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6 Citizenship Levers for Your Kids Before They’re 18 · IMI Podcasts

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Your baby can be a citizen of three countries before it can walk.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Almost nothing about that is luck.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: And almost all of it has an expiry date, because most levers that decide a child's citizenship close on the child's 18th birthday.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: There are six of them.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: We're counting down from the one that costs you nothing to the one you get exactly one chance to pull.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Miss that one, and no amount of money buys it back.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the cheapest lever on the list.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Language is the thing that stops adult applications cold.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Portugal now asks naturalization candidates to pass an A2 Portuguese exam and a civics test.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And its descent routes for grandchildren and great-grandchildren hinge on language plus a demonstrated connection to the community.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: For a 45-year-old applicant, that is a significant asterisk.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: For a seven-year-old who hears the language at home or at school, it is a mere formality, she clears, without ever knowing she was being tested.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: The same logic applies to where a child is educated.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Years inside a country's school system build the kind of documented, lived connection that immigration authorities increasingly want to see, and in several systems, that time counts towards a naturalization or descent claim.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: It also changes what citizenship is worth later.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: A child who already has nationality in an EU member state can study there as a domestic student with local tuition, student finance, and the right to work, which are the three things foreign students pay dearly to go without.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, this is the kind of planning our entrepreneur and investor members are discussing every day.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: IMI Sovereigns is a private community of global citizens and investors, and inside it you get the citizenship catalogue, which maps every path to citizenship across 195 countries.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is where people build passport portfolios for their families.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Link and a discount are in the description.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Language and school only work if the family is on the ground somewhere, which brings us to Lever 5.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Residency is time which cannot be backdated.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: A child who lives in a country accumulates physical presence, a school record, friendships, and in many systems, years that count toward naturalization.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: An adult arriving at 40 cannot buy any of that.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Portugal shows how sharp the edges have become, and its revised nationality law, in for since May 2026, a child born there to foreign parents is a citizen at birth only if at least one parent has completed five years of legal residence, up from one year under the old rule.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: That single threshold can split a family down the middle.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: The older sibling, born before the parent crosses the five-year mark, takes the parent's nationality and has to naturalize later.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: The younger one, born after, is Portuguese from birth.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing separates them except the date on a residence permit.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Portugal also doubled its naturalization requirement to ten years for most applicants, seven for citizens of EU and Portuguese-speaking countries, and it now counts the clock only from the day the residence permit is issued.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: So the practical instruction is blunt.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Start the clock while the children are small, because a family that arrives late gives its children the shortest possible runway to a crew presence.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And in some countries, to be swept into a parent's naturalization automatically.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, before you move a single family member anywhere, look at what you already own.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Lever 4.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Every citizenship you currently have is a potential inheritance.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Most countries pass nationality from parent to child automatically, which means a child born to a dual national can start life with multiple passports, and nobody has to apply for anything but a passport.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Plenty of parents underuse this.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you are entitled to a second citizenship through your own parents or grandparents and have never bothered to claim it, you are sitting on an asset your child inherits the moment you formalize it.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: But sequencing is critical here.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: In several countries, whether your child qualifies depends on your status at the time of the child's birth.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So claiming citizenship before a baby arrives, rather than after, can decide what the baby receives.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Once the child is a citizen by descent, register the birth with the consulate or civil registry promptly, leaving that paperwork for later is how a claim turns into a decade-long documents hunt, long after the relatives who could attest to any of it are gone.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Which raises the obvious question.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: How far back can you reach?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Lever three.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Several countries in the European Union and the wider single market extend citizenship to the grandchildren and, in some cases, the great-grandchildren of their nationals.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: A child who qualifies through a grandparent can hold an EU citizenship without the parents ever relocating, for little more than the cost of assembling documents.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's the highest value paperwork in this entire field.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Italy was the most generous dissent regime in the world until it capped just sanguinis, the right of blood, in 2025.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Its constitutional court upheld that cap in 2026, ending the principle that Italian citizenship could pass down an unlimited chain of generations.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: But the fight is not over.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Italy's Court of Cassation heard arguments in April 2026 over whether an ancestor who naturalized elsewhere when their child was still a minor severed the bloodline for everyone who came after.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: That ruling is still pending as of this video, but it will govern tens of thousands of citizenship claims.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Italy also put a clock directly on childhood.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Under its genuine link law, an Italian parent can pass citizenship to a minor child by declaration, but only inside fixed windows.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Three years from birth for a child born after the 24th of May 2025, and for a child who was already a minor when the law took effect, a transitional deadline now extended to May 31, 2029.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Canada, on the other hand, moved the other way.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Bill C three removed the first generation limit in December 2025.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: But for a child born abroad after December 15, 2025, a Canadian parent who was also born abroad must show at least 1,095 days of physical presence in Canada before that birth, three years on the ground before the baby arrives.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: The documentation bar is rising too.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: In June 2026, Canada ordered some recent citizenship recipients to surrender certificates built on unofficial genealogy records rather than certified originals, then reversed course within days and sent revalidation letters telling most of them to keep the documents.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: The lasting change is a higher evidence standard, but it tells you where this is heading.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Relatives age, archives crawl, governments keep rewriting the rules, and a claim that is straightforward for a young child today can be worthless by the time that same person chases it alone at 30.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Ancestry gives you what your family tree happens to contain.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: The next lever 2 gives you what it does not.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Citizenship by investment or CBI and residence by investment, or RBI, are the only routes on this list built for families from the start.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Dependent children can be included in most applications, usually for a fraction of what a standalone acquisition would cost.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Granada makes the economics simple.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Under its 2013 Citizenship by Investment Act, a non-refundable donation of$235,000 to the National Transformation Fund covers a family of up to four before government and due diligence fees, with roughly$25,000 for each additional child beyond that.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: European Golden Visas work on the same principle, allowing a main applicant to add a spouse and children to a single file, and a child added young can spend her formative years as a resident.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Including your child now secures your child's citizenship.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: It does not guarantee the passport cascades to your grandchildren, since transmission depends on that country's descent rules, and some of them restrict what citizens born abroad or naturalized by investment can pass on.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that brings us to the only lever on this list that can be pulled exactly once in a single day and never again.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Where a child is born can confer citizenship on its own, just soli.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: The right of soil means a child born in a qualifying country becomes a citizen at birth, whatever passports the parents carry.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Around 33 countries still apply birthright citizenship unconditionally, and nearly all of them are in the Americas, from Canada and the United States down through Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: That map used to be much bigger.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: The United Kingdom ended unconditional birthright citizenship in 1983.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Australia closed its version in 1986.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Ireland scrapped its own by referendum in the mid-2000s, which leaves the Western Hemisphere as the last bastion where a child's citizenship depends on a map rather than a family tree.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: The United States is still firmly inside that group.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: In June 2026, the Supreme Court struck down an executive order that would have ended birthright citizenship for children of temporary and unlawful residence, holding that virtually anyone born on US soil is a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: The legal basis for birth tourism came through untouched, but the political pressure on it has not gone anywhere.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, again, treat this as a window rather than a fixture.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: On a separate note, several Latin American countries hand the parents' benefits too.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: In Brazil, a child born in the country is Brazilian at birth, and the parents can apply for permanent residency immediately and naturalize after one year.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: So let's glance back at all six levers.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: One, audit what citizenships your family already has, then trace both family trees for latent claims through parents and grandparents, since those cost simple fees and paperwork.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Claim the ancestral citizenships while they are still claimable because that door is closing fast.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: 2.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Use the timing levers next, whether that means a birth in a Jusoli country or an early start on a residence clock.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Layer schooling and language so the genuine connection tests become mere formalities.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: 3.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then use investment to buy the geography your bloodline didn't leave you.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Handled early, this turns a child's citizenship from an accident of birth into a portfolio he or she can use.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a child who grows up holding four citizenships also grows up holding four legal identities with four sets of documents, four spellings of her name, and four governments who each think they know who she is.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: That gets complicated fast, and it s raises a question a lot of parents ask us in private.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is any of that even legal?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: We answered it in the video on your screen now, where we cover four passports, four names, and one person.
• 11:59
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