2023 was the highest year on record for people acquiring Luxembourgish citizenship and the highest year on record for people reclaiming Luxembourgish citizenship through ancestry.
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2023: Luxembourg Gets More and More Brazilian
Luxembourg’s Ministry of Justice has released its Nationality Statistics for 2023. In total, 11,904 people acquired Luxembourgish citizenship in 2023. This figure includes all procedures for Luxembourgish citizenship, including those unrelated to citizenship through ancestry.
This is a 13% increase from the 10,500 people who got Luxembourgish citizenship in 2022. 2023 was the highest year on record for nationality procedures in Luxembourg, even beating out 2018 (11,876), the year where a number of new paths to citizenship for residents of Luxembourg came into effect.
Among the countries the 11,904 new citizens came from, Brazil came in first place with 4,404 adults. The US came in 4th place with 936 adults. The top five nationalities applying were: Brazilian (4,404), Portuguese (1,237), French (1,131), USA (936) and Belgian (511).
Notably, these 5 countries are in the same order for the second year in a row, each with very similar numbers besides Brazil, with a 1,324 person increase.
Olympic athlete and entrepreneur Márcio May is one of now over 27,000 Luxembourgish citizens living in Brazil. To turn on the subtitles, please press the play button, followed by the CC icon. To change languages, click the gear icon and “Subtitles/CC”.
Statistics For Article 89
Of the 11,904 people who got Luxembourg citizenship in 2023, 4,930 (41%) reclaimed Luxembourg Citizenship through an ancestor alive on January 1st, 1900 (Article 89 of the Luxembourg Nationality Law).
Article 89 Statistics Over the Years
The countries with the most people reclaiming citizenship through ancestry in 2023 were Brazil (4,054) and the US (616). To date, 40,641 have reclaimed Luxembourgish citizenship through an ancestor alive on January 1st, 1900, including 12,269 Brazilians and 3,797 Americans.
For Brazil, 2023 was the year with the most people reclaiming Luxembourgish citizenship in its history. For the US, 2023 was only the third most popular year after 2022 and 2019.
It’s important to remember that it takes 4 months after applying for Luxembourgish citizenship for it to come into effect. Therefore, these statistics really concern applications from September 2022-August 2023.
The Chamber of Deputies only voted on December 21st, 2022 to extend the deadline to recover Luxembourgish citizenship from 12/31/2022-12/31/2025. So the majority of applicants thought 2022 was their final deadline. As many as over 100 people per day applied in October and November 2022. These 2023 numbers largely concern the applications from the last 4 months of 2022.
Putting Things In Perspective
An article in Virgule.lu stated that as of March 28th, 2023, 11.495 Brazilians had reclaimed Luxembourgish nationality.
Because the processing time for citizenship is 4 months, March 28th. 2023, would have included most of the November 2022 applicants. Therefore, only 774 more Brazilians reclaimed the citizenship from December 2022-August 2023. Probably a large majority of which were the people who applied in December 2022.
Therefore, overall, very few Brazilians and Americans actually probably applied to reclaim Luxembourgish citizenship during the calendar year 2023. A total of 712 Americans and 3,013 Brazilian adults remain eligible to reclaim citizenship until December 2023. However, a large number of these people may have abandoned their application, for example LuxCitizenship has 20 clients who have otherwise passed away, are too old to travel to Luxembourg or have some other reason for no longer desiring to apply.
LuxCitizenship Statistics
For the 616 American adults reclaiming citizenship in 2023, 33 or 5% were LuxCitizenship clients. The Government’s statistics include information on other paths to citizenship than Article 89. LuxCitizenship clients accounted for 126 (47%) of the 269 American adults who got Luxembourg citizenship under Article 23 in 2022. The Government does not distinguish between Article 23 and the Article 7/23 combo in its statistics. The Ministry of Justice statistics do not include minor children or anyone applying under Article 7, with the latter being by far the largest grouping of our clients that received citizenship last year.
