Why you might be eligible for dual-citizenship

Yahoo Finance Video

Thu, February 19, 2026 at 5:00 AM GMT+9

Many Americans have considered dual citizenship, but most think they don’t qualify. On this week’s episode of Living Not So Fabulously, John and David Auten-Schneider speak with Daniel Atz, the founder and CEO of Citizenship.eu, about the varied and surprising ways that many Americans could qualify for citizenship abroad.

For full episodes of Living Not So Fabulously, listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on our website.

Yahoo Finance’s Living Not So Fabulously is produced by Dennis Golin.

Video Transcript

00:01 Speaker A

you you’ve talked about this path to citizenship through ancestry. Do you have any data that would say how many Americans give us an estimate of how many Americans you think might be able to to go through that process and actually get citizenship in another country?

00:15 Speaker B

Well, I think that it’s it’s um, it’s an interesting question like there there is no data, right? In the US, many other countries give you the option uh to tell the the government what other citizenships you have.

00:26 Speaker B

But in the US, we only the the American government’s perspective is if you’re a US citizen, you’re only a US citizen. So they don’t maintain any data about this.

00:35 Speaker B

Um, but

00:38 Speaker B

it it’s really hard to say because there’s countries like uh Croatia and Luxembourg where uh a large percentage of the direct descendants that can prove their ancestry are definitely eligible.

00:50 Speaker B

Whereas for France, we think that it’s less than 2%, you know, so I would say Luxembourg and Croatia are more like 90% of inquiries that we get were able to push through and France, I I’ve still never had a successful case.

01:03 Speaker B

Uh, you know, so, um, I think it’s fair to say that there are probably somewhere between 20 to 45 million uh Americans that have potentially some uh eligibility uh for these different pathways.

01:19 Speaker B

There are 22 countries in Europe which have some form of ancestry-based citizenship or for example, in Finland, uh residency programs.

01:29 Speaker B

Um, and then of course, we can’t uh just talk about Europe. There are absolutely programs that exist. For example, Sierra Leone, uh Benin, uh Ghana has the year of return, which is not citizenship, but it’s again a residency through your heritage.

01:45 Speaker B

Um, and we are seeing a really big increase in interest in these programs as well.

Terms and Privacy Policy

Privacy Dashboard

More Info