Seeking a Second Passport | The New Yorker
Permunian, who speaks English fluently, started his business in 2014 with just one other employee. Given the peculiarities of Italian citizenship law at the time, many of the approximately eighteen million Italian Americans living in the United States could plausibly claim 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 contacted him just days after the November 2024 elections to check on his affairs. “We are completely overwhelmed,” he said. He estimated that he received an email from a new potential customer every three minutes. Permunian told me that interest increased after the start of the COVID the epidemic, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the start of “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy” on CNN. But he hadn’t seen numbers like that since Trump was first elected in 2016. “People are looking for an exit plan,” he said.
In most cases, people seeking a second passport didn’t actually intend to go abroad — not immediately, anyway, or not unless the situation in the United States took a bad enough turn. “It’s mostly psychological,” Olga Kallergi, a Greek lawyer who helps Greek-Americans obtain citizenship by descent, said of the requests. “People are worried and want to have an option. » Kallergi was also overwhelmed by the second Trump administration. According to a Greek government official, the number of Americans who apply for Greek citizenship each year is relatively small – on average a few hundred, compared to Italy’s several thousand – but it has quadrupled over the past decade.
A writer named Michael David Lukas is seeking 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 said. “You buy it because you think it’s possible a fire could happen and you want to be prepared.”
Lukas has never 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 United States. The birthright laws made her a citizen and also made Lukas and his children eligible. He had been aware of this option for years, but the January 6 riots finally pushed him to seriously pursue French citizenship. Images 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 deep-rooted understanding that people who survived during periods of oppression were those who held papers that allowed them to pass elsewhere. (He could also apply for citizenship in Israel, but for Lukas, a staunch defender of Palestinian rights, that would feel like “getting out of the frying pan and into the fire.”)
On Reddit, I visited a thread called /AmerExit. There were lots of people sharing their projects and asking for advice. Some weren’t looking for reassurance: they thought they might soon have to leave. “Hello! So, I’m transgender,” one Reddit user wrote last year. “I live in a safe state but I’m fucking terrified of a possible third term, I want to leave this country as soon as possible.” A woman in her 40s posted: “I alternate between a rush of low-level panic/GTFO energy and feeling like we’d be crazy to move away from a stable solution. » She identified as white, married, cisgender, and the mother of two children, one of whom is non-binary. As one Reddit user later explained to me: “I want to leave because, to be honest, I think this country is going in a very bad direction and it’s not getting better.” » In theory, they had obtained Croatian citizenship through their grandmother, but, as a Holocaust survivor, she had not brought any documents with her, leaving her grandchild stranded. “I hope to find a country that actually cares about the people who live there,” they said.
Until recently, American citizenship was, legally speaking, an absolute: you either had it or you didn’t, and, at least in theory, 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 arrested U.S. citizens. Immigration agents killed two American citizens in broad daylight while, apparently, they were exercising their constitutional right to peacefully assemble. This spring, the Supreme Court will consider the administration’s executive order ending the right to citizenship, enshrined in U.S. law in 1868.
