Italy ruling says arrivederci to citizenship by ancestry. Hundreds of thousands of Philly and New Jersey Italian Americans could be impacted.

Jillian Emory of Fairmount spent years connecting to her Italian roots. She learned the language, studied and worked abroad, and hired a genealogist to help track down her family members in Italy.

“I genuinely want to be a part of that culture,” she said. “I speak the language and have spent a lot of time there.”

Then, a new Italian court ruling on citizenship dropped, dashing that dream abruptly for Emory and millions of others in her shoes.

Italy’s Constitutional Court upheld a law that ends the country’s long-standing policy of unlimited generational citizenship. The new restrictions — which are active now — limit Italian citizenship to the children and grandchildren of Italian citizens. Those predecessors must have solely held Italian citizenship at the time of their descendant’s birth, effectively outlawing dual citizenship.

The new guidance leaves Italian Americans everywhere — including those in Philadelphia and New Jersey, which are known for their prominent diasporas — concerned.

“Right now, my only pathway to citizenship is to live there for two years, which just isn’t feasible,” Emory, who calls the new restrictions “frustrating,” said.

Philly’s American-Italian society says it has already held two webinars for members on the subject. Philadelphia has the highest share of Italian Americans among the 10 largest U.S. cities.

Potential Italian citizens in the long queues to be considered have posted on social media, wondering where the new guidance leaves them. Businesses and lawyers specializing in citizenship assistance are also forced to adjust operations.

Here’s what we know about the situation.

This all started last year when a controversial law called the Tajani Decree was introduced by the Italian government in its law journal. The law pushed to replace Italy’s existing citizenship guidance with much stricter policies. But for months, the policy was tied up in court over challenges that argued the law was unconstitutionally retroactive and inequitable.

This week, Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled that the Tajani Decree did not violate equality principles and upheld the law.

The Tajani Decree marks the biggest overhaul of Italian citizenship in more than 30 years.

The new law:

The local consulate did not respond to a request for comment.

Current Italian citizens are already recognized by the country and their status is unaffected by the new law.

The new law is supposed to affect anyone who applied for citizenship after March 27, 2025 (when the law was first issued, but not yet affirmed by the court due to challenges). If you submitted a complete application, were scheduled for an appointment, or confirmed by authorities by March 27, 2025, you are not subject to the new law.

If you submitted or are submitting for citizenship after March 27, 2025, the new guidance means your path to Italian citizenship will be very different.

The court’s decision changes the landscape drastically for Italian Americans in the Philadelphia region, one of the largest and most active Italian-descendant populations in the country.

According to census data, 760,000 people with Italian ancestry live in the Philly metro area, which extends to New Castle County, Del.; Cecil County, Md.; and Salem County, N.J. That’s 12% of the metro area population.

Hammonton, in Atlantic County, N.J., has among the highest proportions of Italian Americans of any town in the country. It is ranked second by percentage of Italian Americans out of 4,197 cities with 10,000 or more residents.

Italians also make up at least 20% of the population in New Jersey’s Ocean City, Westmont, Bellmawr, Glassboro, and Williamstown, and Broomall in Pennsylvania.

The America-Italy Society of Philadelphia, a 70-year-old nonprofit focused on promoting Italian culture and education through lectures, language studies, and events, has hosted two webinars on the subject of the Tajani Decree. One took place last week.

Several of the group’s members and students are directly affected by the ruling, the group’s director, Elisa Schwab Clewis, said.

Nicole Mena of Port Richmond spent more than a year and a half collecting documents proving her Italian lineage.

She had a case dating back to her great-grandmother’s residency in 1948 and hired a lawyer to help her file for Italian citizenship. While waiting for documents to be reviewed, the news broke that the rules were changing. Generational limits would stop at grandparents.

“I was devastated,” she said. “I spent thousands of dollars and so much time tracking documents down. I haven’t done anything since then because I would have to start all over.”

Arianna Valocchi of Brewerytown is a fourth-generation Italian American whose great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from Abruzzo, Campania, and Sicily in the early 1900s.

“I grew up feeling distinctly Italian American and in college set out to learn the language,” she said. She ended up living abroad for two years, and her literature degree focused on translating Italian poetry. She spent two years in South Philly teaching Italian at a Montessori preschool.

In 2023, Valocchi and her dad began the process of pursuing citizenship.

“This was mostly symbolic for my father, more a gift to me and my future children, to be able to potentially work in Italy and move there.”

Valocchi said they used a now-defunct citizenship assistance program that made errors throughout the process and failed to return their calls or their $5,000 deposit.

A year and a half later, with little progress made, Valocchi learned about the Tajani Decree, which would cut her line to citizenship.

The decree’s namesake, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, said the new restrictions are intended to crack down on tourists who “abuse” Italian citizenship as a “novelty.”

In 2024, 30,000 Italian citizenship applications were processed and the number of Italian citizens residing abroad increased by 40%, to 6.4 million, over 10 years, according to the foreign ministry and the Italian consulate.

Tajani said most of those people have no direct connections with the country, do not pay taxes, and do not vote.

“I do think there are Americans of Italian descent who abuse the process and just go buy a vacation home without really engaging with the actual country and language outside their own Italian American identity,” Valocchi said. “Sometimes I feel angry because I think, ‘I lived there! I learned the entire language! I translated your poetry to expose it to English readers! I am truly engaged with the culture!’ But I also don’t think Italian citizenship is owed to me.”

She added, “I always wonder what could have been if we started the process just a couple of years earlier.”

Not necessarily. A citizenship lawyer told CNN things could still change.

“This doesn’t mean the new law is 100% valid and forever,” Marco Mellone said. “There is still space for argument for cases brought by Italian judges to the Constitutional Court. In July 2025, the Constitutional Court issued a judgment saying that descendants had a right to Italian citizenship at birth, from birth. They changed their opinion, I suppose. It is very weird.”

Mellone said he plans to challenge the new law in a separate hearing next month at the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest legal authority. That court’s opinion would supersede the Constitutional Court’s.

“This is a very sad day for millions of people, but I didn’t study law for 25 years to see this kind of thing happen,” he said. “Descendants were born Italian citizens. If you are a citizen at birth, you have a right that nobody can touch. … This is the first step in a long battle.”

The situation leaves locals like Jillian Emory in limbo.

“I speak the language and have spent a lot of time [in Italy],” she said. “But now it doesn’t seem possible. I guess I will just keep waiting and see if the laws ever change back.”