Free College Hack - Italian or Hungarian Ancestry

[nykorn]

Plenty of schools in Europe have completely free tuition, including entirely online degrees, as well as have much lower student loan rates (mine from Sweden 0.5% to 1.25%) than American student loans. But a lot of these are only free for people who have European citizenship or residency and who are not on a student visa.

There are two countries that I know of where you can get citizenship by ancestry even if it is great-great grandparents or similar. Italy and Hungary. There may be more.

The key is proving your lineage (and yes, you should be able to do it if you were adopted, I assume as long as the relevant parent is on your amended birth certificate, which you can do nowadays in the US at least). 

- Get certified copies of birth, death, marriage, name change, divorce, and naturalization records for as many of your ancestors along the direct lineage as you can. These can cost up to $65 per document depending on which state you live in. Estimate to pay $200 for each generation you need (if your parents emigrated from Italy then $200, if your great-grandparents then $600...).

- Get apostilles for each of these required documents. If they originated in the US, it needs a state apostille, if in Italy or Hungary, one of their apostilles. As an example, New York state only charges $10 per document for an apostille.

- These documents may then need to get a certified translation to Italian or Hungarian. For Italy, if you're applying at an Italian consulate in the US which is not Boston or New York - and you need to be applying to the consulate nearest to where you live, not to the one where your ancestors lived - they might not require a certified translation, in that case you could even just translate them yourself. Then you would go to a physical appointment at the consulate with an interview. If you are using a service, this can cost $60 per page or it can be included as part of their citizenship help package.

- You will need to pay the actual citizenship application fee, usually in person at the consulate, which is at least until recently was 300 Euros for Italy. At some consulates, this 300 Euro fee includes translation costs so your translations are "free".

- Some states don't have real Italian consulates, so those people need to travel to another state to apply for citizenship. A video I watched said that at the time the video was made, Washington and Oregon residents would have to travel to San Francisco.

It is easiest to do this via great-grandparents and younger generations. If it was your great-great grandparents it's not impossible, but it might be worth it to ask if getting your parent or grandparent citizenship first somehow helps out your case in any way.

There are services that can help you with all of this. All in all it may cost $3,000 or more to get the citizenship. But that is a cheap price to pay for free college education, hassle-free boarder crossing and visa-free residency in pretty much anywhere in Europe, plus a backup residence if a war breaks out (although Europe might not be the best choice for that!). And it is not a scam, I have family friends in the US who did it via their great-grandparents.

After that you would want to apply for an Italian or Hungarian passport.

Also, not that I explicitly advocate this, but it might be a way to start over with a "new life" if you have a criminal past, as your criminal record is not going to transfer over to the new country. This would enable you to use your degrees for some jobs that you currently can't hold (as an example, I know someone barred from being a teacher or handling cash in the US, because they got arrested for drug use crimes, although they are no longer using drugs). Not sure if the citizenship application checks for your criminal background or not.

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I will be trying this with my own family with Italian ancestry and will get back to you, very eventually, on how much it cost and how it went. It will take me quite a while to gather up all the relative names, documents and then get up the money and apply. I'm hoping I can somehow reuse the same documents for multiple applications and then get citizenship for a bunch of my relatives as a big Christmas present.

[sarahmac]

Plenty of schools in Europe have completely free tuition, including entirely online degrees, as well as have much lower student loan rates (mine from Sweden 0.5% to 1.25%) than American student loans. But a lot of these are only free for people who have European citizenship or residency and who are not on a student visa.

There are two countries that I know of where you can get citizenship by ancestry even if it is great-great grandparents or similar. Italy and Hungary. There may be more.

The key is proving your lineage (and yes, you should be able to do it if you were adopted, I assume as long as the relevant parent is on your amended birth certificate, which you can do nowadays in the US at least). 

- Get certified copies of birth, death, marriage, name change, divorce, and naturalization records for as many of your ancestors along the direct lineage as you can. These can cost up to $65 per document depending on which state you live in. Estimate to pay $200 for each generation you need (if your parents emigrated from Italy then $200, if your great-grandparents then $600...).

- Get apostilles for each of these required documents. If they originated in the US, it needs a state apostille, if in Italy or Hungary, one of their apostilles. As an example, New York state only charges $10 per document for an apostille.

- These documents may then need to get a certified translation to Italian or Hungarian. For Italy, if you're applying at an Italian consulate in the US which is not Boston or New York - and you need to be applying to the consulate nearest to where you live, not to the one where your ancestors lived - they might not require a certified translation, in that case you could even just translate them yourself. Then you would go to a physical appointment at the consulate with an interview. If you are using a service, this can cost $60 per page or it can be included as part of their citizenship help package.

- You will need to pay the actual citizenship application fee, usually in person at the consulate, which is at least until recently was 300 Euros for Italy. At some consulates, this 300 Euro fee includes translation costs so your translations are "free".

- Some states don't have real Italian consulates, so those people need to travel to another state to apply for citizenship. A video I watched said that at the time the video was made, Washington and Oregon residents would have to travel to San Francisco.

It is easiest to do this via great-grandparents and younger generations. If it was your great-great grandparents it's not impossible, but it might be worth it to ask if getting your parent or grandparent citizenship first somehow helps out your case in any way.

There are services that can help you with all of this. All in all it may cost $3,000 or more to get the citizenship. But that is a cheap price to pay for free college education, hassle-free boarder crossing and visa-free residency in pretty much anywhere in Europe, plus a backup residence if a war breaks out (although Europe might not be the best choice for that!). And it is not a scam, I have family friends in the US who did it via their great-grandparents.

After that you would want to apply for an Italian or Hungarian passport.

Also, not that I explicitly advocate this, but it might be a way to start over with a "new life" if you have a criminal past, as your criminal record is not going to transfer over to the new country. This would enable you to use your degrees for some jobs that you currently can't hold (as an example, I know someone barred from being a teacher or handling cash in the US, because they got arrested for drug use crimes, although they are no longer using drugs). Not sure if the citizenship application checks for your criminal background or not.

------------

I will be trying this with my own family with Italian ancestry and will get back to you, very eventually, on how much it cost and how it went. It will take me quite a while to gather up all the relative names, documents and then get up the money and apply. I'm hoping I can somehow reuse the same documents for multiple applications and then get citizenship for a bunch of my relatives as a big Christmas present.

Just a small comment on this one part "your criminal record is not going to transfer over to the new country" - yes, it does. When you do a background check for certain jobs, they ask for police checks from all countries you have lived in. This is true throughout the EU because we have EUROPOL. For American citizens who want to be teachers here, they have to do some weird FBI check if they ever lived in the US. There is no easy escape like that.

That said, everything else you wrote is true. I have Irish citizenship based on my grandparents, my coworker has Italian based on her great grandparents.

Some countries have "citizenship loss" rules though, like Poland. Generally the grandparent or great grandparent is fine, unless someone in the chain of descent did something to lose the citizenship -- like joined the US military. Then the chain is broken.

[ss20ts]

This seems like an awful lot of work to try to avoid working on a degree. By the time you pay all those fees, you could have paid for a term at UMPI and Sophia and have an RA bachelor's degree and you'd have money left over.

[asthewindblows]

It's not exactly "free"; it gets paid from somewhere.

[sarahmac]

It's not exactly "free"; it gets paid from somewhere.

Education that is free at the point of consumption is part of the soft diplomacy strategy of a lot of European countries. The government covers the cost in Germany, for example, not only for EU citizens but also non-EU, as part of goodwill creation toward the country.

It is one of the reasons they don't care if international students stay after graduating to work (and thus pay taxes). That isn't the point -- the point is cultural diffusion beyond Germany's borders. From the BMBF's perspective, it is a good thing when people move back to their own country but maintain and create network links with German firms. It is why a lot of the English language programs are in things like business, management, comp sci, AI, especially at the masters level. And why many programs also require you to reach at least A2 in German even if the degree is taught in English.

The thinking behind it is that it costs less than other forms of "international marketing" the country could be doing, especially given the soft diplomacy style of the US (typically cultural - every kid knows Mickey Mouse) isn't realistic in the German context. Of course, it only works because most HE institutes in Europe, and especially in Germany, are public not private. So the government can be a little strategic.

Other EU countries have taken a similar approach. So is it free? No, in the end the government is paying for it with tax money. But it's currently seen as a good ROI compared to other ways countries could be marketing themselves. When it ceases to have a good ROI, I think they'll be pretty quick to stop it (this already started in part in some countries, with changes in recent years limiting to EU citizens only).

[bjcheung77]

Yes, it's like Citizenship by Ancestry... It's a good opportunity to get this if it's an option for you, but the majority of people on this board wouldn't qualify. In any case, make sure to do your research before treading in these waters, I still recommend if you're in the US, stick with US, and if you're in the UK, stick with top-up options, unless you're really looking at something different...

[midnite123]

It's not exactly "free"; it gets paid from somewhere.

That is true,
but not by the U.S. student

[SophiaPrincess]

European citizenship by descent is fantastic. Free college tuition is the least significant benefit. Most countries only extend citizenship to the children of citizens. Italy takes years to approve citizenship by descent applications. It is faster to move to Italy, apply for their simple residency program and wait 5 years to apply for Citizenship. Ireland has the best program IF you and your parents were registered on the foreign birth registry.

[naet]

I'm curious if anyone knows of a good online school you might qualify for with EU citizenship? Looking for some kind of CS or Software Engineering degree specifically. I am in the US but I'm about to receive my Italian passport/citizenship. I am not fluent enough in Italian to take non english classes.

The process of gaining Italian citizenship via ancestry is a really long process and not that easy at all, also it's sorta expensive. Among other things we had to pay for a local to go to some random ass church in Italy to research some old birth/marriage records that are required to prove the lineage and file paperwork. The Italian bureaucracy is really difficult to navigate and slow to do anything. One of my siblings started the process a long time ago so they can eventually relocate to Italy, and since they are doing all the leg work I'm paying the fees to have mine processed as well.

I don't think it would be worth going for it for the "free college" alone. Even just the time it takes is a pretty large downside, not to mention the cost, the difficulty, etc. But there might be other benefits to EU citizenship that make it more worth it to you.