The Real Reason You Need a Second Passport

When Ron and Jenna visited Vietnam 15 years ago, they instantly fell in love with it.

With some quick-fire research, they figured out which visa would allow them to stay for an extended period. And they stayed… for 13 years.

Then, out of the blue, the government announced that the visa category they’d been using was canceled. Anyone who didn’t qualify for another visa had to leave.

Ron and Jenna were devastated. They’d invested their life savings in a local business. They’d bought a home. They’d sold their possessions in the U.S. and had few ties. Their livelihood, their friends, what they thought was their future—in short, their lives—were tied to their new home.

Why Stop at One Passport?

Many people know the benefits of a second passport, like visa-free travel, the ability to live and work in another country—a country that will take you with open arms should things go wrong at home.

But there’s one benefit I’ve rarely seen mentioned: second passports give you the legal right to remain in a foreign country… forever.

Why aren’t more people talking about this?

It’s because most people suffer from “continuity bias.” That’s the tendency to assume the future will be like the recent past.

But unexpected changes do happen. Few of us expected a global pandemic like COVID. And how many people thought there would be a land war in Europe in 2023?

On the residency front, I’m willing to bet lots of people thought, “I’ll apply for that golden visa in Portugal next year”… only now, recent changes have eliminated the option of a modest real estate investment as a path to long-term residency.

Having a passport from a foreign country is an incredible piece of insurance. However unlikely, a temporary—even long-term—residence permit can be withdrawn. But the obstacles to revoking citizenship under current international law make it almost impossible.

Consider Portugal as a hypothetical example…

Love Portugal? Become Portuguese.

A decade ago, the Portuguese government threw open its doors to foreigners with its fabled residential Golden Visa. I mentioned above that Portugal recently shut down this option. But other visa categories are widely available. Today, there are 800,000 non-citizens legally living in the country. That’s almost 8% of the total population. And this noncitizen population is growing by nearly 20% a year.

The motivation for this openness to foreigners has always been economic. The residential visa option was designed to boost housing prices in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. The more recent emphasis on digital nomads, retirees, and other people of independent means helps to bring foreign money into the economy, boosting growth and job creation.

But Portugal is still a poor country. The monthly minimum wage is €760 ($830 USD). Fifty percent of the population earns less than €1000 a month. The influx of foreigners has led to a dramatic increase in housing costs, much of it driven by speculative investment in short-term Airbnb properties. Because of this, 750,000 homes across Portugal are empty most of the time… a figure disturbingly close to the number of foreigners.

The Guardian recently published an article exploring this situation. It started with the story of a Lisbon HR professional named Margarida Custódio. She earns €930 ($1,010 USD) a month. €700 ($760 USD) of that goes to rent. It pointed out that the Portuguese are putting the government under increasing pressure to take dramatic action.

Now, I’m not saying that Portugal is about to kick out its foreign residents. But it isn’t difficult to imagine a situation in which certain types of visas become much harder to renew. That could easily lead to the sort of heartache suffered by Ron and Jenna.

But a Portuguese passport—which is also a European Union passport—is one of the easiest in Europe to acquire. Its five-year period to naturalization is the shortest on the continent. That means anyone living in Portugal on a D2 or D7 visa has to stay in the country for only five years before they can apply for citizenship. And the required bank balances and monthly incomes to qualify for these visas are among the lowest in Europe.

If you could become a citizen, why wouldn’t you?

A Portuguese passport gives you visa-free travel to 173 countries, making it the fourth most powerful in the world. Above all, it gives you the permanent and unlimited right of travel, abode and work throughout the EU.

Given this, why wouldn’t you want to get Portuguese citizenship? And it’s just one of many powerful passports you can acquire by living in your country of choice for five years.

In a few weeks, I’ll be launching a new service called The Global Citizen… where we’ll talk about these passports in detail… along with many other ways to establish a Plan B overseas.