Permunian, who is fluent in English, started his business in 2014 with only one other employee. Given the particulars of Italian-citizenship law at the time, many of the roughly eighteen million Italian Americans living in the U.S. had a plausible claim to Italian citizenship. Within a decade, demand for Permunian’s services had become so high that his company employed two hundred people with offices in Nashville, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York.
I reached out to him just a few days after the November, 2024, election to check in on his business. “We are completely overwhelmed,” he said. He estimated that he was receiving an e-mail from a potential new client every three minutes. Permunian told me that interest spiked after the onset of the COVID epidemic, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the début of CNN’s “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.” But he hadn’t seen numbers like this since Trump was first elected in 2016. “People are seeking an exit plan,” he said.
In most cases, the people looking for second passports didn’t actually intend to move abroad—not immediately, anyway, or not unless things in the U.S. took a bad enough turn. “It’s psychological, mostly,” Olga Kallergi, a Greek attorney who helps Greek Americans secure citizenship by descent, said of these applications. “People are concerned and want to have an option.” Kallergi, too, has been swamped during the second Trump Administration. According to a representative of the Greek government, the number of Americans who apply for Greek citizenship each year is relatively small—on average, a few hundred, compared with several thousand for Italy—but it has quadrupled during the past decade.
A writer named Michael David Lukas is pursuing French citizenship for himself, his wife, and their two young children. “You don’t buy fire insurance because you want your house to burn down,” he explained. “You buy it because you think that it’s possible a fire might happen, and you want to be prepared.”
Lukas has never actually been to France. His mother, the daughter of Polish Jews, was born in France after her family fled the Third Reich and lived there for about six years before immigrating to the States. Birthright laws rendered her a citizen and made Lukas and his children eligible, too. He was aware of the option for years, but the January 6th riots finally made him pursue French citizenship in earnest. The footage of the attacks on the Capitol gave him a “slow-motion panic attack,” he recalled, triggering what he described as an almost biological impulse to run. As a Jew, he explained, he was raised with a deeply ingrained understanding that the people who survived during times of oppression were those with papers who allowed them passage elsewhere. (He could also seek citizenship in Israel, but for Lukas, an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, that would feel like going “out of the frying pan and into the fire.”)
On Reddit, I checked a thread called /AmerExit. It was teeming with people sharing plans and asking for advice. Some weren’t looking for an insurance plan—they thought that they might actually need to leave soon. “Hello! So, I’m transgender,” a Reddit user wrote last year. “I live in a safe state but I’m fucking terrified of a possible third term, I want out of this country as soon as possible.” A woman in her forties posted, “I’m alternating between rising low-level panic/GTFO energy and feeling like we’d be crazy to walk away from a stable solution.” She identified herself as white, married, cisgendered, and a parent of two children—one of whom is nonbinary. As one Reddit user later explained to me, “I want to leave because, to be frank, I think this country is headed in a really bad direction and it’s not getting any better.” In theory, they qualified for Croatian citizenship through their grandmother, but, as a Holocaust survivor, she hadn’t brought any documents with her—leaving her grandchild stuck. “I’m hoping to find a country that actually cares about the people who live there,” they said.
Until recently, U.S. citizenship was, legally speaking, an absolute: either you had it or you didn’t, and, at least theoretically, it conferred certain rights. Today, not only is the current Administration threatening to increase “denaturalizations”—once extremely rare and largely limited to cases of terrorism or application fraud—but Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement has routinely detained U.S. citizens. Immigration officers killed two U.S. citizens in broad daylight while, all evidence seems to show, they were exercising their constitutional right to peacefully assemble. This spring, the Supreme Court will consider the Administration’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, which was enshrined in U.S. law in 1868.
