The mayor of Rimini, Italy, Jamil Sadegholvaad, has proposed granting citizenship to children of foreign nationals who have finished at least one full school cycle in the nation.

Mayor Sadegholvaad, who is of Persian and Italian descent, has demanded that the national government provide citizenship to almost 1.3 million students, of which 75% were born in Italy.Based on his own experiences, the mayor argues that the best approach to integrate non-EU children into Italian society is to provide them the chance to become Italian citizens by having them complete at least one school cycle in Italy.

There are about 3,500 minors in Rimini who were born to non-Italian parents in foreign countries.Children with at least one Italian parent continue to be excluded from the right to citizenship.Italy’s citizenship reform legislation, Ius Scholae, was introduced to the parliament in 2022 and has been the topic of much discussion ever then, but no real progress has been made.

The bill suggests giving citizenship to children from migrant families who were born in Italy or who arrived before the age of twelve. These people have to be citizens of Italy and have regularly attended Italian schools for at least five years.Currently, Italy grants citizenship to children only on the basis of the right of birth (ius sanguinis), which grants citizenship to everyone born in Italy to at least one Italian parent.

However, those born to non-Italian parents can only become citizens after going through the naturalization process.Politicians in Italy have been pressured over the years by a number of groups and well-known individuals to recognize these children as Italian citizens.On the other hand, Matteo Lepore, the mayor of Bologna, started the process of awarding honorary citizenship to foreign-born children in the spring of 2023.

The Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Matteo Salvini, criticized this decision. Lepore responded by emphasizing that these kids represent the future and that they feel Italian, and he invited Salvini to speak with them.In 2022, there were over one million non-Italian minors residing in Italy.

Over a million adolescents with non-Italian citizenship lived in Italy in 2022, making up 11.4% of the country’s underage population, according to data from Openpolis, an independent nonprofit organization based in Italy that promotes free access to data and information.

The Emilia-Romagna region has the highest concentration of this group (17.4%), followed by Lombardy (16.8%) and Tuscany (15.1%). 15% of Italy’s small non-EU population was housed in these three regions combined.5,171,894 foreign citizens made up around 8.7% of Italy’s overall population in 2021, according to the Italian National Institute of Statistics. The population of people of immigrant descent exceeded six million.