Motivation

Golden Visas or Golden passports are defined as policies developed by countries to mainly attract wealthy people from other countries and provide them citizenship or permanent residencies in exchange for a hefty amount of investment. Between 2011 and 2013, many European states introduced these programs. Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Spain, Portugal, and Netherland started Residence via investment programs. These schemes are mainly targeted toward high-net-worth individuals. This is not the only way to get access to permanent residency or citizenship, due to the aging population all the countries are trying to attract high-skilled migrants with the intention of permanent settlement. So, there are also various temporary and permanent residency programs for high skilled migrants. There is separate literature evidence on all these topics but a lack of literature evidence on comparative analysis of all these programs. So, the aim of this study is to analyze in detail as many countries as possible regarding all types of permanent residence programs and citizenship programs that an adult can obtain and provide recommendations for action to the interested parties.

Methods

we mainly used the existing academic literature as the background knowledge and created a comparative analysis for sixteen countries in detail to give an overview regarding residence and citizenship via investment programs and temporary and permanent residence programs for highly skilled individuals. All the programs for the selected countries including citizenship programs have been discussed individually to get a better and more detailed overview.

Terminologies

Interesting Facts about Investment Migration

• The global investment migration market might grow into a $100 billion (USD) industry by 2025.
• The top investment immigration programs by revenue are US EB-5, UK Tier 1, and Quebec IIP.
• Over 750 million people across the world are willing to migrate to a new country if they could.

Comparison of 16 countries

After a deep analysis of all types of permanent and citizenship programmes, 16 countries have been selected which happen compared on the basis of:

Recommendation of action

Discussion

• The CIP and RIP programs are nowadays very common. This scheme is available to almost every country from large, developed nations to small islands

• The shortest route to citizenship- Argentina
• Israel and Japan don't have any CIP and RIP programs
• Monaco, Singapore, and Thailand do not allow dual citizenship

References

Henley & partners

Harvey Law Group

Residence and Citizenship via investment

Immigrant Invest