In 2025, after a long and arduous journey in her attempts to gain Italian citizenship, including a pivotal genealogical research trip to a village in Calabria, US-born Sabrina Crawford was hoping to fulfil her lifelong dream of building a life in Italy as she edged towards the final hurdle of the bureaucratic process.

But her plans were scuppered when Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government enacted a law stopping access to Italian citizenship via distant ancestry. Since May last year, only those with a parent or grandparent who was an Italian citizen at birth, and who did not take on dual nationality, are eligible to apply.

Crawford, from the San Francisco Bay area, was waiting for one crucial document proving that her Italian great-grandfather had not become a US citizen before submitting her application when the new rules were announced out of the blue.

“It was as if the sky collapsed,” she said. “This horrible news really upended all of my plans, all of my hopes, all of my goals. It broke my heart.”

Crawford is now counting on Italy’s supreme court to deliver a favourable outcome to a legal challenge presented by two US families arguing that the law should only apply to those born after it was enacted. A supreme court panel is expected to make its decision in the coming weeks.

The legislation, which breaks with the longstanding tradition of welcoming the descendants of Italy’s huge global diaspora, was aimed at clamping down on those claiming tenuous links to the country in order to obtain a powerful Italian passport, and to clear the backlog in local councils and consulates, which for years have been overwhelmed by citizenship requests.

“We believe that granting citizenship is a serious matter and should be reserved for those with a genuine connection to our nation,” said Meloni shortly after the law was approved in parliament.

It appears to have stemmed from several contentious cases, including allegations in 2024 that the Italian consulate in Venezuela illegally granted citizenship to five members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia group and political party backed by Iran. The deputy prime minister, Antonio Tajani, also justified it by claiming that Black Friday-style discount deals were being offered on Italian citizenship in Brazil.

But the move has had serious consequences for thousands of legitimate requests, especially from the US, Brazil and Argentina, where millions of Italians emigrated in the 19th and early 20th centuries to escape poverty.

In March, Italy’s constitutional court ruled that the law was valid, but the supreme court has the power to clarify its scope, said Marco Mellone, the lawyer representing the two US families in the case.

Mellone argues that the law should not apply retroactively and that his clients are invoking their rights enshrined in the legal principle of ius sanguinis, Latin for “right of blood”, which allows anyone who can prove ancestry after Italy’s formation in 1861 to seek citizenship.

“This is a crucial point, and the main reason we consider this law to be absolutely unconstitutional and unfair,” said Mellone. “It touches on a [citizenship] right at the time of birth and so it should not be applied retroactively.”

Citizenship has always been a thorny topic in Italy, and even though the number of children born in the country to immigrant parents has been rising sharply they are still denied birthright citizenship. A referendum last year on easing the rules failed because of low turnout.

Citing recent data from Eurostat forecasting that by the end of the century Italy’s population will fall to 44 million compared with roughly 59 million today, Mellone said neither of these obstacles to citizenship were helping the government tackle what Meloni has described as Italy’s “demographic winter”. “They say no to children born in Italy to immigrants and no to those born to Italian emigrants,” he said. “The demographic decline is dramatic. Who will be the Italian citizens of the future?”

Crawford, 50, who for several years lived and worked in Italy, albeit on temporary visas, started her citizenship procedure in 2018. She is Italian from her mother’s side but could not follow the maternal descent route through her consulate owing to an old law preventing Italian women born before 1 January 1948 from transmitting citizenship to their children. Instead, she had to trace an unbroken line of descent to her great-grandfather, who was born in the Calabrian village of Verbicaro.

That involved a trip to the village where, by a stroke of luck, a local priest and historian helped her dig through archives to confirm her ancestor’s name, which in turn enabled her to obtain his birth certificate. Many other bureaucratic hurdles ensued, but Crawford persevered.

If the supreme court ruling goes in her favour, she will be able to pursue her application through a court in Catanzaro, Calabria. “I hope there’s still a ray of hope for people like me who have invested so much time and energy into this,” she said, adding that she grew up surrounded by Italian relatives. “I always knew that I wanted to make my life in Italy.”

Jennifer Daley, a historian from Kansas whose case Mellone is also representing, has been through a similar ordeal over the past 10 years. “This has been a long journey, but I have hope that justice will prevail,” she said.