Buying a Passport—Should You Do It?

The European Union really, really doesn’t like passports for sale.

The European Commission (the EU’s executive committee or “cabinet”) recently proposed denying visa-free entry to people travelling on passports from countries who sell them for cash.

Citizenship by investment (CBI) has been around since the 1980s.

Governments invite people to invest in either private or public activities that benefit locals, in exchange for citizenship and the passport that goes with it.

For little countries without much economic activity or potential—mainly islands—it’s a great money spinner.

However, the majority of applications for CBI come from people who have no interest in living or even visiting the country in question. All they want is a passport.

The European Commission does not like the idea of someone spending $200,000 to over $1,000,000 just to get a passport from another country…

Statistics on the country of origin of people who take advantage of CBI programs are hard to find. Passport-selling countries jealously guard this information.

However, there are some undisputed facts.

The overwhelming majority of applicants for CBI passports, especially in the Caribbean, come from countries increasingly hostile to the West. Chinese have long been the top customers, followed by Russians and Iranians. These applicants want second passports to get around the travel restrictions they face as nationals of those countries.

An individual Chinese or Iranian may have a perfectly good reason to want a passport.

But the potential for bad folks to get passports… whether spies, saboteurs, assassins, or other bad actors… might be too great a risk—as far as the EU is concerned.

It would be a catastrophe for the CBI industry if the EU were to use passports-for-sale programs as a reason to close visa-free access for Caribbean passport holders.

In response to the EU threat, several Caribbean island countries agreed last month to a minimum investment of $200,000 to qualify for a passport. (The only country that declined to do so was St. Lucia.)

But this may be too little, too late. For someone willing to fork out $150,000 for a passport, an extra $50,000 isn’t going to make a dramatic difference.

In the end, the EU and other concerned governments like the United States and Canada are asking CBI countries to do what they say they’ve been doing all along: Grant meaningful citizenship to people who have a genuine commitment to forge a lasting link with them.

But there isn’t enough money in that to make a workable CBI market… Anyone interested in buying a passport as a Plan B for international travel should pay careful attention to developments as they unfold.