This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jacqueline Matwick, 38, who moved from Arizona to Turin, Italy, with her family in 2024. Matwick was anticipating receiving citizenship by descent through her husband, but the Italian government changed the requirements after they moved, and the Matwicks no longer qualified. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
We were in New York for a long time. I was there eight years, my husband was there seven, and our oldest child was born there.
We were new parents in New York City, and childcare was insane — it’s expensive everywhere, but in New York City, it’s insanely expensive, and housing’s really expensive. So you end up with almost a second rent payment just for childcare in New York. It was really hard to make that work.
We thought, “Where can we make our lives work as parents in a way that feels comfortable for us?”
We decided to move in with my in-laws in Arizona in 2020, when our daughter was a year and a half old. We thought maybe the Phoenix suburbs would offer us more affordability — we were thinking we were going to stay in Phoenix and buy a house, but the housing prices had shot up. So we were facing these same financial struggles in New York and in Arizona. It just felt like the math wasn’t really working anywhere.
That was the pivotal moment that sent me looking abroad.
We were living with my in-laws — it’s my husband’s family who has Italian ancestry — and my father-in-law had talked about the fact that moving to Italy and becoming a citizen was an option, so I started digging into it.
At the time, a lot of these digital nomad visas didn’t exist. Spain didn’t actually have a digital nomad visa at the time, nor did Italy. Neither of us were remote workers, either, so that wasn’t something that we were really thinking about.
At the time, citizenship was the way for us to expand our horizons and look beyond the US.
Starting the citizenship process took us years, and we moved to Italy to finish it there
It can take a long time to do the paperwork depending on your family line and how many generations back your Italian ancestry is. If you have inconsistencies in names or dates, you have to go and get documents corrected, and that can be a really tedious process.
It took us a year and a half from when we started looking at the paperwork in 2022 to getting everything corrected, lined up, and stamped in February of 2024.
If you have your paperwork meeting Italy’s standards, you can apply at a consulate in the US, which takes a very long time. Or you can move to Italy and apply. So we moved to Italy in August 2024.
They created this permit that allows you to move to Italy and apply at your town, because everything in Italy is processed locally — even permitting is processed at the town level. So you can move here, establish residency, and then submit your paperwork here. It gets you citizenship faster, and it allowed us to move here faster.
If we had done it in the States, it would have taken us years, and it would have meant that our daughter was in second or third grade when we uprooted her, rather than letting her start kindergarten here. It was easier for her to learn the language when she was younger, and it made more sense for us to do it faster for our kids.
We were expecting to get approved for citizenship within about six to eight months, and at that point, my husband and kids would have citizenship — I could apply for a permit as the spouse, and then we would live here as citizens. I would have the option to get citizenship, too, with a language exam and all these other things, but we’d be able to legally work here and basically live here as citizens.
That was the expectation. What ended up happening was they changed the citizenship law before we were approved.
I don’t think the government thought about what it would do to people who were caught in the middle.
We no longer qualify for Italian citizenship, but we’re still hopeful
There were two law changes. One happened in April of 2025, but that’s not the one that affected us. The one that affected us happened in October of 2024; it has to do with naturalization.
Basically, before, you could think of citizenship like lighting a candle.
When my husband’s great-grandfather had his daughter, he was an Italian citizen. He lit her candle, so she was a citizen. Later, he became an American citizen, and he stopped being Italian. But once his daughter was Italian, she was good, and nothing he did would affect her, so she could pass that citizenship to her son, and her son could pass it to his son.
Italy changed it in October 2024 and said that whatever an adult did affected any children who were still minors. We wouldn’t have moved here if that had initially been the case, because we wouldn’t have been eligible.
They just changed their interpretation of the law very suddenly, and they didn’t grandfather anybody in, even though we were already here and in the process.
We periodically contacted a lawyer for advice, and at that point, the lawyer suggested that there wasn’t a lot of clarity over how people in the middle would be handled. They told us, “Just keep going and see what happens,” so we did.
Our town told us we were the first people who had come in with the problem of arriving before officially gaining citizenship and then no longer qualifying.
The agent gave us a lot of false hope. He was like, “I think you guys are going to be fine because you were already here.” We were pretty hopeful until we got a letter in January 2025 saying that we were rejected.
We came up with a plan to file a case in court. Even though the law changed, once you have a case, you can get a permit.
The law is still highly contentious. So it’s not a slam dunk, but it was enough of a possibility for us to file the citizenship case even though we don’t qualify under these current rules. The case is scheduled for January 2027.
We’re still in Italy, but we’re torn on what to do next
It’s not clear what will feel the best for us moving forward. We’re still in that same mode we were in in 2019, just trying to figure out where we want to raise our family.
We’d like to go back to the US — we miss everybody, but we’re a little uneasy about it for all the reasons that brought us here in the first place. We’re still thinking about Italy or maybe Spain. Spain isn’t too far; we could drive a U-Haul from here if we had to. But that’s a conversation we’re having.
What feels the best? What’s going to give us the lifestyle that we want and give us safety and give us security, and not have us on a work hamster wheel where we feel like we’re never getting to relax and have time for our family?
We’re trying to make it work like everybody else.
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