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Comment by lars512 | Hacker News Reader

I’m all for dual citizenships, but a downside nobody’s talking about is that you have to spend 5-10 years of your life in your new country to get it, not factoring in multi-year waiting times that may exist for processing citizenship. Essentially, you need to be comfortable migrating.

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As they say, "If it was easy, everyone would be doing it."

I incidentally moved to Europe for work several years ago without any particular plans to pursue dual citizenship, but I stuck around long enough I'm almost eligible so now I'm going for it because it'd open a lot of doors.

In my case it wasn't a downside at all, as I love living here (moving from a high-crime city to virtually-no-crime was great, and I love the atmosphere/environment here) and although there are always challenges with migration, for me none of them were too bad. But I had good personal circumstances for migration (few domestic attachments). For others, it could be more of a hurdle.

My experience is that acculturation took a while, but it was much faster than the rate of political change in my birth country.

Unless you happen to be lucky enough to be born a dual citizen.

You can accelerate 5-10 years to 3 months using pay for citizenship schemes. For example Grenada has one where you get citizenship and a passport in return for "donating" $150k USD to the government. Grenada's is interesting because you get visa-free access to China. Antigua and Barbuda are running a "50% off sale" (I kid you not..) where the cost is only $100k USD (normally $200k USD)

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