My daughter, Clio, was born in August, 2022 in San Leandro, California. Immediately afterward, I felt an urgent need to secure her a passport. As someone who’s worked with refugees and reported on forced migration for more than two decades, I understood the potentially life-saving importance of being able to cross a border with paperwork in hand. I started the application process before I had finished bleeding, trudging to the county records office with my newborn for a copy of her birth certificate. I held my bear-suit-clad two-month-old high above my head as a tired photo technician labored to take a valid passport photo. (“No smiling,” he told me. “No crying, look straight ahead.”) The precious blue booklet arrived before her fourth trimester had ended.

A few months later, I happened to be interviewing an Italian lawyer named Marco Permunian, who helps foreigners buy property in Italy. Permunian also helps foreigners to obtain Italian citizenship through ancestry, and he made clear, by way of a quick aside, that because my daughter’s great-great-great-grandfather on her father’s side stowed away on a boat from Italy in the early twentieth century, she likely qualified for Italian citizenship.

“How does it work?” I asked, suddenly uninterested in real estate.

Permunian walked me through the process. His team helped scour Ellis Island records, locate birth certificates in remote Italian municipalities, and assemble and submit an array of paperwork and filing fees—for roughly eight thousand euros a pop.

“We’re doing it,” I told my husband, as soon as I got off the phone.

In many ways, I was behind the curve. Even before Donald Trump was reëlected, everyone I knew seemed to be seeking a second form of citizenship. My sister-in-law applied for Irish citizenship for herself and my niece and nephew. (My brother would be eligible for it, too, eventually, if they decided to live there.) My best friend was also hoping to get her kids Italian citizenship through her husband. My uncle was trying to figure out how to get Greek citizenship through his grandmother—my great-grandmother—and my cousin was considering doing the same. More than a dozen friends who didn’t already have dual citizenship told me that they were sorting out pathways of their own.

If you Google “Apply for citizenship in Europe,” you’ll find a seemingly endless scroll of agencies that are ready to guide you through the process. Many European countries have bloodline-citizenship laws—which, though varying in the details, essentially assert that citizenship rights are passed down through the generations, like DNA. Such laws are on the books in Greece, Spain, Portugal, France, and Ireland—countries where tens of millions of American families can claim ancestry. In recent years, West African nations, including Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria, have laid the groundwork for Black Americans whose ancestors were abducted into enslavement to obtain citizenship. Other countries, such as Vanuatu and Saint Lucia, offer citizenship for financial investment, suggesting a new world order in which it’s a luxury commodity, up for purchase.

Permunian, who is fluent in English, started his business in 2014 with only one other employee. Given the particulars of Italian-citizenship law at the time, many of the roughly eighteen million Italian Americans living in the U.S. had a plausible claim to Italian citizenship. Within a decade, demand for Permunian’s services had become so high that his company employed two hundred people with offices in Nashville, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York.

I reached out to him just a few days after the November, 2024, election to check in on his business. “We are completely overwhelmed,” he said. He estimated that he was receiving an e-mail from a potential new client every three minutes. Permunian told me that interest spiked after the onset of the COVID epidemic, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the début of CNN’s “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.” But he hadn’t seen numbers like this since Trump was first elected in 2016. “People are seeking an exit plan,” he said.

In most cases, the people looking for second passports didn’t actually intend to move abroad—not immediately, anyway, or not unless things in the U.S. took a bad enough turn. “It’s psychological, mostly,” Olga Kallergi, a Greek attorney who helps Greek Americans secure citizenship by descent, said of these applications. “People are concerned and want to have an option.” Kallergi, too, has been swamped during the second Trump Administration. According to a representative of the Greek government, the number of Americans who apply for Greek citizenship each year is relatively small—on average, a few hundred, compared with several thousand for Italy—but it has quadrupled during the past decade.

A writer named Michael David Lukas is pursuing French citizenship for himself, his wife, and their two young children. “You don’t buy fire insurance because you want your house to burn down,” he explained. “You buy it because you think that it’s possible a fire might happen, and you want to be prepared.”

Lukas has never actually been to France. His mother, the daughter of Polish Jews, was born in France after her family fled the Third Reich and lived there for about six years before immigrating to the States. Birthright laws rendered her a citizen and made Lukas and his children eligible, too. He was aware of the option for years, but the January 6th riots finally made him pursue French citizenship in earnest. The footage of the attacks on the Capitol gave him a “slow-motion panic attack,” he recalled, triggering what he described as an almost biological impulse to run. As a Jew, he explained, he was raised with a deeply ingrained understanding that the people who survived during times of oppression were those with papers who allowed them passage elsewhere. (He could also seek citizenship in Israel, but for Lukas, an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, that would feel like going “out of the frying pan and into the fire.”)

On Reddit, I checked a thread called /AmerExit. It was teeming with people sharing plans and asking for advice. Some weren’t looking for an insurance plan—they thought that they might actually need to leave soon. “Hello! So, I’m transgender,” a Reddit user wrote last year. “I live in a safe state but I’m fucking terrified of a possible third term, I want out of this country as soon as possible.” A woman in her forties posted, “I’m alternating between rising low-level panic/GTFO energy and feeling like we’d be crazy to walk away from a stable solution.” She identified herself as white, married, cisgendered, and a parent of two children—one of whom is nonbinary. As one Reddit user later explained to me, “I want to leave because, to be frank, I think this country is headed in a really bad direction and it’s not getting any better.” In theory, they qualified for Croatian citizenship through their grandmother, but, as a Holocaust survivor, she hadn’t brought any documents with her—leaving her grandchild stuck. “I’m hoping to find a country that actually cares about the people who live there,” they said.

Until recently, U.S. citizenship was, legally speaking, an absolute: either you had it or you didn’t, and, at least theoretically, it conferred certain rights. Today, not only is the current Administration threatening to increase “denaturalizations”—once extremely rare and largely limited to cases of terrorism or application fraud—but Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement has routinely detained U.S. citizens. Immigration officers killed two U.S. citizens in broad daylight while, all evidence seems to show, they were exercising their constitutional right to peacefully assemble. This spring, the Supreme Court will consider the Administration’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, which was enshrined in U.S. law in 1868.

Those of us whose ancestors came willingly to the U.S. trace our lineage to people pursuing a promise: of religious liberty, perhaps, or economic mobility, or the freedom to express political views. But now, as the Trump Administration threatens those hard-won civil rights—and the lives of citizens and non-citizens alike—even the most privileged classes are feeling the creep of an autocratic regime.

If my daughter has options that might protect her in the future, wouldn’t I be failing as a parent if I neglected to pursue them on her behalf? In his dual-state theory, Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish labor lawyer who fled Berlin in 1938, described dictatorships as offering two simultaneous realities: one of overt state violence, and another of apparent order, where people not yet under threat—people like me—can plod along. That is my explanation for why I dallied on getting Clio’s Italian-citizenship application started. It was expensive and time-consuming, and I was doing other things, like helping immigrants get lawyers and organizing ICE-watch neighborhood groups. Soon, I thought, I’d get around to it.

But when I finally called Permunian he was bereft. Had I not heard the news? The Italian foreign minister had announced that Italy would be slashing its citizenship-by-descent laws. Now only children and grandchildren of Italian-born citizens would be eligible, not multigenerational descendants like my husband or kid. Back in 2024 I’d asked Permunian whether Italy might ever consider changing the law, given how many people qualified. “That would mean changing the entire constitution,” he said—a very doubtful prospect. He turned out to be wrong. At a press conference, the minister cited the number of citizens living outside of Italy, which had grown forty per cent in recent years, thanks to a “cottage industry” of businesses (presumably, ones like Permunian’s) that overwhelmed Italian courts and immigration offices.

Permunian was rather screwed; so were we. Time to get serious—with each passing day, getting a second passport felt less like a doomsday plan and more like a necessity. I wrote to Olga Kallergi, the Greek attorney, asking if she thought my daughter would be eligible for Greek citizenship. Possibly, she said, if we could secure the right documentation to prove ancestry. She asked for the full names and ages of all my ancestors, dating back to my great-grandparents, and informed me of the factors that work in an applicant’s favor: speaking basic Greek (I’d have to work on that); knowledge of Greek history and current events (points for me); and past trips to Greece (another point in our favor—I’d taken Clio and my mom along on a reporting trip to Greece just a few months prior). I worried that articles I’d published that were critical of the Greek government might work against our application. “They shouldn’t,” Kallergi told me. The real question was what documents her team managed to procure to verify the existence of my great-grandparents, born on a remote island in the late nineteenth century.

Kallergi offered me a discounted flat fee of thirty-five hundred euros to process both Clio’s and my application, plus eight hundred and forty euros in taxes and four hundred in fees. This was not exactly money that I, as a freelance journalist who works part time at a public school, had on hand. Plus, there was no guarantee that we’d even get citizenship. Then I thought of Lukas’s words: You don’t buy fire insurance because you want your house to burn down. What does it mean, for those of us who can, to give a child easy passage across the line? ♦