The Value of Your Ancestors : Gaining ‘Back-Door’ Access to the European Union through Birthright Citizenship

The amalgamation of three factors — acceptance of dual citizenship; the development of a transnational Europe; and national citizenship laws based on ancestry, heritage, and restitution — has created a new class of individuals in Europe: birthright citizens who lack a genuine link or affinity to the country of their acquired nationality. This Note highlights this new class of individuals, which claims citizenship based not on traditional concepts of "ethnic return migration," but rather as a means to access the economic perquisites of the EU; they seek not access to their motherland, but to the Union as a whole. This Note ultimately suggests limitations on some of these new forms of citizenship and emphasizes the recent nature of this phenomenon, calling for further research by the EU to better understand the population transfers and economic effects that these new citizenship rules have brought upon the Union