Citizenship Restitution as (Disguised) Selective Immigration Policy
Reinhard Schweitzer (Universitat Abat Oliba CEU) and Tina Magazzini (Universidad de Valladolid and Czech Academy of Sciences)
The central question posed by David Owen and Rainer Bauböck in the kickoff for this forum is whether citizenship is an appropriate form of reparation for historical injustice, and whether it should be offered not only to the victims themselves but also their descendants. The very varied and nuanced responses that their piece has triggered so far suggest that it is difficult to answer this question with a simple yes or no. In our contribution to this debate, we want to take a step back and ask whether the states that are framing citizenship offers in terms of reparation might instead – or in addition – be trying to attract desirable immigrants.
A certain suspicion of selectivity and potential discrimination underlying such schemes has already been alluded to by several other contributors to this debate (including Ashley Mantha-Hollands regarding ‘Lost Canadians’, and Timothy Jacob-Owens with respect to Hong-Kongers) and we believe it deserves more scrutiny. What are the underlying motives that make certain states change their legislation in ways that include or expand provisions of reparative citizenship that go beyond the generation directly deprived of it? Based on preliminary insights from the CITREST Project – which looks at the Austrian and Spanish cases – we argue that one such motive can be for these citizenship provisions to (also) work as selective immigration policy, in the sense that they privilege certain groups that represent either an earlier ethnic composition of the nation or a minority that had been persecuted in the past but has come to be seen as a desirable demographic to attract.
As mentioned by Owen and Bauböck, a law that came into force in September 2020 reformed the Austrian Citizenship Act to entitle all descendants of victims of National Socialism in Austria to acquire citizenship without having to comply with the otherwise very restrictive naturalisation requirements. The overall number of people acquiring Austrian citizenship every year has since then almost doubled, with this reform being the basis for around 40 per cent of these acquisitions. The new provision has been estimated to potentially benefit more than half a million people and, by the end of 2024, almost 33,000 citizenships had already been granted on this basis (according to official statistics). A very similar step has been taken by the Spanish government in 2022 with the so-called ‘Democratic Memory Law’ (Ley de Memoria Democrática) that offers – among other reparatory measures – privileged citizenship access to the offspring of Spaniards exiled during the Spanish civil war and subsequent dictatorship under General Franco. By the end of February 2025, close to 700,000 applications had been received and more than 200,000 new citizens have already been inscribed in the Civil Register.
Questioning states’ genuine motive rather than applicants’ genuine links
Mantha-Hollands already expressed some scepticism about granting citizenship as a response to past injustices, pointing at the differential, racialised categories of those who have benefited (or conversely have been left out) from such policies. Jacob-Owens, highlighting a different, yet related reason for doubting governments’ noble purposes, has also voiced some concern regarding the ways in which these pathways to citizenship translate into practice, showing how they might lend themselves to prioritising economic considerations over corrective justice.
What emerges from an overview of the various reparative citizenship initiatives mentioned in this debate is that while it is often precisely racialised, economically disadvantaged and/or otherwise minoritised groups that have been disproportionately the victims of historical injustices, these same communities seem to be underrepresented among the new citizens made through ‘reparative’ citizenship legislation. For instance, as noted by Owen and Bauböck, as well as by Lior Erez, the exclusion of the descendants of the Moriscos from the 2015 Spanish reparation law is hardly justifiable on reparative grounds, given that they were expelled during the same period and on the same grounds as the Sephardic Jews.
With this in mind, we argue that in addition to investigating the complex reasons why individuals apply for such schemes and questioning the importance of their having (or not) ‘genuine links’ with the country that offers them citizenship, it is also worthwhile unpacking why some governments decide to offer citizenship restitution in the first place; why (only) to specific groups; why in particular historical moments, and, as in the Spanish case, only within a specific time frame?
Addressing this very question in relation to the 2015 Spanish law offering citizenship to the descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled at the end of the 15th century, Alfons Aragoneses argues that the government’s underlying motive was “the desire to improve the country’s reputation”. He thus interprets this law as primarily a “nation-branding” exercise, an argument that is also reflected in Peter Spiro’s suggestion that a motive for Austria was that it “would have looked bad if it hadn’t fallen in line” with other European States repairing Holocaust-era denationalisations. While this might well also have played a role in the case of the Spanish Democratic Memory Law of 2022 (as well as the previous Historical Memory Law of 2007 – both of which have served a left-wing government to show the world that Spain is finally coming to terms with its authoritarian past), we argue that the main motive here might be a different one.
In both the Austrian and Spanish cases, the citizenship offer is officially framed as nothing but “a measure of reparation” (as the preamble of the Democratic Memory Law explicitly states – in contrast to that of the 2015 law discussed by Aragoneses). And at least for now, the political discourse and public debates around the enactment and implementation of the two laws have been consistent with this narrative. But there is also the fact that the reforms come at a time when both countries, as well as the EU as a whole, are facing an urgent need for (much) more immigration: As Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez put it – rather bluntly – in October 2024: “Spain has to choose between being an open and prosperous country, or a closed and poor country”. What he hints at is that his own as well as many other governments must also grapple with a public opinion and political landscape that are increasingly hostile towards immigrants, and especially those that are perceived as culturally or ethnically different from the majority population.
Seen in this context, ancestral citizenship offered as a form of restitution might be exactly what the EU and its Member States are looking for: a policy that attracts and facilitates both the migration and subsequent integration of a significant number of people whom the same policy automatically preselects on the basis of an earlier ethnic composition that is largely in line with what Hans Kundnani describes as Eurowhiteness (thereby avoiding the backlash based on fears of migration-related diversity) and whom the responsible government will not even have to count as immigrants, because it will already have granted them citizenship. In this sense, the policy has the potential of offering an immigration pathway that is not presented or recognised as such.
Especially in countries that have comparatively restrictive citizenship regimes (Austria received one of the lowest MIPEX scores in the category ‘access to nationality’) and in which access to citizenship is traditionally linked to strict linguistic and integration requirements (Spain is the only EU country to include obligatory knowledge of Spanish for all citizens in its constitution), offering fast-track citizenship to people living elsewhere could be expected to cause significant controversy. That this has – at least so far – not been the case can at least partly be explained by the implicit selectivity of these policies, which – in the Austrian and Spanish cases, as elsewhere – essentially aim to repair the very logic of ius sanguinis. The built-in selectivity and often discriminatory effects of reparatory citizenship have been highlighted by Owen and Bauböck themselves as well as several other contributors to this debate. But it is not the only problematic aspect of these citizenship offers.
What (else) can be problematic about reparative citizenship for descendants?
Owen and Bauböck rightly note that the “hypothetical transmission chain that [always underlies such policies but] might also have been interrupted by voluntary renunciation or a lack of interest among earlier generations in claiming an ancestor’s citizenship.” This seems particularly relevant when the citizenship in question means membership of the very state that was responsible for the historical injustice that is now to be repaired (as also mentioned by Spiro and Erez). What if the parent or grandparent precisely did not want (their children) to be or become citizens of the state that had forced them into exile? Arguably, reforms like the ones currently implemented in Austria and Spain would then go entirely against the will and decision of the victims whose suffering they are supposed to make up for. This point can be linked to Jocelyn Kane and Patti Lenard’s contribution on the role of citizenship refusal, as well as to the ‘tort law approach’ that Owen and Bauböck mention, and that regards citizenship as “a purely private good, analogous to a real estate property or an art object, that ought to be restored to the rightful owner or their heirs”. But what if the owner of this good had willingly given it away, instead of making it part of their inheritance? Quite clearly, the heirs would then have no legal (or moral) claim to it.
During a recent conversation with someone who acquired Austrian citizenship through the 2020 law, the beneficiary – a university professor in his early 70s – mentioned that his late father – who had fled the Nazi-regime in Austria – would probably have rejected the offer to regain Austrian citizenship – an offer that for the father himself came too late, anyway. While in this case it is also too late to ask the father whether he is nonetheless happy for his son to now be Austrian and thus able to travel hassle-free to Europe (he most probably would be), it could be argued that if the father did not want his own Austrian citizenship back, it makes little reparative sense to grant it to his son, or anyone further down the same generational line. The problem with this argument is, of course, that citizenship is not simply a private good (as pointed out by Kane and Lenard, as well as Erez) and that it risks pitting the claims of different generations against each other and thereby ultimately undermining them.
More useful – also as an aid for distinguishing whether reparative citizenship is indeed ‘genuine’ and can be conceptualised as a remedy to past harm – is Owen and Bauböck’s proposition to exclude from this conceptualisation any “policies that allow for extraterritorial citizenship acquisition based purely on an ancestor’s possession of citizenship if they are not intended to repair historic injustices but merely aim to reconnect a broken chain of citizenship transmissions among emigrants.” A closer look at how the Spanish Democratic Memory Law is being translated into practice suggests that precisely this is the case here: Whereas the preamble of the 2022 law very explicitly refers to the citizenship clause as “a measure of reparation for persons who suffered exile” and that therefore “establishes a rule for the acquisition of Spanish nationality for persons born outside Spain to fathers or mothers, grandmothers or grandfathers, exiled for political, ideological or religious reasons”, the ministerial instruction on how this rule is to be implemented on the ground effectively removed the requirement of exile by adding an additional supposition according to which any “person born outside of Spain to a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother who had originally been Spanish [citizens] may exercise the [right of] option foreseen in this paragraph” (BOE 257, p.145806). In many Spanish consulates, including that in Buenos Aires (where most applications are being received), this instruction is interpreted as allowing applicants to apply without providing any proof of their ancestor having had to leave Spain because of persecution.
Importantly, this small but significant re-interpretation of the law itself in fact extends the scope of this provision beyond the initial idea of restitution and thereby indeed raises the question of whether the intention behind this citizenship offer was really the wish to repair a historical injustice, or rather to simply extend access to citizenship to all descendants of the many people who emigrated from Spain during the post-civil war period.
Conclusions: Tailor reparative citizenship more narrowly to historical injustices
In line with other contributors to this debate – such as Spiro who writes that the issue of citizenship as reparation “is more about the state extending it, than about the individual receiving it” – we believe that the motivations of the states granting citizenship are at least as important as those of the individuals applying for it, which is why we focused on the former.
By looking at the cases of Austria and Spain, we argue that while the recent changes in reparative citizenship legislation are likely the result of various factors, including a certain element of ‘nation-branding’, particularly in the Spanish case the implementation of the law lends itself to being interpreted as an attempt at selectively attracting a specific demographic group of (potential) immigrants – those with ancestral ties to former Spanish emigrants. Even if this is the case, we are not arguing against the granting of citizenship as a form of reparation. We rather suggest that since reparative citizenship cannot, and should not, be thought of as a measure that operates in a vacuum, the reparative element should remain at the centre of the scope and aims of these policies, in order for them to be more than just “another birthright lottery”, as Spiro very fittingly calls them.
In practice, if states are serious about the reparative element of such a policy, then they should do the hard work of tailoring it to the various injustices – such as acknowledging that many Roma and Sinti lacked official documentation before Nazi rule in Austria/Germany – to make sure that the remedy does not inadvertently amplify existing blind spots and injustices. One way of guaranteeing that corrective justice remains at the core of citizenship as reparation could be, as suggested by Jacob-Owens, to ensure that it happens in response to claims made by groups directly affected, and not in a (however well-intentioned) top-down and time-limited fashion.
The risk, otherwise, is that reparative citizenship offers, as they are currently set in Austria and Spain, indeed are little more than an extension of the birthright lottery, and one that allows states to pre-select potential immigrants that either represent an earlier ethnic composition of the nation (in the case of the Spanish Memory Laws) or an ethnic minority that had been persecuted in the past but has come to be seen as a welcome part of the current population (Jews under the Austrian Law and the Sephardic laws in Spain and Portugal). Arguably, today’s reparative citizenship schemes will have a very similar effect to the ‘patriality’ requirement that was built into the British citizenship regime (as explained in Jacob-Owens’ response) and that had the effect of affording full citizenship to applicants who were almost exclusively white.