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3 hours agoThe Mediterranean Country Quietly Giving Americans 5-Year Visas
Portugal's D7 visa offers a renewable 5-year residency option for Americans seeking a Mediterranean lifestyle without complex requirements.
The new checks, part of the EU's new Entry/Exit System (EES), collect digital personal records of third country nationals travelling to the Schengen area and replace the manual stamping of passports.
Gaining citizenship through family or through marriage is possible, but if you don't have any useful relatives or an EU spouse you'll be looking at getting citizenship through residency. From residency requirements to rules on dual nationality, every country in Europe has its own way of tackling naturalisation.
A young French tennis coach who once lived the American dream describes being detained, shackled and expelled under the Trump administration's tightened border rules. JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: There was a sharp drop in the number of European tourists visiting the U.S. last year compared to 2024. Many said the volatile political climate was the reason. Frightening stories of Europeans getting caught in the Trump administration's reinforced border controls have also dampened desires to cross the Atlantic. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley brings us one French person's experience.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.
For the first time since the end of the second world war, France has recorded more deaths than births, suggesting that the country's long-held demographic advantage over other EU countries is slipping away. Across the country in 2025, there were 651,000 deaths and 645,000 births, according to newly released figures from the national statistics institute Insee. France had long been an exception across Europe, with birthrates that topped many of its neighbours'.
In total, 19 dual nationals were stripped of their French passports in 2025, according to figures published in the police gazette l'Essor de la gendarmerie. The process followed convictions in the French courts, all for terrorism-related offences. The figures represent a fall on the previous year, when 41 people had their French passports removed. In 2023, 11 dual nationals lost their French citizenship, in 2022 six did, and four each in 2021 and 2020.
The data shows that 15,000 Americans were issued with their first carte de séjour residency permit in 2025, compared to 13,122 in 2024 - a 14.3 percent increase. READ ALSO: Checklist: How to move to France as an American✎ This number is probably a slight under-estimate of the number of Americans moving, since it does not include Americans who have dual nationality with an EU country and who therefore do not require a residency permit.
In 2024, Indian nationals received the largest number of highly-qualified worker and researchers visas, according to the latest figures from Eurostat, the EU's statistics office. Indian citizens were granted the largest number of EU Blue Cards in 2024 (16,300), ahead of citizens of Russia (6,700, a number that declined from 9,500 in 2023), Türkiye (5,600) and China (4,600). Almost 1,900 Blue Cards were issued to US citizens, just over 1,200 to Brits and almost 600 to Canadian nationals.