Nationality and National Origin

Detects references to nationality/citizenship/immigration-status disclosure: nationality fields, national origin, citizenship status, visa status, and naturalization records. Unlike the three sibling Art-9 patterns in this wave (sexual-orientation, religious-beliefs, racial-ethnic-origin), nationality is NOT a GDPR Article 9 special category — it is processed under GDPR's ordinary Article 6 lawful-basis regime. It is grouped with the Art-9 set here because it shares the same detection problem (an attribute value with no fixed format) and was bundled with them in the C3 deprecation/gap analysis, and because national origin carries real discrimination risk. Topic-grade detector, low confidence by design.

Type

keyword_list

Engine

universal

Confidence

low

Confidence justification

Low by design. Nationality/immigration status has no fixed format, so it is detected purely by topic vocabulary. The bare word "national" appears constantly in unrelated contexts (National Bank, nationally recognized, national holiday); the regex is scoped to full disclosure phrases only, and hits should be paired with corroborative keywords (citizenship, visa, immigration) to raise precision.

Jurisdictions

global

Regulations

GDPR

Frameworks

ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2

Data categories

pii

Scope

broad

Risk rating

6

Pattern

(?i)\b(?:nationality\s+field|national\s+origin|citizenship\s+status|immigration\s+status|visa\s+status|country\s+of\s+citizenship|dual\s+citizenship|naturaliz(?:ation|ed)\s+status|non-citizen\s+status)\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

citizenship, visa, immigration, passport, naturalized, permanent resident, foreign national

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

• The onboarding form records nationality and citizenship status. — Citizenship status phrase present
• File notes his current visa status and immigration category. — Visa status phrase present
• HR record documents naturalization status for payroll tax purposes. — Naturalization status phrase present

Should not match

• National Bank of Australia reported quarterly earnings. — Near-miss proper noun ("National Bank"), no nationality disclosure
• She received a nationally recognized award for her research. — Near-miss adverb ("nationally"), not "nationality"
• The office is closed for the national holiday on Monday. — Unrelated "national" (holiday), no disclosure vocabulary

Known false positives

• The word "national"/"nationally" appears in unrelated contexts (proper nouns like National Bank, adverbial "nationally recognized", "national holiday") that have nothing to do with a person's nationality or citizenship. Mitigation: The regex targets full disclosure phrases ("national origin", "citizenship status", "visa status") rather than the bare word "national"; require corroborative keywords (citizenship, visa, immigration, passport) for confidence.

References

• GDPR Article 6 — lawfulness of processing (nationality is ordinary, not special-category, personal data)