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.
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.
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.
When I spoke with Charlie, a businessman from the Midwest who is in the process of obtaining a Portuguese “golden visa,” I was struck by what I saw in the background of his video. He wasn’t Zooming from a sterile condo in a glass tower in some anonymous global capital, or a fancy hotel room on his way someplace else. He was sitting in the cozy-looking living room of the suburban house he’d lived in for years.
“We have four kids and two grandsons, who all live very close, and we spend an inordinate amount of time with our family,” Charlie said. “It’s the central focus of our lives.” (He asked to go by a pseudonym in case speaking publicly would interfere with his visa application.)
Charlie’s done well enough as an entrepreneur to afford a pricey Plan B, but he isn’t a jet-setting oligarch or a paranoid crypto bro. He’s a Kamala Harris voter (“obviously”), he’s Jewish (“we go to synagogue on occasion”), and he loves living in America, where he’s part of a tight-knit community. Still, he’s almost at the end of the year-long process to purchase a Portuguese residence permit, which begins with investing about $540,000 in the country.
What pushed him to look outside the United States was his growing fear for his safety. Charlie told me that he feels threatened by both the Nazi-saluting right and the Gaza-protesting left. “I have enough knowledge of history to know and to believe that people who say ‘It could never happen here’ are daydreaming,” he said.
(I asked him why he hadn’t simply taken Israeli citizenship, which is available to all Jews, would cost him next to nothing, and was quite literally created for this purpose. “I don’t know that my wife particularly savored the idea of living there,” he said. “It wasn’t in her mind an ideal place.”)
Lately, though, his fears have gone way beyond anti-Semitism “to being scared of where our country is going and whether the forces of good will eventually win out over the bullshit that’s tearing down the government,” he said. He sees an escape hatch as common sense, not traitorous. He told me that he’d “even inspired” a few of his friends to look into it.
Mina Hsiao and Chris Carter are a couple nearing retirement age. They recently returned to San Diego after spending most of the past 16 years in Shanghai, but within months, they had applied for a visa to live in Sarawak, on the Malaysian island of Borneo. The permit lasts 10 years and costs about $33,500 a person. Applicants must also have health insurance and be able to financially support themselves.
The couple had been looking forward to their homecoming, but it quickly became clear that the U.S. they’d left was not the same country that was waiting for them. Hsiao felt unsafe as an Asian woman, particularly when she went out wearing a mask. Carter’s family was divided along political lines. Even their church felt like a minefield. “We were hopeful until November,” Carter recalled. “But after I saw how many people voted for Trump, after the first term, after January 6—and people of faith in the church embracing Christian nationalism …”
“The Christianity that somehow has morphed in this country is not our expression of faith,” Hsiao interjected. “We thought we were coming back to a psychological home, not just the comfort of language but also ideals—security, opportunity for all. And that wasn’t the case.”
How long do they envision staying abroad? “At least three years, nine months, and two weeks,” Carter joked. “But things will not go back to pre-Trump,” Hsiao added. “That’s our concern.”
Kate, who works at a pharmaceutical company in Boston, is establishing European residence through the same visa program as Charlie (and she asked me to use a pseudonym for the same reason). She moved to the United States from Ukraine in 2000 after her family struggled to adjust to post-Soviet turmoil, and got American citizenship soon after.
She is in her 50s now, and started thinking about relocating a few years ago, when she had some extra cash after downsizing her home. “I thought maybe Cape Cod would be a good investment,” she said, “but then my cousin, a lawyer in Manhattan, said, ‘Don’t do Cape Cod. Buy something in Europe and get a citizenship.”
Then, in January, she saw a message on social media about federal workers being asked “to stay loyal or resign,” Kate told me. She “completely freaked out” and sent it to her family, commenting: “Perestroika in one week.” She’s now in the process of applying for permanent residence in Portugal.
“I have my job in America, so there’s no rush to move,” Kate said. “But I fear civil war.” She told me she felt lucky not to be in Ukraine, “but seeing how polarized America has become—it makes me wonder about the way forward.”
Whether these Americans will really leave remains to be seen. Charlie said his greatest hope is that he won’t have to. But he finds comfort in knowing that he has the option of escape if the worst ever comes to pass, and in the idea that if he does have to go, he won’t be alone. He said he tells his family members: “If it gets so bad that we feel the obligation to leave the country, we believe it’ll be bad enough that they’ll want to go as well.”
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