You can already get a visa-for-money from most major first world countries, and after a few years, it is easy enough to make the jump towards citizenship. Is it really that big of a jump to get rid of the time component?<p>For example:<p><i>USA</i><p>EB5 investor visa: $1,000,000 or $500,000 depending on the area you 'invest' in. One of the easiest ways to get a green card, and from there, citizenship<p><i>UK</i><p>Tier 1 investor visa: £1,000,000 in 'investment', which can just be the purchase of government bonds. Apply for indefinate leave to remain (green card equivilant) after 4 years. If you invested £5 million, you only need 3 years. If you invested £10 million, it is down to 2 years. The UK non-domicile tax status can also be very very generous to wealthy expats (unless they are American and thus are taxed on world wide income regardless).<p><i>Canada</i><p>Canada used to have such a program (Immigrant Investor visa for $800,000 CAD for people with net worths of at least $!.6 million), but that was terminated recently. I believe the Quebec version is still open though
I thought I might dislike this article because I support free migration (and probably share some views with the libertarian expatriate who at first seems to be getting set up as the article's bogeyman).<p>But I was impressed that the article didn't really go there; instead, it uses his experience as part of a pretty compelling observation "that borders exist more for some people than they do for others". And that's absolutely right. I've visited 23 countries and never had a hitch, hassle, snafu, or anybody questioning my presence or right to travel there. Whereas I have known people who grew up in the U.S. but lived in fear of deportation because they came here at age 1 instead of age 0.<p>And when I helped a medical student from West Africa with his travel itinerary to the Caribbean (which I think was his <i>only</i> experience with international travel), he ended up getting deported all the way back to his home country for lack of a transit visa for one of his connections -- a visa that there's no chance I would have been asked for, let alone deported over. (He had to buy a whole new itinerary and fly across the Atlantic a third time, figuring out how to avoid connecting through that country.)<p>My coworkers think of Caribbean island nations as a great place to go on honeymoon; the not-actually-the-bogeyman libertarian activist in the article thinks of them as a great place to expatriate; and West African students think of them as "which one won't deport me on my way to school this time?".
Obviously, governments and borders are outdated. I lived in 5 different countries (Russia, Switzerland, Italy, US, Denmark), and I couldn't help but wonder — why, why all this paperwork?
"What's difficult to argue with is the fact that making it possible for a rich person to buy his or her way out of a country doesn't do much for the billions who are prohibited from leaving theirs, whether it's because of immigration restrictions or just plain poverty. And laws that so explicitly link political membership to financial gain drive home the sad reality that borders exist more for some people than they do for others."<p>And there you have it. "Some people are just better than others" used to be a polite fiction maintained outside of the public eye; acknowledged but not overtly flaunted. Now it's the latest in how societies are restructured and a somewhat-expected consequence of what happens when information and money can be freely moved but people cannot.
The united states offers investment visas that grant "permanent residence to the individual" to anyone who invests over $1,000,000 in several industries. - <a href="http://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-through-job/green-card-through-investment" rel="nofollow">http://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-through-job/green...</a>
The only thing that bothers me here is that Qatar is toted as an example.<p>Fun fact: all these athlete citizens in Qatar have a special class of citizenship, as in they are made Qatari but experience none of the perks, especially the very nice benefits of a petro-gas welfare state where basically everything from property to utilities to education abroad is subsidized.<p>Oh, and when they stop being useful, the citizenship is stripped. This is common knowledge and leads to interesting situations.<p>More interesting are Palestinian athletes who are not even made citizens. They are not allowed to see their passports. On trips abroad, their handlers carry them and they are only authorized for travel to and from Qatar for any event. Then, they are destroyed/cancelled until the next event.<p>So, please, do not use Qatar as an example.
I, for one, support this initiative. If someone wants to become a citizen of my country then by all means I should consider it, and if they meet our requirements I can let them in in exchange for something. "What will you add to my country?" Money, Knowledge, Science, Art, whatever so long as it benefits.
> <i>Roger Ver, a libertarian who did some jail time for selling explosives online without a license and renounced his U.S. citizenship a week after he became Kittitian (paying with cash, not bitcoin) believes in changing citizenships at will because he finds governments oppressive and borders meaningless. “My personal plan is to undermine governments who try to control people and their lives,” he told me last month over Skype.</i><p>This dishonest demonising is sad. It was a plea bargain for selling fireworks after the state got angry with him for his hostile viewpoint when he actually tried to participate in the political process rather than circumvent it entirely as he advocates now. Protip for those idealistic people complaining about segments of the population entirely abandoning the political process rather than attempting to engage with it and fix the system; This is exactly how you provoke people into that abandonment.<p>I have come to expect as much from people cheerleading for the state, it's depressing to have my cynical biases validated so firmly.<p><a href="http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/11/12/bitcoin-venture-capitalist-roger-vers-journey-to-anarchism/" rel="nofollow">http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/11/12/bitcoin-venture-capital...</a><p><i>I argued that taxation is theft, the war on drugs is immoral, and that the ATF are “a bunch of jack booted thugs and murderers” in memoriam to the people they slaughtered in Waco, Texas. Unbeknownst to me at the time there were several plain clothed ATF agents in the audience who became very upset with the things I was saying. They began looking into my background in the attempt to find dirt on me. I had already started a successful online business selling various computer components. In addition to computer parts, I, along with dozens of other resellers across the country, including Cabelas, were selling a product called a “Pest Control Report 2000.” It was basically a firecracker used by farmers to scare deer and birds away from their corn fields. While everyone else, including the manufacturer, were simply asked to stop selling them I became the only person in the nation to be prosecuted.</i><p><i>The reasoning for the prosecution became crystal clear after a meeting with the US prosecuting attorney and the under cover ATF agents from the debate. In the meeting, my attorney told the prosecutor that selling store bought firecrackers on Ebay isn’t a big deal and that we can pay a fine and do some community service to be done with everything. When the prosecutor agreed that that sounded reasonable one of the ATF agents pounded his hand on the table and shouted “…but you didn’t hear the things that he said!” This summed up very clearly that they were angry about the things that I had said, not the things that I had done.</i>
There's a question I've had about the citizenship for "investment" programs. It's frequently framed as an investment, not a sale [1]. That seems to imply that there is a chance of getting your money back. So could one "invest" the required amount and then sell the investment a few years later, keeping the citizenship? Or are the investments things that are not particularly liquid, so you're stuck with it?<p>[1] Although it looks like St. Kitts has a donation option as well.
Citizenship is already weird. My wife and I both being born in the US, we are tri-citizens and our descendants will also have tri-citizenship in perpetuity.<p>It would have been quad-citizenship if Norway allowed for multiple passports.
> <i>"Investor programs give the lie to the notion that citizenship is sacred, in a civic sense[.]"</i><p>It's always been a lie. To most governments, their citizens are their cattle.
There is quite a bit of international law about this, from quite a while back. The article notes, "Then again, it is a country’s sovereign right to decide who to let in and who to keep out—and not all countries consider fairness a priority when it comes to immigration policy," and that is largely true. But countries have obligations to their citizens in how they relate to other countries, and some of those reciprocal obligations have been tested in international law. The Guatemala v. Lichtenstein case (the Nottebohm case)[1] decided by the International Court of Justice, the successor to the Permanent Court of International Justice first established under the League of Nations, decided in 1955 that international law can examine the naturalization law of nation-states when citizenship is asserted by a citizen as protection against the actions of another government. The facts in the Nottebohm case were that Mr. Nottebohm had been born in Germany in 1881 and was a German citizen by facts of birth. He lived in Guatemala from 1905 until 1943 without becoming a citizen of Guatemala, traveling to Germany and other places on business from time to time. In October 1939 (just after the beginning of hostilities in Europe in World War II), Nottebohm applied for citizenship in Lichtenstein, which granted him citizenship despite its usual requirement of three years of residence before citizenship. When Nottebohm tried to reenter Guatemala after a period of travel in 1943, Guatemala (which by then had declared war on Germany as part of World War II) did not allow him reentry, but rather interned him as an enemy alien and transferred him to Guatemala's ally, the United States. After the war, the government of Lichtenstein sued the government of Guatemala for not protecting its (Lichtenstein's) citizen. In its defense, Guatemala claimed that it owed no duty to Lichtenstein to protect Nottebohm as a friendly alien, because Nottebohm did not have sufficient genuine connection to Lichtenstein to be treated as a citizen of Lichtenstein. The international court agreed that despite the general rule that countries may decide their own laws of citizenship and immigration, when a person from one country asserts a right of citizenship against the action of another country, the citizenship relationship can be examined by principles of international law.<p>The bottom line for you and for me: if you buy citizenship somewhere, and then travel somewhere else, you may not enjoy consular protection or any other diplomatic representation from the country whose citizenship you bought and paid for. You may be treated as a person with the birth citizenship you started out with (or some other citizenship acquired along the way), rather than the citizenship you chose for yourself, if your connection with your new country is weak and exists on documents more than it exists in fact. So be careful how you shop for citizenship and think ahead before you travel internationally.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.worldlii.org/int/cases/ICJ/1955/1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.worldlii.org/int/cases/ICJ/1955/1.html</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nottebohm_case" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nottebohm_case</a>
Emigration tends to be from poor countries to rich countries.<p>In my experience the poorer people in rich countries tend to be less in favour of immigration than rich people in those countries.
very frustrating issue in Cyprus is that wealthy foreigners get their passport within 1-2 months while non-EU foreigners who have been living in the country for over a decade (my wife included) have to wait for at least 7 more years after applying for citizenship due to the bureaucracy.