The European countries still welcoming citizenship claims | CNN

When New Yorker Antoni Scarano visited Romania in 2019, the trip marked his first return to his country of birth since the 1990s. As a newborn, Scarano, now 34, was among tens of thousands of Romanian children adopted by US families following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But around 2017, with the help of a Facebook group, Scarano reconnected with his Romanian family, including his birth mother, siblings and grandmother. Two years later, Scarano and his wife, Samantha Attaguile, arrived in a small village in the Transylvania region on a sunny spring day to meet those relatives — who rolled out “the Eastern European red carpet” for the couple, as he describes it. “It was like a party,” Scarano says. “It turned into a big love fest, really. We really hit it off, and it felt like we picked up where we left off, you know, all those years ago.” Over the next several years, the couple traveled to Romania three more times, feeling increasingly drawn to the country’s close-knit communities and relaxed pace of life — a striking contrast to the “60-to-90-hour weeks” demanded by their full-time jobs in the US, Scarano says. In May 2024, following months of packin