Introduction

Over the past five years, the number of Luxembourg citizens living in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina has significantly increased. The data sourced from the National Registry of Natural Persons (RNPP) reflects this growth trend. Interestingly, the number of Luxembourg citizens migrating to these countries each year remains relatively low. All the while, as of March 31st, 2023, Brazil overtook neighboring Germany as the third country in the world with the most Luxembourg citizens.

This discrepancy between total growth and migration suggests that the majority of these Luxembourg citizens have recovered their Luxembourgish citizenship through ancestral roots, rather than through migration.

However, some people in Luxembourg may be confused because the overall growth trend in total citizens living in this three countries does not correspond with the numbers which Luxembourg’s Ministry of Justice publishes each year on citizenship procedures completed by applicants from these three countries.

Explanations

This discrepancy between the RNPP and Ministry of Justice has two main explanations.

First, the Ministry of Justice only publishes statistics on nationality procedures for adult applicants, not their minor children. Our own research would indicate that the number of minor children corresponds to around 29-30% of the adult applicants.

Secondly, the Ministry doesn’t provide statistics on people who were always technically Luxembourgish citizens but are just getting their first citizenship certificate. This phenomenon includes all those who have an all-male family lineage back to a male ancestor born in Luxembourg between 1815-1943. Legally, these people were born Luxembourgish citizens and never lost this status. These people can directly obtain a nationality certificate from the Ministry of Justice. However, since they’re not officially “applying for citizenship”, their numbers aren’t included in the Ministry’s citizenship procedure statistics. This is despite the fact that most of these people didn’t know that they were already citizens, and the Luxembourgish government also didn’t know about them. Because these individuals are already citizens, there are no application deadlines. This group continues to grow.

And It Keeps On Growing

In the below, we’ll analyze the true growth of Luxembourgish citizens (and especially those through ancestry) living in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina since 2018, the year that the National Registry of Physical Persons (RNPP) started keeping track of the Luxembourgers living abroad. We will base our analysis on the statistics as of December 31st of every year. The RNPP has already released new statistics since December 31st, 2022, however the other data sources are only released once a year.

No country has seen a more drastic rise in Luxembourgish nationals over the last few years than Brazil. Up until 2018, there were considerably more Luxembourgers living  in the US than Brazil. In fact, no Brazilians completed an application to recover Luxembourgish citizenship until 2016. But by 2019, the numbers took off and never went back. Interest in applying for Luxembourgish citizenship through ancestry absolutely exploded in Brazil in 2018. Although the number of Luxembourg nationals migrating to Brazil each year remains incredibly low (23 in 2022), yet the total number of Luxembourgers living in the country has increased almost ninefold in the past five years. And the numbers only continue to grow. While not included in these statistics, the RNPP has revealed that as of June 30th, 2023, there were additional 6,804 new Luxembourgers living in Brazil. Therefore, the growth in six months of 2023 surpassed all of 2022. The total number of Luxembourg citizens in Brazil as of July 2023 was 26,743.

In the United States, the number of Luxembourg nationals grew from 3,602 in 2018 to 12,268 in 2022. The real question for the United States is how many native Luxembourgers were actually living in the country before the Luxembourg Dual Citizenship law was introduced? This information is not archived by Luxembourg’s government, but our best estimate is approximately 2,000.

In the United States, the number of total new Luxembourgers through the Article 23 and 89 processes remained lower than LuxCitizenship’s expectations in 2022. While still a considerable increase, it was much less than our estimates.

Additionally, as of June 30th, 2023, the RNPP indicated that there was an increase of 1,843 Luxembourgers living in the US since January 1st, for a total of 14,111.

Argentina was the third most important location for Luxembourgish immigration to the Americas in the 19th century. Likewise, today, Argentina is the third country with the most Luxembourgish nationals through ancestry in the Americas. Interestingly enough, although the total number of Luxembourgish immigrants moving to Argentina in history may not have been that much less Brazil, the numbers in Argentina are a fraction of those in Brazil.  The total number of Luxembourgers living in Argentina has just a bit more than doubled from 195 in 2018 to 421 in 2022. Remarkably, there were zero reported migrations from Luxembourg to Argentina from 2018 to 2022. This stark contrast suggests that the rise in Luxembourg citizens in Argentina is entirely due to people claiming their nationality via ancestry. By comparison to the US and Brazil, few Argentines took advantage of the Article 89 process which had an initial deadline on December 31st, 2018. As of March 2023, only 20 Argentine citizens had yet to complete their Article 89 application. As of June 30th, 2023, the total number of Luxembourg citizens in Argentina had increased to 483.

Conclusion

The data from the RNPP and the Ministry of Justice reveals an intriguing trend. Despite low migration numbers, the Luxembourgish diaspora has grown immensely in the USA, Brazil, and Argentina over the last five years. The key to this puzzle lies in Luxembourg’s nationality laws, which allow people to reclaim their Luxembourgish citizenship through ancestry. Only time will tell how these populations will continue to grow and evolve.