Surge in Luxembourg citizenship enquiries following Trump win

Dual citizens

Surge in Luxembourg citizenship enquiries following Trump win

Daniel Atz, CEO of LuxCitizenship, expects more applications from Americans will flood in over next 21 days

Daniel Atz, second from right, at a Luxembourg dual citizen meet up in Minnesota in October. His consultancy has dealt with 850 enquires so far this year

Daniel Atz, second from right, at a Luxembourg dual citizen meet up in Minnesota in October. His consultancy has dealt with 850 enquires so far this year © Photo credit: LuxCitizenship

Duncan Roberts

Reporter

08/11/2024

Donald Trump’s election victory has sparked a fresh wave of enquiries from Americans seeking to apply for dual Luxembourg citizenship, according to the CEO of a US consultancy.

Daniel Atz, who founded LuxCitizenship, a platform that helps people with citizenship applications, said that the consultancy received around 50 enquiries on Wednesday after the election was called for Trump.

Also read:

Luxembourg citizenship hit historic high in 2023

Atz said that similar surges – thought not so numerically significant – coincided with other social upheaval events like the overturning of the Roe v. Wade constitutional right to abortion in June 2022 or the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July this year. “But in most of our experience, there is a 21-day delay after a major social shock until we see a peak,” he said in a phone call on Thursday.

A US-Luxembourg dual national from Nebraska, Atz thinks that many people are still taking stock of the election result and that applying for citizenship of another country with a view to moving abroad is not on their immediate radar.

“However, as more and more reports of people leaving the United States are made public, they will start thinking about it. So, I would expect immense growth, and we are going to be hiring [staff] as a result,” Atz said.

To be quite frank, Luxembourg isn’t the best place to come and work remotely

Daniel Atz

CEO LuxCitizenship

He thinks that a number of Americans will now come to Luxembourg. Whether or not they’ll stay is another matter. “I think some of them, quite frankly, just have a lot of resources, a lot of money and are very emotional. But they don’t have very much knowledge whatsoever about life in other countries. And, to be quite frank, Luxembourg isn’t the best place to come and work remotely. You know, it’s not Portugal [which has been attracting swathes of so-called digital nomads].”

While he has not been able to empirically prove that social events and a rise in applications for Luxembourg dual citizenship are linked, he has done research on a wider scale. The figures for dual citizenship applications by ancestry across the United States do correspond to the narrative arc that he has experienced this year, he said.

Citizenship enquiries linked to Trump

“In 25 days in January, we had a crazy demand for the Luxembourg citizenship. We had as many enquiries as in five months in 2023,” Atz said. He explained that while applicants usually only allude to events in the United States, in January they were being much more specific.

“I call these people Trump preppers, because in their motivations, they were very clear it was related to Donald Trump,” he said.

That wave of applications was enough to encourage Atz to make his first new staff hires of the year. But then enquiries stagnated until the double whammy of Joe Biden’s disastrous presidential debate performance on 27 June and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on 13 July.

“All of a sudden we had another peak in demand,” Atz said. “Then, when Kamala Harris’s candidature was announced, it flatlined to the lowest we’ve experienced in years.” That coincided with the Paris Olympic Games, Atz said, which also gave people some renewed focus and optimism.

Generally, in 97% of instances we get a correct result on the person’s eligibility. On Wednesday we got more non-eligible results than we maybe get in a year

Daniel Atz

CEO LuxCitizenship

So far this year, LuxCitizenship has dealt with 850 enquires, which is already 100 more than in 2023, Atz said. “We end up working with 20% of people that come through,” he added.

Atz did say, however, that on Wednesday LuxCitizenship was receiving an extraordinarily high number of enquiries from people who were not eligible for Luxembourg citizenship. “There are multiple ways to get citizenship, there’s lots of variables involved, but we have quite a sophisticated online tool. Generally, in 97% of instances we get a correct result on the person’s eligibility. On Wednesday we got more non-eligible results than we maybe get in a year. Maybe they were just not taking the time to properly read the eligibility conditions.”

The vast majority of the people the consultancy usually deals with are what Atz describes as very middle-class Caucasians from the middle of America, such as Wisconsin, which was a centre for 19th-century Luxembourg emigration.

Also read:

More Americans applied for Luxembourg citizenship after Roe v Wade overturn

Daniel Atz, norte-americano e luxemburguês

One outlier to this was when Roe v Wade was overturned. “For weeks, every other person we talked to was a Jewish female,” Atz said. They were mainly descendants of the last collective emigration from Luxembourg, fleeing the Nazis in WWII, when some 330 Jews settled mostly in New York City.

But they had not been interested in gaining citizenship before the Supreme Court’s judgement, Atz explained. “I think that was the most ominous moment of the eight years that I have had the business.”