Why My Friend Plans to Buy a Maltese Passport

You have to walk a mile in a man’s moccasins to understand why he wants a second passport from Malta. 

I come to this observation after a short chat here in Saudi Arabia with my friend, Hadi.  

After my recent trip to Oman, I popped over to the Saudi city of Jeddah to spend some time with Hadi, a fellow crypto and NFT investor I befriended online. He’s a Palestinian, born in Jordan, who has spent much of his 27 years living in Jeddah on his Jordanian passport. 

That’s not necessarily a problem. And it’s not like he’s looking for a way out of Saudi Arabia. He likes it here, and with good reason—Jeddah is a great city. 

Nevertheless, he realizes from his own perspective the message I regularly offer up in my dispatches: A second passport opens up a world of new opportunities. 

Most Americans, I have to imagine, never really give much thought to a second passport. Why futz around with that? Uncle Sam’s Little Blue Book of Travel is one of the best on the planet (#9, for those keeping score, based on the 112 countries we can visit without first having to apply for a visa). 

But many, many reasons exist for packing a second passport. 

The most prominent reason: If American society ever goes pear-shaped (and given the level of social discord and governmental debt in the U.S., that is not a trifling worry), a second passport means you have a legal way out of the country and a destination to which you can alight. 

It also means a different set of possibilities that are not open to Americans who only have a U.S. passport as their global form of identity.  

The great bulk of financial institutions outside America almost always decline to work with U.S. clients.  

The reason: Uncle Sam’s governmental minions are overly eager to impose all kinds of nastiness on banks, brokerage firms, and crypto exchanges overseas that don’t abide by their paternalistic rules that seem to suppose U.S. citizens are too stupid to manage their finances as they see fit. 

Instead of risking U.S. governmental wrath for the dumbest of transgressions, those same financial institutions ringfence America and pretend it doesn’t exist.  

That means Americans can find it difficult, or even impossible, to access some of the most interesting and profitable investment opportunities in areas like crypto, foreign stocks, high-yield savings accounts…things that Europeans, Japanese, South Africans, Brazilians, etc. can access no problem. 

But when you have a second passport, suddenly these doors open for you. In the legal vision of those banks and whatnot, you’re now Panamanian, Portuguese, or Czech…or whatever nationality is tied to the second passport you obtain. 

Now you have access to products and services you’d be locked out of otherwise. (This also works if you have long-term or permanent residence in a foreign country, which I have benefited from by having a Czech long-term residence card.) 

For Hadi, the rationale for wanting a Maltese passport is slightly different, though the underlying theme is still “better opportunity.” 

A Maltese passport is a European Union passport, and an EU passport carries a great deal of cache all over the world. Indeed, aside from South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, every passport that ranks ahead of America (including Malta) comes from an EU country. 

In Saudi Arabia, that cache means Hadi can apply for jobs here in Jeddah that automatically pay higher wages just because he’d be seen as an EU citizen. 

I’d never really thought about a second passport from this perspective: Not wanting to actually use it to live somewhere else—or as a Plan B parachute out of social turmoil—but to improve your standard of living where you’re already living happily. 

It’s an opportunity of a different variety, but still an opportunity specifically tied to owning a second passport. 

To that end, Hadi is trading crypto and NFTs, and he’s setting aside a lot of his profits to afford the roughly €400,000 ($420,000) cost of the Malta Permanent Residence Program, which can lead to a Maltese passport. It’s one of his primary goals. 

“Plus,” he says, “it means I can travel to so many places so much more easily” than he can on a Jordanian passport that allows visa-free travel to just 20 countries. 

“I’ll get there,” he says. “I’m gonna be Maltese at some point.”