Malta Offers Citizenship and All Its Perks for a Price
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Why would anyone choose that? Well, there are many reasons. A booming economy with good jobs, excellent educational opportunities for children, and a robust social safety net (funded by those high taxes) will attract hard-working people from developing countries to come and work to make your economy grow even more.
Both Canada and Australia could have used this tactic a long time ago, but unfortunately both of them are still too strict on skilled workers and trying too hard to attract millionaires. Guess what, those millionaires will not contribute a single penny to your economy besides the initial payment, whereas a thousand skilled workers will actually pay you millions of dollars in taxes every year.
To be eligible for this visa, you need to have had AUD750,000 in eligible assets for the last 5 years = all assets such as stocks, bonds, savings, 2nd / 3rd homes - but not the house that you have lived in.
You also need to have had AUD1,125,000 (1.125 million) in total assets (which can include the house that you live in) for at least the last 2 years.
If you are eligible, then at the time of the decision you made a government approved Designated Investment for at least AUD750,000 in a State or Territory of Australia. This amount must be available for transfer to Australia within a reasonable period when requested."
This obviously doesn't apply for the world at large, but many people from the Americas are likely to have some european roots.
But: in many cases it's not just close ancestors, i.e. you can get italian citizenship if you have _any_ ancestor who was born in italy since the 1800, as long as they didn't renounce it.
> “We want to attract individuals who can add value to our country because of their ideas, and their networks and their businesses and their talent”
If this goal can come to fruition, this would be a great boost to Malta. I don't necessarily see it happening, and see more abuse of the citizenship than anything (probably to gain access to the EU's business benefits). However, it could potentially be a game changer. I wonder if other countries will follow suit.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/26/estonia-offers-...
Maltese citizenship grants you the right to live anywhere in EU and Switzerland. Not just visit, but settle. On the other hand Estonia's e-residency doesn't even give you a right to enter Estonia itself.
It's similar in the fact that you are paying for residency in a way. You get the benefit of having an Estonian residency online, rather than your own, if so inclined.
I don't care for any immigration restriction at all. The war on immigration is failing globally. The US pays about 18 billion Dollars a year to enforce these laws, and has about a dozen Million illegal immigrants. Germany is quickly approaching the point where it should be deporting something like 500.000 persons a year, roughly the dimension of third-reich deportations, to not increase the population of illegal immigrants. But of course we can't deport that many people, even if we wanted to.
There will be a point where the European Union is forced to abandon the war on immigration. I just hope we don't lose our souls while trying to avoid that conclusion.
You just can not deny the fact that massive immigration is a challenge for a society. If we only had an example of a country whose leading film industry produces movies about China towns, Ghettos, racism, the Italian mafia and the like, that I could show you …
Blaming the EU for its war on immigration is shortsighted. The European Union is as pro immigration as it can get. It is a continent with countries that spend the last thousands of years killing each other and people of 28 states are now free to move wherever they want. And it is expanding.
Social integration does not magically work. It is a good thing, when it works, but you need the commitment to invest big sums into it. See how hard it is to do this inside the EU. If we wanted to fix Greece, it would be a small hickup in our statistics.
If the EU now opens its borders without investing billions in integration programs, we will not get our melting pot but our very own salad bowl with Baltimores and Fergusons all over the place. I would say, pick an easier one first and take a look at Greece or Romania and Bulgaria, whose people are free to move here but have problems of similar scale [0] and the bad EU opened up to recently. That investment will pay dividends enabling us to take on the next one.
[0]: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2285796/Romanian-gyp...
And yes, it's about convenience. The number of immigrants could be a few times higher before we're actually at a point where it's not just costing some money.
Where do you get this number from anyway?
You know, Germany has no borders, but the EU has indeed some. You can stop people there. There are other things you can do. Germany is taking proactive measures to stop emigrants from the Balkan.
We could stabilize North Africa again - hopefully this time without the dictators - and get them to stop the smugglers for us, like Gaddafi did.
I am not saying to not let them in either. Just list some requirements like knowledge of the language, a degree, maybe a job, just like the US, Canada and Australia do - typical countries Germans emigrate to, where they have to meet their requirements.
Projecting a further rise in asylum seekers, it's not unreasonable to assume that from the currently 100k-300k additional people arriving as either asylum seekers or poor illegal immigrants, it's not unreasonable to assume that about 500.000 people have to be deported to halt the rise in the "asylum/illegal" population. The exact number doesn't matter, currently, we can deport maybe 20K, so even 100k would mean scaling the capacity by a factor of five.
The examples of US and Canada are particularly bad. Yes, they have strict immigration laws, yes they enforce them strictly, but both countries are losing their war on immigration. The US spends 20 billion Dollar a year on immigration enforcement, and some people say there are still 30 Million illegal immigrants. Canada has a lower population, owing to their geography, but they have roughly 300.000 illegal immigrants that they can't get rid of.
Australia on the other hand fights "illegal immigration" by detaining boat refugees on sea for months, or for years in extraterritorial concentration camps ("out of sight, out of mind"). And that doesn't mean that they don't have a population of illegal immigrants living in their country regardless of all their efforts...
You should be afraid of illegals from the Middle East...
Strangely, I heard the requirement of 10 jobs being created doesn't come with a salary requirement, so I heard of folks being hired at $1 per year.
And the last NYT report on it, if I remember correctly, the line to give up one's US citizenship was 5 years long (and you can't actually do that until you're taxes are all filed and paid)
but you can still move your company to another country and not get double business taxed (which will save lots of money) and get your money in a different way than just a pay check.
It's only fair. If the US government decides to make it difficult for businesses by raising taxes to the point of ridiculousness, I'm going to leave.
(Although you are likely paying the higher, rather than the lower, of the relevant two).
The EU population doesn't tend to equate desirable tax law with lower percentage, anyway.
There's so much filthy global money in Manhattan and California real estate right now that it's mind-boggling. And as Malta is a tiny island nation, and real estate exhibits extreme price inelasticity, this sort of thing can happen quickly.
Real estate hyperinflation is a plague that must be fought with any means necessary.
Moreover, Malta is clearly selling this as a means of entry to the entire EU. Few will likely choose to relocate to Valletta.
I suppose the thing with Malta is anyone who was from the EU can already go there.
Malta is essentially selling EU-wide* permanent residency permits and is making mad money out of it. Greece is in dire need of money, and is also entitled to the issuing of EU-wide permanent residency permits, so it makes sense for Greece to follow suit.
* Technically speaking, Schengen-Area-wide.
Which may not be for long if the EU decides it doesn't like Malta selling EU-wide residency permits.
No, it's actually EU-wide. An EU citizenship doesn't grant automatically grants you access to the labor market of e.g. Switzerland and Norway (both Schengen but not EU) but it does to the UK and Ireland (both non-Schengen but EU).
The Schengen treaty only is about to things: No passport checks on the border and joint police work. It doesn't grant any additional residency rights for citizens.
It's like everybody putting their code in GitHub, and all hackers going after GitHub. Wouldn't it make Malta a good target for kidnappers etc? It's not exactly country with high security etc, unless I'm missing something.
Also, for what it's worth, Malta actually has a pretty good track record for this kind of thing: