Passports for sale
dissentmagazine.org
dissentmagazine.org
For example:
USA
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
UK
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).
Canada
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
Malta now requires a years residency before you get your passport:
USD $1 million + tax on the worldwide income of a millionaire for 5 years + spending of a millionaire in the national economy for 5 * 182 days + tax on the worldwide income of a millionaire for as long as he remains a citizen plus 10 years afterwards
In UK's case:
£1 million + tax on the worldwide income of a millionaire for 6 years + spending of a millionaire in the national economy for 6 * 182 days
You mentioned 2,3,4 years for the indefinite leave to remain and the powerful non-domicile tax status, all of which are true but irrelevant to this analysis. Anyone trying to gain citizenship through the investor program must be a tax resident for at least 6 years.
In Canada's case:
CAD $0.8 million + tax on the worldwide income of a millionaire for 3 years + spending of a millionaire in the national economy for 3 * 182 days
In St. Kitts's case:
A one time payment of USD $0.25 million
It is not for no reason that every corrupt Russian oligarch and oil baron and African dictator flocks to London.
UK does not tax worldwide income based on UK citizenship, but it does tax worldwide income for all UK domiciled residents, which includes all citizenship-seeking immigrants.
Your trivia on the non-domicile status is interesting, but both the grandparent and myself have already mentioned it, and I specifically said that it's "irrelevant to this analysis".
I do want to take a moment to point out the ridiculousness of paying half a million dollars or more being one of the easiest ways to get a green card in America.
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.
And when I helped a medical student from West Africa with his travel itinerary to the Caribbean (which I think was his only 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.)
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?".
His original itinerary involved six countries and four separate airlines across two bookings, so I don't think that's inconsistent with what you said.
AFTER EDIT: I am sincerely interested, and I think "hell" may be a bit of an exaggeration, so I'm not sure what's objectionable about this question. But let me know if you have an objection, okay?
I am waiting 8 months to renew my Swiss residence permit (I have to do it every year), despite that I live in Switzerland for 9 years already.
Canadians can enter the country for 6 months without a visa. This makes it is easy to work illegally for people who are willing to take that risk.
There is the TN visa, which is easy to obtain. But it's only for 8 specific professions. I for one worked as a Computer Systems Analyst. A job title I never heard before that. Once you have this visa it's bound to your employment, when you loose your job, you have to leave the country in 10 days. This is a temporary visa and you can not apply for a green card.
Then there is H1B. This visa allows you to apply for a green card, but you can only apply for it on one specific date per year, if you can get it depends on a lottery (!), which decides if you can work 6 month later. Also it requires a mountain of paperwork, which however the companies lawyer will normally take care of. From there it takes 2-3 year to get a green card.
I guess you'd need limitations on health care and an awareness campaign about it (so that confused people didn't travel in an attempt to save money), but other than that, I think the only stopper is the slightly higher level of paranoia the U.S. shows towards foreign visitors.
For the TN program you simply present yourself to the immigration officer when you enter the country (this part is something that even a citizen will have to do), show them your documentation, pay $50, and you're done. You don't even have to fill out a form.
Try explaining to them why you have a degree in Electrical Engineering but work as a Data Scientist. My friend tried, and it would be funny if it didn't almost cost him his job. He literally got in due to a shred of mercy caused by his girlfriend's tears at the possibility of a refused visa.
The USA sometimes feels like a dystopian nightmare, mainly populated with idiotic yes-men and ruled by Machiavellian bureaucrats. There are a few niche ecosystems that are impressive, but they are by far the minority.
You can theoretically only do the border visa part once.
Also remember to have the documentation when you cross the border, in case some border guard forgot to stamp your passport with your renewal number, which has happened to me.
Their computer systems are so bad (or they are so untrained) that they can't just look it up by passport number. It's supposedly a pretty complicated process on their end at the secondary screening office.
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.
If you've ever read some of the, frankly, heartbreaking immigration stories (e.g. families separated for sometimes tens of years). The US seems to have an undisclosed quota in certain parts of the world and a lot of people get rejected for unquantifiable reasons (and then get accepted the second time without changing their status/application). This even seems to occur on family visas which it shouldn't.
You just dismissing the entire vias struggle into living within a country for a couple of years and saying a stupid pledge is ignorant and completely out of touch with the reality for millions of poor people (and even many in the "middle class").
All I meant was that this is a far better situation than being able to straight-up buy Citizenship, say, from Malta.
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.
Oh, and when they stop being useful, the citizenship is stripped. This is common knowledge and leads to interesting situations.
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.
So, please, do not use Qatar as an example.
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.
I have come to expect as much from people cheerleading for the state, it's depressing to have my cynical biases validated so firmly.
http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/11/12/bitcoin-venture-capital...
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.
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.
[1] Although it looks like St. Kitts has a donation option as well.
So typically you have to invest that amount up until you get either change of status or citizenship. So 2-5 years depending on country and their rules.
I will say that many of these programs don't seem to have kept pace with inflation so the US EB-5 (1 mil) for example would be 1.8 mil in 2014 if it had kept pace.
It would have been quad-citizenship if Norway allowed for multiple passports.
You can't pass on your US citizenship unless you have lived in the US for N years, with N being 5, IIRC.
> our descendants will also have tri-citizenship in perpetuity
is probably wrong. If the descendants never reside in the US, they won't be able to pass on the citizenship to their own children unless they traveled to the US just to give birth.
I wonder how this interacts with 8 USC 1401(b)? That says:
The following shall be nationals and citizens of the
United States at birth:
...
(b) a person born in the United States to a member of an
Indian, Eskimo, Aleutian, or other aboriginal tribe: Provided,
That the granting of citizenship under this subsection shall
not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of such
person to tribal or other property;
I suppose that 1401(b) would still be meaningful in the case where someone is born in the United States to an Indian, Eskimo, etc., but is not considered to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States for some reason. Then the 14th would not grant them citizenship, but 1401(b) would as long as that did not impair their tribal rights.
That raises the question of when someone can be born in the United States but not subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
I realize that "provided that" in common speech more often means "so long as" or "only when", but "provided, that" or "provided: that" in statutory text could be read as simply introducing an additional and slightly indepedendent statutory provision. I think the comma is significant here for encouraging this reading.
It's always been a lie. To most governments, their citizens are their cattle.
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.
would you accept it if a country kept out black people or people who are gay?
The world accepts the existence of North Korea. What do you think?
Sovereign rights are not sacred. They are a holdback from the middle ages that allow the tyranny of the sovereign.
Granted.
> They are a holdback from the middle ages that allow the tyranny of the sovereign.
Not in a constitutional form of government, where the sovereign (in most cases the majority of the voters, as represented by a congress or parliament and referenda) is restrained to protect the rights of minority groups. Contrast this with anarchism, where the majority can tyrannize over minorities which have no recourse.
yes restrained somewhat. But there still are many minorities in the US whose rights are not protected.
> Contrast this with anarchism, where the majority can tyrannize over minorities which have no recourse.
I think you have it in reverse. In most constitutional democracies, the majorities can legally tyrannize over minorities with the minorities having no recourse at all. Unless your argument is that the US hasn't been a constitutional government for most of its history.
Anarchy is about eliminating the monopoly of violence that governments use to obtain obedience from minorities.
>> Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited--or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society.
>> - Errico Malatesta
That's simply not true. Minority rights are growing, not just in theory but in practice, in constitutional democracies all over the world.
> Anarchy is about eliminating the monopoly of violence that governments use to obtain obedience from minorities.
That's nice in theory, but you can't run a country on theory.
I don't accept that as the definition of anarchism, any more than I accept "The Best Person On Earth" as the definition of my next-door neighbor. In theory, it would be nice if my neighbor were the best person on Earth, but I doubt very much it's true, and I don't intend to act as if that person were utterly without flaw by removing the locks on my door.
People don't choose anarchy because they want violence. They choose it because they don't like violence. Those that choose violence want to obtain the "archy"/power for themselves. Sure there are violent power hungry people that claim to be anarchists but that is not the core. They are like the Gay bashing gay people.
If you are not an anarchist, you don't get to decide who is anarchist and what an anarchist believes. That there are some violent anarchists does not mean that all anarchists are violent. It's much better to take people at their word and observe their actions, rather than to impose your own morality on them.
Kind of like telling gays that they are violent rapists and unfit to have families and marriages. As this democracy used to portray them and continues to do so.
Everything's short of where it should be. That's reality. Tearing down this system and replacing it with another won't change that.
> People don't choose anarchy because they want violence. They choose it because they don't like violence.
Supposedly. Ideally. That's another case of having a nice theory, which may or may not reflect reality.
> Those that choose violence want to obtain the "archy"/power for themselves.
OK, and how do anarchists stop them without choosing violence?
> Sure there are violent power hungry people that claim to be anarchists but that is not the core.
No True Scotsman. Not very persuasive.
> If you are not an anarchist, you don't get to decide who is anarchist and what an anarchist believes.
And anarchists don't get to decide who I consider an anarchist and what I believe. It goes both ways.
> It's much better to take people at their word and observe their actions
I observe their actions. The G8 Summit in Seattle was very enlightening.
> Kind of like telling gays that they are violent rapists and unfit to have families and marriages. As this democracy used to portray them and continues to do so.
Wrong.
how about north and south america?
how about all the rest of the world?
How about if you didn't have borders and didn't need to spend money on militaries to defend those borders, like California doesn't spend much money on the military to defend its border against oregon?
It would be difficult to govern any entity that large effectively.
> how about north and south america?
Ditto, only worse.
> how about all the rest of the world?
Worse still.
> How about if you didn't have borders and didn't need to spend money on militaries to defend those borders, like California doesn't spend much money on the military to defend its border against oregon?
Tell that to the people fighting ISIS.
You do business with anyone who has business in India? If so, well...
Of course, people should do their homework before purchasing expensive insurance policies that might or might not pay out when the need arises.
If you follow the social contract tradition of Western political philosophy to its logical conclusion, a state is just that: a glorified insurance policy that people feel compelled to buy in order to avoid the various dangers and inconveniences of statelessness. In exchange for regular premiums (taxes), you get assurance that a bunch of dudes with guns and bombs will protect your life, liberty, and property from anyone who dares to harm you. The fact that you also happen to be a shareholder (citizen) of this insurance company is a nice perk, because it means it's at least theoretically possible to make the company's interests align with yours. But that doesn't change the fundamental fact that the state is a glorified insurance company.
It's nice to see that a lot of the baseless romanticism and fanaticism that used to surround statehood during the last couple of centuries are finally fading away in favor of a more rational analysis of costs and benefits. Right now, it's only happening with millionaires who have much to gain and lose. But I wish ordinary people also had the chance to calmly evaluate whether the premiums they're paying are worth the benefits they're getting. The usual act of voting with your hands can become radically more effective with combined with the threat of voting with your feet.
In my experience the poorer people in rich countries tend to be less in favour of immigration than rich people in those countries.