Residency Vs. Citizenship
By RJF Wall, Overseas Property Investor and Professional Traveller
Many may now be aware of the “Five Flags Theory,” and the benefits of obtaining a second citizenship. For a number of years I’ve followed various groups that help point you to possible citizenship by investment programs, the quickest/cheapest/best passports you can get, etc. After having lived now in Latin America with my partner in various locations, I’d now argue that residency has more immediate value than any sort of second passport you can get.
You’ve probably heard the various arguments about why a second passport is important: it gives you an alternative travel document, it allows you freedom in some cases from your home country, it sometimes opens up travel to additional countries, etc. All of that is true, but if you are living abroad, what I’ve found is more important is the ability to stay in the country of your choosing as long as you want to stay there, without having to play games with immigration departments.
If you have a Tier-1 passport right now, this allows you entrance into most countries visa free (or really, an “automatic tourist visa”). But what if you want to stay there?Depending on where you’re located, the visa may be good for as few as 30 days or as many as 180 days. For someone who travels frequently internationally, you may never outstay the visa of your home base. And some gringos go years simply crossing the border to make a “visa run” and renew their tourist visa year after year.
In my experience, i’ve found the visa run process to be stressful after some time. For example, living in Costa Rica in San Jose might mean that you’d need to plan an early morning drive up north to cross into Nicaragua and return back. You can make a short vacation of it, maybe visit San Juan Del Sur and come back in a few days. But after a while it can become tiresome and you just do a day trip, usually with a driver because you’d have a hard time bringing your car into the other country. And it’ll just likely happen that you’ve waited until one of the last days, and you really have other things you have to do. Instead, you’ve got to plan a day out to run across the border. The driver costs money, you lost a weekday in the process, and you know you’ve got to do it again in a few months. It’s a headache.
Worse yet, many countries are getting stricter with the visa runs and not allowing them after multiple uses. This involves questioning, immigration officials have the right to give you a shorter visa when you re-enter, and nobody wants all of that stress if indeed the goal is to live long-term in a country at the end of the day. And that is presuming you have a “good” passport in the first place. If you (or your travel companion) are traveling on a passport from, say, Honduras, you’re really going to feel the pressure of trying to get by on just a tourist visa. Perhaps with your Canadian passport you got the 180 day visa entry into Costa Rica, for example, but your Honduran wife only got 30. Now what do you do?Go to Panama or Nicaragua once a month? Cross your fingers every time that your Honduran wife doesn’t get turned down this time for re-entry?
In this sense, the fact that you’re using your U.S. passport, or your St. Kitts passport you bought, or your Irish passport you got by citizen by descent, really doesn’t make much of a difference in your living situation. Regardless of the passport, your right to stay in the country is limited. What matters more is having a residency to allow you to stay indefinitely.
In addition, there are certain basic things you can’t do in some countries without residency, such as opening a bank account or even buying a car. Yes, where there’s a will there’s a way, and there are often “fixers” who can somehow get you through to what you want, but if you’re really wanting to establish yourself in a base, do you want to go through that hassle?
Final Thoughts
We’ve lived in a few different countries now, and each one was with the idea of living for as long as we desired (i.e., not to be a perpetual traveler). There is a lot of security entering the country knowing we can stay as long as we want, and even put down roots if we so desire, versus worrying about an immigration official deciding (as once happened) to only give a ten-day entry on a tourist visa.
If you’re just starting this process of international diversification, still in your home country, it’s tempting to look at these “sexy” programs of second citizenship and having multiple passports. A second passport certainly has value–But in my experience, residence has more immediate value when you move to another country.
