Even as Donald Trump advertises his hard-line approach to border crossers, he is actively soliciting one particular group of immigrants: rich ones. In February, Trump proposed that America start offering a U.S. “gold card” for $5 million. “Green-card privileges, plus” is how the president described it: “It’s going to be a route to citizenship, and wealthy people will be coming into our country,” he said. Trump predicted that the United States could sell a million of these cards, enough to eliminate the national debt. Even Russian oligarchs could be eligible, he said—though (thanks to economic sanctions) “they’re not quite as wealthy as they used to be.”
Trump seemed to relish the scheme’s shock value. But these days, buying a visa or passport is not controversial: About half of the world’s nations already offer visas, permanent residence, or even full citizenship for sums ranging from the low five to low seven figures. The U.S. itself grants up to 10,000 residency permits a year under its EB-5 investor visa program, which Congress has approved until 2027 and costs applicants about $1 million.
But if Trump expects a flood of takers, he has it backwards: The international rich aren’t trying to come here, so much as Americans are trying to get out. U.S. citizens now represent the majority of clients looking for an exit, through foreign citizenship, permanent residence, or a visa that allows them to live abroad.
I have been writing about the world of millionaire migration for years. The market depends on a cottage industry of advisers, financial planners, and lawyers who help their clients navigate the paperwork and requirements, and I spoke with some of these experts in the weeks following Trump’s announcement. All seemed to think that only a handful of people would take Trump’s bait—mainly because there simply aren’t enough people rich enough to shell out $5 million with no return on their investment.
Dominic Volek, an executive at the consulting firm Henley & Partners, told me that his clients typically “look at investing 10 percent of their net worth on citizenship or residence.” To consider the gold card, they’d need “a liquid net worth of $50 million, and there are only around 100,000 people globally who have that kind of money.” Even then, gold cards will succeed only “if America’s relaxed about the source of funds,” another lawyer, Sam Bayat, who works with a lot of clients in the Middle East, told me. Shady Russian oligarchs, in other words, might be the target demographic, rather than an edge case.
The far bigger story is the reverse phenomenon: Thousands of Americans a year are applying to visa programs abroad, primarily in Europe—Portugal in particular—and the Caribbean, where island nations offer citizenship outright, sometimes upon purchase of property. An American doctor or dentist considering a second home in storm-addled Florida might now buy a $325,000 condo in St. Kitts and Nevis instead and, in the bargain, qualify for the island nation’s citizenship in as little as three months. A nature lover might look to Costa Rica, which grants residence (and a fast track to citizenship) for $150,000. Vanuatu will effectively sell you a passport for $130,000; Dominica’s costs $200,000.
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Historically, people have looked to buy a different citizenship because they live under undemocratic political systems, or because their passport makes it difficult to travel. (Afghans, for instance, can go to just six countries without a visa; Spaniards can go to 133.) Eric Major, the CEO of the immigration-advising firm Latitude, began his career helping rich Hong Kongers make exit plans to relocate to Canada or the United Kingdom ahead of the territory’s scheduled handover to China. “The smart capital, the top guys in Hong Kong in the 1990s, were all saying, ‘We gotta hedge,’” Major told me, referring to fears that China would crack down on business and political freedoms. Major went on to work mainly with clients from China, Russia, India, and the Middle East.
Today most of Major’s clients are American. Volek’s firm has more clients from America than from the next four biggest feeder countries (Pakistan, Nigeria, India, and the U.K.) combined. Fifteen years ago, the firm did not see much point in opening a U.S. office. This year, it’s launching its tenth. “I never would have imagined my No. 1 source market would become America,” Major told me. “But now the top brass of America is hedging.”
Hedging is the operative word: Few of these Americans are actually moving abroad at the moment. It’s about having options, Volek said: “It’s purely the realization that, ‘I’m wealthy and diversified in terms of assets, bonds, and equities, so why on earth would I have one country of citizenship and residence? It makes no sense.’”
The great American hedge began during the coronavirus pandemic. Overnight, U.S. citizens—even the entitled ultrarich—found themselves barred from entering other countries. “I’m worth $20, $50 million and I have a private jet and a home in Europe, and you’re telling me I can’t enter?” Volek recalls. That wasn’t something Americans “had contemplated before.”
The emergency passed, and international travel picked back up. But the sense of uncertainty has persisted—compounded by a spate of uniquely American tragedies: school shootings, high-profile displays of systemic racism, and the storming of the Capitol on January 6. Climate events such as hurricanes and wildfires have shaken homeowners, inflation has spooked investors, and the Trump-Biden-Trump whiplash has made politics feel more unpredictable than ever.
Now, as Elon Musk attacks the federal government’s social and regulatory programs, the U.S. is beginning to take on the contours of a nation without a clear future. “It’s the same push factors as other countries,” Major explained. “People don’t trust the government; they’re worried about the quality of the air; they want to educate their kids.”
It’s hard to exaggerate how meaningful this shift has been for the mobility industry. I’ve been talking to people like Volek and Major since 2012, and I published the first book on the market for passports in 2015. I would always run into the occasional American looking to expatriate, but they tended to be eccentrics, such as a man known as “Bitcoin Jesus” and subscribers to newsletters such as Nomad Capitalist. These Americans weren’t worried about gun violence and political stability. They were hard-core libertarians who wanted to avoid taxes at all costs. Many would go on to renounce their U.S. citizenship after acquiring their foreign one.
As the people looking to move have changed, so too has the mobility industry, which has far more options now and is far more accessible and socially acceptable. “The overall trend is toward more legitimacy and people realizing it’s totally normal” to pay to emigrate, Kristin Surak, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of The Golden Passport, told me.
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Americans without a ton of money are finding ways to access new passports by re-hyphenating themselves. Many are casting around for long-lost relatives through which they can claim Italian, Irish, Austrian, or German citizenship. Tracking down birth certificates from the old country and persuading embassies to accept them as proof of citizenship used to be logistically complicated; now there are consultants to help with that too. European countries have grown accustomed to American applicants who want to expand their options and lower the cost of college, health care, and child care.
According to one estimate, about 40 percent of U.S. citizens might be eligible for European passports through their ancestors. Last year, Ireland received 31,825 passport applications from U.S. citizens, Austria naturalized 1,914 (virtually all as reparations for Nazi-era persecutions), and more than 6,100 Americans applied for British citizenship, with a noticeable uptick beginning in November.
“Americans have gotten very pragmatic,” says Audra DeFalco, who specializes in “citizenship by descent” at Latitude. “They’re retirees, people whose grandma was Polish and they really loved their grandma; some want to study abroad without having student loans.”
More and more, DeFalco says, the Americans with an exit plan are just people who have the time and resources to make one.
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