I’m looking for comprehensive statistics on how many citizenships each country grants per year.
Actual citizenships, not permanent residency or anything less.
Google doesn’t seem to throw up anything comprehensive.
Help…?
Are you counting only naturalisations, or also citizenships conferred by virtue of birth, descent, etc?
My first thought is the statistics kept by each individual country. I’m sure it would be public knowledge except in dictatorships etc.
Maybe someone has collected those into a list somewhere - I don’t know.
I think part of the problem may be comparability. With some countries, you’re either a citizen from birth, or citizenship is granted to you at some later point by government decision. With others, there’s an intermediate category; persons who are not citizens from birth, but who are entitled to become so at any point by simply registering or taking other action; no government action or decision is required. Are those “grants” of citizenship? Note that if they are, there may be no reliable count of how many people have taken the relevant action, since the government is not involved. Some countries have different categories of citizenship; e.g. the UK has I think six different classes of citizenship, not all of which confer the right to settle in the UK; do we count grants of all of those, or just of those which look like citizenship in the familiar sense?
I think for this exercise to be meaningful you need a standard concept of “citizenship” and standard concept of “grant”, and then you need to measure various countries actual laws and practices against those standards and make your own judgment about what you will regard as the “grant” of “citizenship”. Otherwise you may be comparing apples and oranges.
The OECD has collected some of these stats in their International Migration Outlook; check out Table A.6. Their data only covers “OECD countries and selected non-member states”, but there’s about 30–40 countries included in that list. There’s also a breakdown of each of those countries’ new citizens by country of prior citizenship, and a table of “metadata” that describes how the data was collected and any important differences between the different countries’ statistics (as alluded to by UDS).
Sorry I should have been clearer - I’m not counting citizenships gained by birthright.
To make it clearer, I’m looking for number of citizenships granted to migrants or refugees residing in some country other than the one they were previously a citizen of.
Thanks MikeS for your link, I will check it out.