that forces them to live as invisible people without basic rights.

Many stateless people come from states that have disappeared or may have been displaced by war or for other reasons. Others have no nationality, because of gaps in the laws of their country of birth: they may be the children of stateless persons or of people whose countries do not recognise as citizens the children born to their citizens abroad. Some people are stateless because the country where they live does not recognise their country of origin as a state, as in much of the European Union (EU) for people from Palestine or Western Sahara.

In Sweden the number of recognised stateless persons increased from 5,300 in 2005, the first year with available data, to 42,511 in 2022. In Greece, the number of stateless persons reached 4,488 in 2022, exactly the same as in 2021.

Since the middle of the last century, two UN conventions have aimed to guarantee minimum rights for stateless persons. First, the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which defines which people fall into this category and requires signatory countries to provide them with access to basic rights that are at least the same as those enjoyed by legally resident foreigners. 

Then there is the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which limits the requirements that stateless persons must meet to obtain a nationality. However, France, Greece and Slovenia have not yet ratified the 1961 Convention, and Cyprus, Estonia and Poland have not even acceded to the 1954 Convention, according to the latest report on statelessness by the European Migration Network (EMN), an EU-funded intergovernmental organisation. 

In 2022, according to the latest Eurostat data, the 27 EU countries granted citizenship to a total of 7,296 stateless persons. As of 2013, the first year for which data is available, at least 67,600 stateless persons were granted citizenship, with more than half in Sweden.

Only 18 countries have simplified access to citizenship for stateless people, according to Globalcit. The process, however, varies from country to country and facilitations are not always provided. Ireland does not require stateless persons to have lived in the country for a certain period of time. In Greece, if a stateless person has lived in the country for 3 years, they can apply for citizenship. Belgium reduces the residence requirement from 5 years to 2 years, while 5 years of residence is also the criterion in Germany. Nine other EU countries, including Spain, Portugal and Romania, do not facilitate the acquisition of citizenship for stateless persons.

All EU countries, except Cyprus and Romania, grant citizenship to people born in the country who would otherwise be stateless. In Greece, children born to stateless parents acquire Greek citizenship if they are born in the country.

More obstacles on the path to citizenship

Citizenship acquisition is in any case the only status that recognises the holder as an equal member of society, giving him/her equal access to rights, but also a sense of security that there is no scenario of returning to the country of origin.

At a time when far-right forces are dragging European rulers towards tightening migration policy, it is certain that the challenges of acquiring citizenship will increase in member states. In Greece, the recent landmark decision of the Council of the State, which terminates Turkey’s recognition as a safe third country for refugees of five nationalities (Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Somalia), is expected to increase pressure on an already overburdened administration where, without realistic and systematic solutions, the problems of delays in residence permits and citizenship, instead of being corrected, will worsen, leaving thousands of people in limbo. 

*The cross-border data investigation was conducted as part of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet).

The project was coordinated by the Spanish journalism group Civio, with the participation of the following newsrooms: Deutsche Welle (Germany), Noteworthy (Ireland), OBCT (Italy), Dennik N (Slovakia) and MIIR (Greece).

To read more on the methodology of the investigation, please check the boxes on methodology at the end of Civio’s reports: here, here and here.