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Germany's Plan to End Dual Citizenship · IMI Podcasts

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Two years after Germany let new citizens retain their old passports, senior figures in its ruling party are drafting a plan to end it.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: In the United States, a false tax return filed before naturalization can now cost a person the citizenship itself.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a second passport or want one, both could reach you.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are two doors out of citizenship.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Each turns on one question, and missing it could cost you the passport you count on most.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Door number one is in Berlin, and for decades it was shut.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Until mid-2024, Germany had one of Europe's most restrictive rules on multiple nationality.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: New citizens usually waited eight years and gave up their old passport, with exceptions mainly for citizens of the European Union and Switzerland.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: That changed on June 27, 2024, when the Act on the Modernization of Nationality Law took effect.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: It cut the standard weight to five years.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Every naturalizing applicant could now retain their previous nationality, wherever they came from.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Section 25 went too.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Under that rule, a German who voluntarily took another citizenship lost the German one automatically.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Since June 2024, a German can acquire any foreign citizenship, including one through investment, and lose nothing at home.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Results came fast.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Germany naturalized a record 332,500 people in 2025, up 14% on the year before.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: De Statis, the Federal Statistical Office, links the surge directly to the reform.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first year above 300,000 since records began in 2000.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Syrians made up one in five new citizens, 65,600 people, followed by 34,100 Turkish and 19,700 Russian nationals.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Naturalizations of Americans doubled to 6,600.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Restitution cases for descendants of people the Nazi regime stripped of citizenship rose 61% to 12,000.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: In the cities that track it, between 85 and 98% of new citizens retained their previous nationality.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Germany has a reputation as a one-passport country.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Its own 2025 microcensus counts 4.03 million residents with two citizenships, and 3.61 million of them are German nationals.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Polish, Turkish, Russian, Syrian, and American are the most common second passports.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Door number one began to swing back on September 6, 2026.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: In the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the alternative for Germany, the AFD, took 43.8% of the vote.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was the party's first outright win in any German state election.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: With 39 of the state parliament's 83 seats, the AFD finished three short of an absolute majority.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Christian Democratic Union, the CDU, fell to 17.2%, less than half its 2021 result.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Before that night, the CDU had led every government in the state since 2002.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Ahead of the vote, Günter Kings, a deputy leader of the Conservative Group in the Bundestag, gave an interview to the Telegraph.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Previous governments, he said, had made German citizenship too fast and too easy.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: He spent eight years as a state secretary in the Interior Ministry, and the governments he now partly blames.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: In his view, naturalization should only be the last step at the end of an integration process.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: His reported package has four parts.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Applicants would renounce their previous citizenship and pass a language exam on complex subjects well above everyday B1 German.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: They would pay all their living costs from their own income and disavow all forms of antisemitism.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Under German case law, covering 51% of your costs yourself is enough today.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Kringles rejects that.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Someone drawing nearly half their income from the state, he argues, cannot claim economic integration.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: When the record numbers landed in June, he said, we have to react legislatively here.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the 2024 law is settled, part of it is already gone.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: The reform created a three-year fast track for exceptionally integrated applicants with C1 level German, and it lasted 16 months.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: On October 8, 2025, the Bundestag voted 450 to 134 to delete it.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: There was no transition clause.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Applications already in the queue were judged by the rules on the day of decision.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: In its final year, the Fast Track accounted for under 1% of naturalizations.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: The AFD wanted more.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Its March 2026 motion to restore the eight-year wait failed by 438 votes to 135.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Krings's plan would take the CDU beyond its own coalition agreement, onto ground the AFD has occupied for years.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Two more state elections were set for later in September, in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, with citizenship part of the campaign backdrop.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Door number one has a second side, and it is the one investors watch.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: His comments target immigrants who naturalize in Germany.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: They leave open whether a CDU bill would also bring back Section 25 for Germans who acquire another citizenship.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: If it returned, a German buying a second passport through investment would once again be trading one citizenship for another.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: German applicants and their advisors will watch that scenario most closely.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Demand from Germans is rising.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Henley's 2026 Private Wealth Report ranks Germany 13th among its clients' nationalities, up from 24th in 2024.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: It also records a 16% rise in German inquiries from the last quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Germans barely register in Europe's golden visa statistics because free movement already lets them settle anywhere in the European Union.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Their interest goes to options outside it, from the American investor visa to Caribbean citizenship by investment.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Foreign residents have exposure too.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Germany offers no golden visa, but its Section 21 self-employment route works as an investor pathway in practice.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Entrepreneurs who naturalize after five years on it would face the higher language and income bars.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: For now, no bill exists.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Any law would need the Social Democrats, the SPD, whose coalition agreement with the CDU protects dual citizenship and the five-year standard.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: That agreement says the coalition stands by the reform of citizenship law.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: SPD leaders have rejected conservative calls to end dual citizenship, and the party has softened CDU migration plans before.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Interior Minister framed the 2025 fast track repeal as cutting pull factors for irregular migration.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Reopening the question would mean reopening the coalition agreement itself.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: As of October 2026, IMI has reported no draft bill, and when the plan surfaced, talks inside the coalition had not begun.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: German citizenship law changed twice in 16 months, and IMI's weekly newsletter tracks every change at IMIDaily.com slash newsletter.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Before you plan around one country's rules, see every route side by side.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: IMI Sovereigns members get the citizenship catalogue, which compares every path to citizenship in 195 countries, from naturalization and marriage to descent and investment.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Quarterly private briefings cover the program changes and policy risks we cannot share publicly.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sovereigns sells no programs and takes no referral fees.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Join at imidaly.com slash IMISovereigns and use the code SOV10 for 10% off your first month.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Door number two is in Washington and it opens onto your past.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: On June 11, 2025, the Justice Department made denaturalization, the legal process of stripping citizenship, one of its five enforcement priorities.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: A memo told its lawyers to prioritize and maximally pursue these cases wherever the law and the evidence allow.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Denaturalization sounds like a tool for war criminals and spies.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: For decades, they were the main targets.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Its ten categories now include financial fraud against the United States, with tax violations named outright.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: One catch-all category covers any other case it deems important.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Nearly 25 million naturalized citizens live in the United States, about 7% of the population.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: By the Internal Revenue Services estimate, underreported tax costs about$500 billion a year, much of it from forgotten cash income and misunderstood deductions.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: A naturalized citizen who made such an error before naturalizing and failed to disclose it could now face a case.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: At the naturalization interview, every applicant answers whether they have ever committed a crime, charged or not.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Even the process tilts against the defendant.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: These are civil cases, so the government needs clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence, a lower bar than beyond reasonable doubt.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Defendants get no appointed lawyer and no jury, and no statute of limitations applies.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Vanessa Benn shows how this works in practice.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: She is a Houston accountant who filed a false tax return, underreported her income, and received a refund of$7,712.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: After pleading guilty, she served 12 months in prison and paid the fines.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Prosecutors then moved to strip her citizenship.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: They argue she concealed the offense during her 2017 and 2018 naturalization interviews.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: America has done this at scale before.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Between 1907 and 1967, it stripped 22,000 people of citizenship, with the peak in the McCarthy era.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then the Supreme Court stepped in, and cases fell to single digits a year for decades.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Cases more than doubled to 90 in 2018, according to Bloomberg Law.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: In 1967, the Supreme Court had warned against creating two levels of citizenship, one for the native-born and one for the naturalized.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: A native-born American who commits tax fraud faces fines, penalties, and even prison.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Naturalized Americans face all of that and can also lose the citizenship itself for conduct from before they became American.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Door number two has one more lock, and it reaches everyone with two passports.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Reuters reported in May 2026 that the IRS was considering a new checkbox on Form 1040, the main federal tax return.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: One draft reads: Check this box if you are a non-U.S.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: citizen or have dual citizenship.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: No formal rule or timeline has been announced.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: If adopted, it would be the first time the form has separated citizens from non-citizens.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: About 5 million Americans have citizenship in at least one other country.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: For them, the box would create a record, signed under penalty of perjury, that ties their tax filing to a second nationality.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: America taxes its citizens on worldwide income wherever they live, a policy it shares only with Eritrea.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Some Americans are leaving on their own terms.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: The Treasury's latest list names 1,781 people who gave up their citizenship in the second quarter of 2026.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: At this pace, 2026 would close at about 6,500 names, second only to the 2020 record of 6,707.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: David Lesperance of Lesperance and Associates says the number leaving is multiples higher.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: That list names only a narrower group, such as people with a net worth above$2 million.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Heidi Finn of Latitude Group meets most clients at the start of that row.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Few want to leave, she says.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Most want to make sure America is not my only option.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Put the two doors next to each other.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: In Germany, the danger is a rule that can change before your file is decided.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: America's danger is a past with no statute of limitations.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: So timing decides which German rules you face.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: For a US applicant, what you disclose at the interview can be tested years later.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, get a specialist.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: IMI Professionals lets you filter by tax and wealth planning or international law.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: At imidal.com slash IMI Professionals.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Germany and the United States showed two ways citizenship can end.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Some countries end it for a simpler reason you were away too long.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: In the video on your screen, we cover the 22 nations where a long absence alone can end your citizenship.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Subscribe and turn on notifications so the next rule change reaches you first.