Second Passport as an Asset: Passport Portfolio and Plan B

🧭 A passport can also be passed to the next generation from birth: choosing your child's country of birth — 12 countries, jus soli, bonuses for parents and pitfalls.

How the Passport Market Emerged

Selling citizenship is not a new idea: the first modern programme was St Kitts and Nevis in 1984, and it grew into a full-fledged industry in the 2000s and 2010s. Mobility became measurable once passport indices appeared: Henley has published its own since 2006, turning a passport's "strength" into a number a client can understand. The Caribbean and several EU states then launched investment programmes, and advisers built an entire market around them — with brokers, due diligence procedures and secondary products. Demand has since gone mainstream: according to Henley, in early 2025 British nationals filed almost three times as many applications for alternative residence and citizenship as a year earlier. Today this means tens of thousands of wealthy families changing jurisdiction every year, and a distinct profession — structuring a passport portfolio around specific needs.

Concept

Wealthy families increasingly treat citizenship as an asset with measurable utility. A passport portfolio is a set of citizenships and residence permits that delivers mobility, access to jurisdictions and insurance for the day one country becomes a problem. The utility of each passport is now assessed as routinely as the return on an investment portfolio: by mobility indices, tax profile and banking reputation.

What Is Plan B

Plan B is a prepared landing strip: a second citizenship or residence permit, a banking and property base in another jurisdiction, and the readiness to relocate within a reasonable timeframe. The trade calls it geopolitical insurance. Demand is rising against a backdrop of political and tax turbulence: Henley & Partners estimates that a record ~142,000 millionaires will move between countries in 2025, and US citizens have for the first time entered the largest groups of applicants for investment programmes.

How to Measure a Passport

A passport's utility is measured along several axes. The first is visa-free access: on the 2025 Henley index Singapore leads (193 destinations visa-free), followed by South Korea and Japan, while the United States has dropped out of the top ten over the past decade. The second is the tax profile: the United States (and Eritrea 🍓) tax citizens on the basis of citizenship regardless of where they live, which makes the American passport "expensive" to maintain. Next come a country's reputation for banking compliance and the right to live and work across a region — where the EU passport is unrivalled. A strong portfolio combines mobility, tax neutrality and access to key markets.

Scenarios: When a Second Passport Makes Sense

A second passport is justified when it solves a specific need for the family. Here are the scenarios clients bring most often, and the logic of each.

Running an International Business

For an entrepreneur from a jurisdiction banks consider "toxic," accounts, neobanks and contracts come slowly and at a discount. A neutral citizenship (the Caribbean, Turkey) or UAE residency removes part of that friction: it simplifies KYC, widens the list of countries for incorporating companies and opening payment systems, and gives visa-free access to partners without a month's wait. One distinct advantage — a Turkish passport opens the door to the US E-2 investor visa, which is not directly available to citizens of many countries.

Holding Assets in Your Own Name

The more complex the sanctions and compliance landscape, the more expensive nominees and opaque intermediate structures become. A second passport from a neutral country lets you hold a brokerage account, real estate and company stakes in your own name. This reduces the risk of losing control and simplifies succession: the asset is registered to the real owner rather than to a nominee structure that heirs would later have to unravel. The ownership logic itself is best built through a holding structure.

Plan B and Protecting the Family

The classic motive is having somewhere to move the whole family if the home country becomes unsafe. This also covers access to quality healthcare, education for the children and a predictable legal system. For families from regions with military conscription or political risk, a second passport works as a literal emergency exit.

A Second Name and Privacy

On naturalisation, the name in the new passport often takes a different transliteration, and some countries even allow a lawful change of name. This is a legitimate privacy tool: less automatic profiling and less linking of a person's public data. The limits should be understood soberly — under CRS and FATCA the bank still identifies the beneficiary from the totality of the data. A second name reduces everyday visibility, but it does not sever the link to the UBO for the tax authorities.

Mobility and Children's Education

An EU passport or a strong visa-free passport gives children the right to study and work in dozens of countries without separate visas, and gives the family the freedom to plan relocations around treatment, study or a deal. For an entrepreneur it also means speed: you can board a plane on the day you need to be at a meeting, rather than two weeks after filing a visa application.

Tax Planning

Citizenship and tax residency are deliberately kept apart: you live and pay tax in one country while keeping a second passport in reserve in another. A passport in itself creates no tax — only the United States (and Eritrea 🍓) tax on the basis of citizenship — so a second citizenship from a neutral country does not add to the tax burden, while giving options for a future change of residency. We cover the mechanics of separating the two in the article on the tax residency tie-breaker.

Routes

There are several routes. The fastest is CBI: direct citizenship for a contribution to the economy, with no requirement to live in the country; the classic market here is the Caribbean — St Kitts, Grenada, Dominica, Antigua and St Lucia. The second runs through residence: a permit with subsequent naturalisation (for example Portugal, whose golden visa has operated without real estate since 2023) or investment programmes such as Turkey's — citizenship for real estate from $400,000. The third is hybrid: passport and tax residency are deliberately split between different countries, so you live and pay tax in one while keeping a second passport in reserve in another.

The Cost of Entry

Prices have risen and keep rising. Following the Memorandum signed by the Caribbean states in March 2024, the minimum CBI contribution rose to roughly $200,000 in Dominica, $235,000 in Grenada and $250,000 in St Kitts; real estate as the qualifying basis now starts at $300,000–$400,000. Turkey holds the line at $400,000 for real estate or a $500,000 bank deposit, with the asset held for three years. Portugal's golden visa, after the 2023 reform, runs through funds (from €500,000) and cultural contributions (from €250,000), with real estate excluded as a basis — yet 2024 saw a record 4,987 visas issued. In 2025 the United States announced it would replace EB-5 with a "gold card": $5 million was cited at the announcement, while the launched version carries a contribution from $1 million with a path to a green card.

Regulation Is Narrowing the Windows

The main regulatory shift of 2025 is the Court of Justice of the EU ruling of 29 April in Commission v Malta (C-181/23). The Court held that Malta's "golden passport" scheme (a contribution of around €750,000 and a formal 12 months of presence) was incompatible with EU law, calling it a commercialisation of the grant of Union citizenship. This closed the last CBI programme inside the EU: the path to a Maltese passport now runs only through naturalisation with genuine ties. In parallel the Caribbean is tightening — hence the Memorandum, the common minimum threshold and the enhanced due diligence under pressure from Brussels and Washington. Over all of this sits tax transparency: CRS and FATCA have made hidden accounts pointless, so a second passport today is arranged with full reporting in mind — the era of anonymous structures is over.

The second cluster is operational risk. Programmes are tightening checks, exchanging lists of rejected applicants and introducing mandatory interviews, while the Caribbean states have raised their minimum thresholds under pressure from the EU and the US. The visa-free lists themselves are also fluid: access can be gained just as it can be lost, if a country loosens its controls or spoils relations with its neighbours.

Where the Market Is Heading

The direction is clear: fewer programmes, stricter checks, higher prices. The EU is methodically winding down both CBI and the "easiest" RBI — the golden visas of Portugal, Spain and Ireland have already been cancelled or seriously curtailed — while the remaining jurisdictions compete on the quality of their checks and their reputation. The centre of gravity for residence is shifting to the Gulf: the UAE and Saudi Arabia became the largest magnets for capital in 2025 (the UAE expects around +9,800 millionaires for the year), while the United Kingdom is losing a record –16,500 amid the abolition of the non-dom regime. The United States is experimenting with a "gold card" in place of EB-5, but demand so far is modest — only a few hundred applications had been filed by May 2026.

Mobility has a flip side too — the exit tax. Parting with an "expensive" citizenship costs money in itself: in the US, leaving triggers the exit tax under the §877A rules (a mark-to-market regime for those whose assets exceed $2 million), and in 2024 nearly 5,000 people renounced their passports — a record for the decade. That is why a well-built portfolio is designed from both ends: thinking through how to enter the jurisdictions you need and how, if necessary, to exit the surplus ones with minimal loss.

This material is for informational purposes only and does not constitute individual legal advice.

Sources

• CJEU — Case C-181/23 (Malta investor citizenship)
• Henley Passport Index