The LuxCitizenship Study 2024

About this book

A demographic study of the people who have reclaimed Luxembourgish nationality by ancestry across the Americas — who they are, where they live, why they applied, and what they intend to do with a European passport.

The Headline Numbers

27,632

Luxembourgish citizens living in Brazil, 31 December 2023 — up from 2,844 in 2018

14,972

in the United States, up from 3,602 in 2018: 316% growth in five years

541

in Argentina, 31 December 2024 — the third-largest community in the Americas

4%

of Luxembourg's own resident population (669,512) is matched by the Brazilian cohort alone

What It Found

Brazil overtook the United States in 2019, and kept going

Brazilians began applying years after their American cousins and passed them on 2 June 2019. In 2023 alone, 7,693 Brazilians obtained Luxembourgish citizenship — more in one year than the entire American community numbered in 2018. Few in Luxembourg anticipated this.

The respondents trace back to a very small number of ancestors

416 American respondents descend from 225 Luxembourgish ancestors across 218 families; 634 Brazilian respondents from 80 ancestors; 124 Argentine respondents from 28. A handful of nineteenth-century departures account for tens of thousands of European passports today.

Each community settled, and largely stayed

The American ancestors left in the mid-1800s for Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Brazilians arrived with the first migratory wave in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. The Argentines came in the late 1800s to Benito Juárez in Buenos Aires Province. Two-thirds of Brazilian-Luxembourgers were born in the same state their ancestor settled.

Mobility differs sharply between the three

35.3% of Brazilian respondents no longer live in their ancestor's state, and 21.4% of Argentines have left their ancestor's province — a rate 1.9 times lower than the American one. The Americans are the restless ones; the South American communities stayed close to where they landed.

A small but real return migration has begun

8.4% of Brazilian respondents now live in Luxembourg, and a further 5.7% live in another country. STATEC counted at least 894 Brazilian dual citizens resident in Luxembourg on 1 January 2023, most of them citizens by ancestry.

They are more educated than the countries they live in

86.8% of Brazilian respondents studied beyond secondary school and 15.1% hold a master's or doctorate; 56.5% of Argentine respondents pursued higher education. Brazilian and Argentine respondents cluster in government and law — civil servant, lawyer and university professor recur throughout.

What’s Inside

• Who applies, and from where — the geography of the new dual citizens across the United States, Brazil and Argentina
• The ancestors — when they left Luxembourg, from which cantons, and where they settled
• Motivations — what people say they are actually claiming when they claim a passport
• Language, travel and intent to move — how many plan to live in Europe, and when
• Method and sources — Luxembourg open government data alongside anonymized, aggregated case files

Sources and Method

Luxembourg's Ministry of Justice, the National Registry of Natural Persons (RNPP) via data.public.lu, STATEC, CTIE and the National Archives, alongside LuxCitizenship's own surveys of 416 American, 634 Brazilian and 124 Argentine dual citizens and the 333 Luxembourgish ancestors they trace to. Practitioner data is anonymised and reported in aggregate. LuxCitizenship works only with clients in the United States, so no Brazilian or Argentine respondent is a client.

Where It’s Held

• Profiled by Luxembourg’s open-data portal
• Catalogued at the Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines, Dudelange