530 S. POGONYI naturalization policies, the socialization-based preferential treatment of individuals cannot be considered unfair – or ethnically selective. But in addition to the preferential policies that target resident populations, many European countries offer citizenship for individuals who do not habitually reside and have never resided within their territories. Most countries in the world (including all member states of the EU), with some limitations, offer citizenship for descendants of citizens born abroad. In most European countries, even descendants of deceased citizens are eligible for citizenship in their ancestor’s country of origin even if they have never lived there and do not speak the national language. Moreover, most countries do not restrict the transmission of citizenship. In practice, this means that successive generations of expatriates may without limitation retain the citizenship of their ancestors, regardless of the fact that they may have no actual ties to their ancestral ‘homelands’ and national culture. In a world marked by transnational migration, jus sanguinis citizenship attribution policies create large non-resident citizen populations. One could argue, that these policies offer individuals born abroad the opportunity to restore their citizenship lineage even if their parents or grandparents did not register them as citizens at birth. The option to restore citizenship discontinued by ancestors can be seen as a logical extension of the jus sanguinis principle. If states can without any limitation issue citizenship for descendants of nationals born abroad, the restoration of citizenship should also be available for those foreign-born individuals whose parents missed or were illegitimately denied the opportunity to register them at birth. Citizenship is inevitably one of the most valuable assets in the modern world (Harpaz, 2019; Shachar, 2009), and as long as individuals have the right to pass it on to their descendants regardless of habitual residence, those whose parents failed to register them should not be in a disadvantaged position. And there are even more compelling normative arguments supporting the unconditional naturalization of individuals born abroad to citizen parents. In some cases, parents are illegitimately barred from registering their foreign born descendants at birth. To make things even more complicated, many of these parents were forced abroad by undemocratic regimes or the absence of decent life opportunities. German citizenship law is a good illustration of the different types of normatively valid considerations. Article 116 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany stipulates that those individuals whose ancestors were deprived of German citizenship on grounds of political, racial or religious grounds under the Nazi dictatorship of the Third Reich, should have the right to restore their citizenship. After the Brexit vote, thousands of individuals applied for German citizenship, claiming that their ancestors were deprived of German citizenship under Nazi rule. The German government recognized its moral duty to help these individuals, and revised the application of the restorative regulations so that even fifth generations of former citizens could apply for German citizenship (‘Germany Eases Citizenship for WW2 Refugee Families’, 2019). This legislation is a good example of citizenship restoration of individuals who (or whose parents) were unjustly denaturalized (and, in some cases, expelled thereafter). As many of the individuals eligible to this type of restorative citizenship are descendants of members of ethnic minorities (first and foremost, German Jews), this law cannot be seen as an ethnically exclusive measure. Germany, however, offered facilitated citizenship not only for descendants of persecuted ethnic, religious and political minorities, but also ‘ethnic’ Germans living abroad in Eastern and Central Europe (Hailbronner, 2013). These individuals who were