The detail that ought to trouble the government is not the reform itself but its timing. Reporting by The Local records the case of the relocation adviser Jennifer Sontag, who had seven clients ready to move to Italy through citizenship by descent at the start of 2025. All seven, she says, remain in the United States: they lost the pathway their move was based on and did not qualify for any existing visa category.
Sontag, chief executive of the ViaMonde agency, told The Local that clients had already booked flights, signed leases, sold homes, begun property searches or entered relocation contracts, because they expected to build their lives in Italy under the law as it stood when they started planning.
The rule that ended it is a single line: a two generation limit, requiring an applicant born abroad to have a parent or grandparent who held Italian citizenship only, or held it at death, with narrow exceptions. A state is entitled to decide who its citizens are, and to change its mind. What it is not entitled to expect is that people will treat the decision as legitimate when it arrives with no transition for those already in the process.
Italy is a country with a falling population that has spent years marketing itself to the descendants of its emigrants. Having invited them, it moved the line while they were mid air. The Constitutional Court has now sent the restrictions to the European Court of Justice, so the legal question is open again. The reputational one is simpler: a rule that punishes the people who believed the campaign is expensive in a currency budgets do not record.