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buro9

> the U.S. has a residency requirement

This is fairly loose though.

Just don't leave the country for more than 6 months, and spend at least 6 months and a day in the country in each year.

The rich aren't constrained too much.

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You also have to pay taxes on worldwide income and maintain a residence if you keep on doing the 6 months deal. I don't think anyone becomes an US resident to dodge taxes.

For the super rich from countries with questionably run regimes, citizenship in the US (and partial transfer of assets) is a great hedge against a potential fall of the regime or seizure of assets.

A 10-20% decline in net worth is totally worth it for that hedge.

The US taxes citizens on world wide income, no matter where they are resident, so they are probably the worst choice among the first world nations for the super rich. There are people, like Eduardo Saverin, who give up their US citizenship to avoid US taxes.

The UK is a haven for a lot of these people, as it has a very attractive non-domiciled rule (live in the UK, only get taxed on UK income or income which you bring into the UK - income which stays out of country is effectively untaxed).

Or, perhaps a jurisdiction like Hong Kong with no capital gains tax might make sense.

I think there is a reason why Chinese money heads to West Coast USA / Canada and Russian money heads to UK. The large Asian population in the Coastal North American cities makes it a place that a rich Chinese person would actually want to live long term and send his family there. It is a place where they would have an easier time assimilating.

I think that can't be discounted.

Why do Russians like the UK?

likely geographic proximity, but I'm not as familiar with Russian behavior as I am with Chinese behavior, so don't quote me on it.

The US CIS is very explicit in stating there is no strict definition of minimum residency duration, and it is in fact up to the discretion of the visa/immigration officer upon your arrival. People who attempt to follow this "6 months + 1 day" idea are going to be sorry when they re-enter.

citation: http://www.uscis.gov/green-card/after-green-card-granted/mai...

For an ultra-rich jet-setter type I would hardly call that a loose requirement.

But you can't do that in 2 countries at once.

I'm sure the rich have ways of being in two places at once (from a paper trail perspective).

They do well with this when it comes to tax, I don't see why they wouldn't do well just because it's a question of citizenship.

I'm sure the rich have ways of being in two places at once (from a paper trail perspective).

No, they don't, because it's based on border crossings recorded in your passport, not something trivial like rent payment records.

A couple of years ago I obtained British citizenship, after living in there for approximately 10 years. As part of the application process I needed to document every day spent out of the country, over the proceeding five years.

This was not as simple as counting the stamps in my passport, and I didn't really know whether the Home Office had any other way of tracking me. It took several days for me to compile the complete list.

As an example, fly London to Belfast, rent a car and drive to the Republic of Ireland. No stamp in the passport.

A few times traveling to the European mainland, other than by air, resulted in a lack of either arrival or departure stamps.

My passport was never stamped on departure from the UK.

Now I have British citizenship, I regularly travel across multiple EU borders and no crossing is recorded in my passport.

My British passport, although two years old, does not have a single stamp in it, and I've been resident in a different EU country for the past year.

What counts as a day? I imagine that a half day in two countries would be counted as one day towards both since neither is probably splitting hairs over whether it was 12 hours and one minute. I would imagine that because of this it is possible to "double spend" a day for every time you fly between the same two counties.

Obviously this assumes that given a range of dates, the number of days is calculated as inclusive of the date of ingress and egress.

At first I thought you were just being obtuse, but you are correct!

USCIS will count the day that an applicant departs from the United States and the day he or she returns as days of physical presence within the United States for naturalization purposes.[1]

As long as the other country counts it the same way, you could spend 6 months in two countries and end up fulfilling the physical presence requirements in both.

[1]http://www.uscis.gov/policymanual/HTML/PolicyManual-Volume12...

Well, at least China only counts it if it's a full 24 hours in the country.

Why would you want to? There can't be that many countries in which one would want citizenship. Especially given that some of them (or is it just the US?) have horrible tax consequences even for expats.

Pretty much just the US does that.

Eritrea is the one other one.

Well, not more than 6 months, no, but I'm legally resident in two countries, one of which cares if I'm there more than 180 days, and the other cares if I'm there for more than 90 days; not everywhere is America.

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