Edit April 27, 2021: The Ministry of Justice confirmed to LuxCitizenship that 2002 additional Americans are eligible to apply for citizenship through ancestry but have not been able to travel to Luxembourg yet. Therefore, the numbers are even bigger than expected.
Covid-19 Causes Americans Reclaiming Luxembourg Citizenship to Decrease for First Time
Of these 438 Americans acquiring Luxembourg Citizenship in 2020, 395 or 90% reclaimed Luxembourg citizenship under the Article 89 process. An additional 12 people or 3% went through the Citizenship by Option process. Compared to 2019, the remaining 7% of citizenship cases went through other processes like Naturalization for Americans living in Luxembourg. The Ministry of Justice does not publish statistics on individuals who obtained Luxembourg nationality certificates through the Article 7 process. These applicants have their citizenship recognized instead of “obtaining” it.
2020 Explained – What Could Have Happened for Citizenship Procedures
LuxCitizenship worked with 12% of the total people who completed & fully obtained Luxembourgish citizenship under Article 89 in 2020.
Our last client who was living in the USA and was able to travel to Luxembourg did so on March 9th, 2020. From March 9th-December 31st, 2020, no LuxCitizenship clients traveled from North America to Europe. This was due to Covid-19 and the associated travel restrictions.
If we assume that the number of successful applicants that made it to Luxembourg largely did so before March 9th and multiply by the number of weeks left in the year, at least 1,659 more people would have been expected to complete procedures.
We believe this is also a low estimate. It assumes all weeks in the year would have equivalent amounts of applications as in January-March. On the other hand, most of LuxCitizenship’s clients indicated in January 2020 that they planned to travel from spring until the end of 2020.
Follow Up to Our Predictions from Our 2019 Study
In our 2019 study, we estimated that at least 1,195 Americans would travel to Luxembourg in 2020. This would make the number of Americans who recovered Luxembourgish citizenship through ancestry equivalent to more than 1% of the Luxembourgish citizens living in Luxembourg. Based on the pre-Covid numbers, it seems that, even with conservative estimates, significantly more Americans than ever expected were on the path to dual citizenship in 2020.
Want to learn more? Over the next two weeks, we will be releasing our annual research on who are the American-Luxembourgers, these new dual citizens. You can check all of our research on the dual citizenship trends in 2020 in one place: https://www.luxcitizenship.com/luxembourg-dual-citizenship-trends-2020/.
To see our demographic report about the new American-Luxembourgish dual citizens, check out: https://www.luxcitizenship.com/american-luxembourgers/.