Golden Visas and Golden Passports: The New Global Playbook for HNWIs and Family Offices

Golden Visas: A Fast-Track Second Door

In simple terms, a golden visa is a residency-by-investment program: a government offers foreign nationals a residence permit—sometimes temporary, sometimes on a longer-term basis—in exchange for qualifying investment. That investment can be real estate, job-creating business activity, fund subscriptions, government bonds, or direct contributions to state funds.

For high-net-worth individuals, this is essentially a mobility and jurisdictional hedge. It provides the right to live, work, or at least spend extended time in another country, often with visa-free access across a wider region. In many cases, physical presence requirements are limited, allowing the visa to function as a “plan B” or insurance policy rather than an immediate relocation decision.

Golden Passports: Citizenship as an Asset Class

Golden passports—citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programs—go further. Instead of residency, they grant full citizenship, typically via a substantial investment or donation. In an EU member state, that can translate into the right to live, work, and study across all 27 EU countries, making it a far more powerful lever than a single-country visa.

CBI programs tend to be concentrated in smaller, capital-constrained countries: notably in the Caribbean, parts of Europe, and a few outliers such as some Middle Eastern and Pacific states. Investment can mean a non-refundable contribution to a national development fund, a purchase of government-approved real estate, or backing a public-benefit project. Over time, some residency programs also allow long-term holders to naturalize and obtain citizenship—though timelines are lengthening in places like Portugal, where the traditional five-year path is reportedly under political pressure to stretch closer to a decade for some non-EU applicants.

Why Golden Visas Emerged—and Why They’re Under Pressure

Golden visa frameworks are not new. Canada ran a high-profile federal investor program as early as the 1980s, exchanging residency for passive capital and job creation. In Europe, the concept gained momentum in the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis, when austerity-stricken states such as Portugal, Greece, Spain, and Hungary sought new revenue and capital inflows.

The logic was straightforward: sell residency to non-EU investors, particularly from China, Russia, and the Middle East, in exchange for investment in property, businesses, or funds. The programs generated billions in real-estate and financial inflows, plugged budget gaps, and bolstered construction and services. They also, however, contributed to housing-price inflation in some cities, attracted politically sensitive capital, and raised acute concerns about money laundering and security screening.

The result: a tightening cycle. The European Commission has repeatedly warned that golden visa and passport programs create vulnerabilities to illicit finance and security risks. Several EU and UK-aligned countries—including the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Greece, and Spain—have closed or significantly hardened their schemes, often citing both housing pressures and national-security concerns.

The Trump “US Gold Card”: A New Entrant

Against that backdrop, the US has stepped into the space in its own way. In late 2025, the Trump administration announced a “Trump Gold Card”—a fast-track immigrant visa program for individuals willing to contribute USD 1 million (or USD 2 million via a corporate sponsor) to the US Treasury, earmarked to “promote commerce and American industry.”

The Gold Card is positioned as a premium track for wealthy foreigners seeking US residency without navigating traditional employment or family routes. A companion “Platinum Card,” priced at USD 5 million, has been promoted as allowing holders to spend up to 270 days per year in the US without triggering taxation on non-US income—an arrangement that instantly drew attention from tax advisors and policy analysts, and that remains politically controversial and under close scrutiny.

For global investors accustomed to Europe’s golden-visas wave, the Gold Card represents a reframing of the US as a pay-to-play destination, even as Washington maintains pressure on other countries to tighten their own investor programs.

European Programs: From Open Door to Narrow Corridor

Europe remains central to the golden visa conversation, but the era of low-friction real estate routes is ending.

• Portugal became the flagship program in 2012, initially requiring €500,000 in property, later reduced to €350,000 for certain rehabilitated assets. Over time, roughly 90% of raised capital flowed into property, reshaping urban markets and pushing up prices. Under political pressure, Lisbon has now eliminated direct real estate purchases as a qualifying route, steering applicants instead toward regulated investment funds, scientific research, or job-creating corporate investments.
• Greece, Spain, and Hungary joined the wave around 2013, offering residence permits tied to real estate purchase thresholds. Greece has since raised thresholds in key areas and diversified routes (including startup investment), while Spain and others have curtailed or effectively frozen their regimes.
• Across the bloc, political sentiment has turned more skeptical. The war in Ukraine intensified concerns about Russian and other politically sensitive capital using golden visas as a backdoor into the Schengen Area. That, combined with housing crises in several member states, has tilted the balance against broad-based investor residency programs.

For HNWIs, this does not mean the door is closed, but it is narrower, more heavily regulated, and less property-centric than a decade ago.

The Caribbean: Still the Epicenter of Golden Passports

The Caribbean remains the world’s densest cluster of fully-fledged citizenship-by-investment regimes. Nations such as Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, and Saint Lucia have built meaningful portions of their fiscal capacity on CBI receipts, with some economies deriving well over half of government revenue from these programs.

However, external pressure has forced significant changes. Concerned that Caribbean passports—many of which offer visa-free access to the UK and Schengen states under separate agreements—could serve as a vector for criminals and sanctioned individuals, European and US authorities have pushed for tighter controls. In response, the five main Caribbean CBI states agreed in 2024 to:

• Introduce a minimum price floor of USD 200,000 per citizenship application.
• Strengthen due diligence standards and third-party background checks.
• Enhance information-sharing with partner governments and international bodies.

For serious, well-advised applicants, these shifts are a double-edged sword. Costs are higher, but program credibility and long-term viability are arguably stronger, as governments aim to demonstrate responsible gatekeeping rather than volume-driven sales.

Nauru: Climate Risk and Citizenship for Survival

One of the most unusual golden passport narratives is emerging in the Pacific. The remote island state of Nauru has turned to citizenship offerings in part to fund the enormous costs of climate adaptation and potential internal relocation. With large portions of its population living in low-lying coastal zones vulnerable to sea-level rise and flooding, the state faces existential infrastructure challenges.

By monetizing citizenship, Nauru is effectively selling a scarce sovereign resource to underwrite climate resilience, reframing CBI from a luxury mobility product to a fiscal survival strategy. For investors, the passport is less about mobility than about aligning capital with a compelling—and controversial—climate story.

New Zealand: A Contrarian, High-Trust Option

While many advanced economies are restricting or dismantling investor visas, New Zealand has taken the opposite tack. Facing a post-2024 recession and lagging capital inflows, Wellington announced that it would relax key requirements of its investor visa regime, including:

• Dropping English-language tests for certain investor categories.
• Broadening the scope of acceptable investments beyond narrow asset classes.
• Adjusting minimum-stay requirements to make the program more attractive to globally mobile HNWIs.

The result has been what officials describe as “red hot” interest from wealthy individuals in the US and Europe, many of whom now view New Zealand as a geopolitical safe harbor with strong rule of law, high-quality healthcare and education, and relative insulation from global flashpoints.

How Golden Visa and Passport Programs Work in Practice

While program details vary dramatically, most regimes share a few core mechanics:

• Capital Commitment: Applicants must invest or contribute a threshold amount—often in the low- to mid-six figures for Caribbean CBI, and from several hundred thousand to multiple millions for residency programs in major economies.
• Due Diligence and Compliance: Background checks, source-of-funds verification, and anti–money laundering screening are standard. The reputational stakes for host states are high; failures can trigger sanctions or visa suspensions from bigger powers.
• Physical Presence and Renewal: Some golden visas require substantial time on the ground to maintain status or progress to permanent residence or citizenship; others allow minimal presence but limit local tax exposure and social-rights access.
• Pathways to Citizenship: In many cases, residency can eventually evolve into naturalization, but timelines and eligibility criteria are lengthening under political pressure.

Sophisticated investors now treat golden visas similarly to any other regulated cross-border investment product: they evaluate jurisdiction risk, legal robustness, exit options for investments, and the likelihood of future rule changes.

Who Opposes Golden Visas—and Why

Opposition to golden visa and passport schemes falls into three main buckets:

• Security and Crime Risk: Law enforcement agencies and the European Commission argue that these programs can be exploited by money launderers, sanctioned individuals, and organized crime networks, especially where vetting is weak or outsourced without oversight.
• Inequality and Legitimacy: Critics in civil society and academia see pay-to-play residency as entrenching a two-tier system, where the rich can buy rights that refugees, skilled workers, and long-term residents struggle to obtain. This raises philosophical questions about whether nationality and residency should ever be commoditized.
• Local Economic Distortions: In cities such as Lisbon, Athens, and Barcelona, golden-visa-driven capital flows are blamed—sometimes disproportionately—for driving up housing costs, fostering absentee ownership, and exacerbating supply shortages.

The resulting political pressure has already closed or fundamentally reshaped several programs. In that sense, the “golden visa asset class” is best understood as politically contingent, not guaranteed.

Where Can You Still Realistically Obtain a Golden Visa or Passport?

Opportunities remain, but they are more constrained and more nuanced than the early 2010s landscape. Broadly, serious investors still look at:

• Caribbean CBI for relatively fast, straightforward citizenship, now at higher but more harmonized price points.
• Selective European routes, especially fund-based or business-investment tracks in countries like Portugal and Greece, where property is no longer the sole or main gateway.
• New Zealand and a handful of other advanced economies experimenting with revamped investor visas.
• Special regimes like the US Gold Card, assuming they stabilize into a predictable legal framework and withstand domestic political scrutiny.

For each, the key question is not just “Can I get in today?” but “How likely is this regime to survive, in recognizable form, over the next 5–10 years?”

Snapshot of Key Golden Visa / Passport Trends

For CEOs, investors, family offices, and policymakers, the message is clear: golden visas and passports are no longer an easy arbitrage; they are a regulated, politicized, and increasingly premium component of global wealth strategy. The opportunity set is shrinking—but for those who move thoughtfully and with expert counsel, it is not gone.