Carys Cassidy, a 35-year-old transgender woman from Denver, cannot remember when she started thinking about leaving the United States. The thought of packing up and moving to Europe was always in her head, even as a child, and it only became stronger as she got older. "When we talk about the cultural and political situation out here, and how divided things are, I think that existed before Donald Trump," Cassidy told Newsweek.
"I already felt that then. And also social mobility here is less than it is in Europe." "In the U.S., you're pretty much expected to work and that's all," Cassidy said. "Then if you try to better yourself, you're sort of penalized for that in some way, either with massive amounts of debt or you are forced to make cuts in your life, like housing or life experiences." Europe, to Cassidy, felt like a place to catch her breath and live the life she'd been dreaming of.
She eventually realized she had a great-great-great-great-grandfather linking her to Luxembourg, a landlocked European nation of roughly 691,000 people. She started digging online and found that some of her ancestors had moved from Luxembourg to the United States in the 1800s, going through Chicago and then spending time in Minnesota, Iowa and Kansas. This long-lost ancestor gave Cassidy the right to claim Luxembourgish citizenship under the country's law, which requires an unbroken male line of descent leading back to an ancestor born in Luxembourg in 1815 or later.
Women can pass down citizenship if a child was born on or after January 1, 1969. The paperwork, which took Cassidy one year to put together, was the hardest part of the process. Luxembourg does not require a language test or a trip to the country to obtain citizenship.
In March, Cassidy, who is transitioning, obtained her Luxembourgish citizenship and left the United States for Sweden. "I left right off because I was worried about the second Trump administration," she said. An increasing number of Americans have sought citizenship in the tiny European country since President Donald Trump's return to the White House, as part of a wave of U.S. nationals trying to obtain "Plan B" passports in a time of political uncertainty.
In the first year of Trump's second mandate, 3,574 Americans acquired Luxembourgish citizenship, the largest-ever cohort since the country began tracking data, according to the national register. The country's Ministry of Justice recorded only 657 new Luxembourgish citizens in the U.S. that year—an apparent contradiction. But many of those whose citizenship was recorded in the national register last year were already technically considered Luxembourg citizens under the law.
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