President Donald Trump created a stir last week when he announced a new plan to combat the national debt: Selling aspiring Americans a pathway to citizenship for $5 million.
“You have a green card. This is a gold card,” Trump said during an Oval Office news conference. “We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship. And wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban endorsed Trump’s plan as a replacement for the HB-1 visa program. “If you ain’t gonna hire American, pay taxpayers for the right,” he wrote on X.
While Trump’s plan has several logistical and legal issues — namely that it would be outside the scope of his powers as president and that it likely lacks sufficient distinction from the already existing EB-5 visa — such immigration policies are not uncommon on a global scale.
Nearly half of all countries have laws in place to allow some form of residency or citizenship by investment. Nearly 60 have active programs, including nations as disparate as Malta, Cambodia, and Dominica. Travel documents obtained through these programs are colloquially referred to as “golden visas.” In the last decade, the popularity of these visa programs have exploded across the globe.
“From our perspective, the demand at the moment is huge,” Dominic Jones, the managing director of Greener Pastures New Zealand, which assists people in obtaining the New Zealand Active Investor Plus visa, told Quartz. “It’s unprecedented and we’re blown away by the interest.”
Though golden visas are popular across the world, particularly for financially successful families and individuals from emerging economies, Americans have outstripped many other countries in pursuit of citizenship or residency by investment in recent years.
Between 2019 and 2024, Henley & Partners, a firm dedicated to assisting the wealthy obtain golden visas, reported a 1,000% increase in its American client base. Dominic Volek, the firm’s group head of private clients, told Quartz that more Americans have sought out his firm for assistance obtaining residency or citizenship by investment than the next four countries combined.
At the same time, however, golden visas are often highly controversial in the countries that already have these programs. Many critics argue that the programs amount to selling passports and say they’re frequently used for money laundering.
Here’s everything you need to know about golden visas and residency by investment.
What makes a golden visa ‘golden’?
There are two reasons why golden visas earned their shiny nickname. The first, and perhaps more obvious reason, is the price tag attached. Depending on the desired country of residence, people seeking visas need to invest in the country through purchasing property, putting money into the economy, or making outright contributions to the government.
The other reason these visas are golden, however, is their flexibility.
“There’s very little physical presence required to maintain the right to reside [in the desired country],” Volek told Quartz. “You can live there if you want, but you don’t have to. It’s a good backup plan, depending on your outlook on the geopolitical challenges of your home country.”
While limited residency requirements are a perk for those seeking golden visas, they’re also the cause of significant controversy.
Malta, for example, is considered the gold standard of golden visas: Henley & Partners consistently ranks the country’s golden visa program as the best in the world. But the ease of accessing Maltese residency and citizenship after spending extremely limited periods of time inside the country has come under fire from other European Union member states. In 2020, the European Commission opened infringement procedures against Malta and Cyprus for “selling” EU citizenship.
“The Commission considers that the granting of EU citizenship for pre-determined payments or investments without any genuine link with the Member States concerned, undermines the essence of EU citizenship,” it said.
A 2021 joint investigation by the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation, The Guardian, Dossier Centre and five independent Maltese media organizations used leaked Henley & Partners documents to reveal that wealthy individuals from countries including China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia planned to spend an average of just 16 days in Malta before obtaining Maltese passports.
In response to the investigation, Henley & Partners issued a statement in 2021 saying it was “proud of the service that it has provided to Malta and its people.”
“We are fully aware of the potential inherent risks in handling client applications for residence and citizenship and have invested significant time and capital in recent years to create a governance structure that is committed to the highest of standards,” the statement continued. “Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the countries involved to investigate and vet applicants.”
Why do people pursue residency by investment?
Like all immigrants and expatriates, the people seeking golden visas are motivated by a variety of factors.
“It’s rising geopolitical uncertainty, retrenching of globalization, and risk mitigation,” Jones explained. “In the same way high network individuals mitigate risk in their own investments by having a portfolio, having a second residency or citizenship option is something they are increasingly looking into.”
People seeking New Zealand’s golden visa, he said, are often motivated by a desire to reside in such a famously beautiful and laid back country. But New Zealand is an outlier: In many cases, when people seek golden visas, they have little intention of ever residing full time in the country.
For those from emerging economies, in Africa or southeast Asia, gaining a golden visa is often a strategy to travel with fewer restrictions, Volek said. If their home country’s passport is comparatively weak, a golden visa can ensure that they travel internationally with ease. Malta and Austria are considered a desirable country for those seeking golden visas because, as members of the EU, their visas open up access to travel, work, and study across Europe.
Even for Americans, who have an especially strong passport, the allure of EU residency is still highly desirable. It allows for even more visa-free travel and the right to live, study, and work across Europe.
“Most of the clients are interested in having an insurance policy in place,” said Volek. “That’s been a big shift over the last few years. Security is no longer just a concern for emerging markets.”
Do countries with golden visa programs actually benefit?
While the individuals obtaining golden visas benefit through a long-term sense of security, the governments offering the visas receive something more tangible and immediate: a massive influx of cash.
The exact mechanism for investment varies from country to country. It “very much depends on what the country is trying to achieve,” said Volek.
In New Zealand, for example, individuals are required to invest between $2.9 million and $5.8 million. Investment options include philanthropy, managed funds, or property development.
“This is a really positive tool for New Zealand,” said Jones. “We have a low population. We have pretty shallow capital pools. For us to attract both financial and human capital is really, really valuable for our country.”
Conversely, in Malta, golden visa recipients make a non-refundable contribution to the Maltese government.
“The government realized they have something that is attractive to successful, wealthy people,” said Volek. “So they set up a program where investors contribute to a Maltese sovereign fund. There’s no financial return to [investors]. [Their] money is gone. But Malta then uses that for projects in the country. They build bridges, they build roads, they have bursary programs for local students.”
There is reason to believe, however, that the economic benefits of golden visas programs are overstated. In 2024, Australia scrapped its golden visa program, with government officials arguing that the program was “delivering poor economic outcomes.”
“It has been obvious for years that this visa is not delivering what our country and economy needs,” Australian Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil said in a statement last year after the country ended the program.
Over the years, investigations from the government, watchdog groups, and journalists revealed the program was vulnerable to exploitation — especially from wealthy criminals using their investment in Australia as a money-laundering scheme.
The United Kingdom also recently canceled its golden visa program. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there was widespread concern that wealthy Russians were abusing the system. In the aftermath of the rollback, members of the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat parties criticized the program for enabling international criminals.
“Golden visas were a shocking loophole for dirty money to make its way into our economy, and for oligarchs to buy their way into this country,” Labour Member of Parliament Margaret Hodge said last year, according to the Guardian. Hodge, who chaired a parliamentary anti-corruption committee, continued, “we need full transparency on who benefited from it and what went wrong.”