This paper focuses on how people use legal bordering processes enforced through citizenship laws to their advantage and argues that citizenship provisions may function as immigration regulation, according to the way people use them. Building on an ethnographic fieldwork carried out with binational Brazilians, Chileans and Argentinians of Italian descent, it shows how they use the Italian passport they can inherit from their ancestors through the right of blood to migrate to Europe as citizens. It observes that young South American Italians engage in new forms of migration which seem to counter the current restrictive European immigration policies and that they contribute to the recent resumption of Italian migration in the EU. This article shows that Italy's entangled histories of citizenship, emigration and colonization explain why the descendants of Italian emigrants are so privileged by Italian legislation in terms of citizenship and mobility. It also argues that Italian provisions on ancestral citizenship acquisition contribute to a stratified migration regime based on ancestry, race and class, linking Latin America, Italy and Europe while tackling the paradoxes that South American Italians face upon "return" to Italy.