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Austria sees big jump in number of naturalised citizens

Amanda Previdelli
Amanda Previdelli - [email protected]
Austria sees big jump in number of naturalised citizens
Austrian flag: Birth in Austria doesn't give citizenship, but it can help. (Photo by Sandra Grünewald on Unsplash)

Austria has seen a 61 percent increase in the number of naturalisations in the first semester of 2022, but where are the new Austrian citizens originally from?

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The first six months of 2022 saw 8,158 people being awarded Austrian citizenship through naturalisation processes.

That’s 61 percent more naturalisations than in the same period of the previous year (5,057 naturalisations) and 52.5 percent more than the first half of 2019, before the pandemic, according to data released by Statistik Austria.

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"The strong increase is primarily due to naturalisations of victims of National Socialism (Nazism) and their descendants, who account for almost 30 percent of the newly naturalised persons in the first half of the year," says Tobias Thomas, Director General of Statistik Austria.

In 2020, an amendment to the Austrian Citizenship Act allowed descendants of victims of the National Socialist (Nazi) regime to apply for dual citizenship. With this, descendants of the Nazi regime were allowed to become Austrians without giving up their previous citizenship.

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In the first half of 2022, 2,421 people (of whom 2,396 live abroad) were granted Austrian citizenship under the new amendment, corresponding to 29.7 percent of all naturalisations in this half-year.

Who are the new citizens?

People who were naturalised under this new guidance are most frequently nationals of Israel (939 or 11.5 percent of all naturalised persons in the first half of 2022), the United States (546 or 6.7 percent) and the United Kingdom (525 or 6.4 percent).

Other naturalised individuals (a total of 5,737 persons) were most frequently nationals of Turkey (603 or 7.4 percent), Syria (531 or 6.5 percent) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (469 or 5.7 percent).

Half of the naturalisations in the first six months of 2022 were women (50.3 percent), and about a third were minors under 18 (31.9 percent). Almost a quarter of the newly naturalised persons were born in Austria (1,923 or 23.6 percent).

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In all states, more people were naturalised in the first half of 2022 than in the same period of the previous year.

The relative increases were highest in Vorarlberg (up by 59.7 percent to 313 naturalisations), followed by Vienna (43.0 percent to 2 265) and Styria (+38.0 percent to 487).

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Compared to the first half of 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were also more naturalisations in seven states, especially Carinthia (an 81.5 percent increase to 265 naturalisations).

Only in Vienna (3.5 percent decrease to 2,265) and in Upper Austria (1.2 percent decrease to 757) were there fewer naturalisations compared to 2019.

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