Repatriation - citizenship by ancestry without investment

Repatriation means obtaining citizenship by descent: you prove that your ancestors were citizens of a country and receive its passport without any investment. The state in effect returns citizenship to the descendants of those who were once part of it. Money plays no role — everything turns on documents proving your descent.

This is how the programmes of Israel, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Ireland and other countries work. The depth of the “roots” varies: in some places a grandparent is enough, in others more distant ancestors are recognised. Hungarian citizenship, for example, is available to descendants of residents of historical territories, including Transcarpathia. The main difficulty is gathering and legalising the archive documents that prove the chain of kinship.

The advantage of repatriation is that citizenship costs nothing or next to nothing, and the result is the same full passport, often an EU one straight away. The drawback is time: the process usually takes 6 to 24 months, and much depends on how well the archives have survived and on a correctly built family tree.