On January 1, 2026, a rule took effect in Germany requiring men aged 17 to 45 to obtain permission from a Bundeswehr career center before leaving the country for more than three months.
The requirement was not new. West Germany added it to the Military Service Act in 1965, where it sat dormant for decades, and the new military service law switched it on in peacetime, a change that drew no public debate during passage. Most men it covered never knew it existed.
Once the provision surfaced publicly in April 2026, the government stepped back from it. A general exemption decree issued that same month lifted the requirement across the board, so as of mid-2026 no application is needed and no penalty applies. The obligation remains on the statute book, available to activate.
Germany is a G7 democracy with one of the strongest passports in the world, and few would expect it to legislate an exit control of that kind at all. A country like that writing one into law, then parking it in reserve, is a useful place to start, because the full range of tools a government can reach for is worth understanding.
A government has six main ways to keep you, your money, or both inside its borders. It can bar you at the border, trap your money, tax you for leaving, call you up for service, withhold the paperwork you need to go, or cancel the document that lets you travel.
Each of these attaches to something specific: a citizenship, a tax residency, or assets sitting inside a border, never to you as a person who belongs to no jurisdiction. Concentration is the exposure, and spreading your legal and financial life across several countries is the defense, with one honest caveat: a second passport rarely cancels an obligation the first one still imposes.
1. Exit Bans
An exit ban is the bluntest tool on the list. The state orders that a named person cannot leave, and it usually holds the passport while the matter plays out.
The trigger does not have to be a crime. Exit bans are used over unpaid debts, tax disputes, pending investigations, commercial litigation, and in some countries as leverage against a relative of someone the government actually wants.
China has expanded its use of exit bans over the past decade. The human rights group Safeguard Defenders has documented their growing application against foreign executives caught in business disputes and against Chinese nationals connected to investigations, sometimes as pressure on family members abroad.
Russia restricts exit for citizens who owe certain debts, hold security clearances, or fall under mobilization. Dozens of other states keep some version of the power in reserve.
The mechanism attaches to your physical presence inside the country plus your standing there as a citizen, resident, or party to a dispute. A second passport does nothing for you while you are inside the banning state and subject to its order.
What it changes is the situation on either side of that. Exit bans, along with conscription and tax exposure, attach to your citizenship and your presence, not to the passport you happen to carry, so a person whose life is based elsewhere is far less likely to be inside a high-risk country when a ban lands, and has somewhere to be if it is ever lifted.
2. Capital Controls
Capital controls limit how much money you can move out of a country, or freeze it in place entirely. Your body can be free to go while your capital is not.
They appear fast. Governments announce them over a weekend, with banks already closed, precisely so there is no window to react.
Cyprus is the clearest recent example inside a wealthy currency union. During the 2013 banking crisis, the country shut its banks, imposed withdrawal and transfer limits that lasted about two years, and converted a portion of uninsured deposits above €100,000 into bank equity, ultimately close to half of those balances at Bank of Cyprus.
Argentina has cycled through currency controls for years, rationing access to dollars. Argentines cannot renounce their nationality, which leaves them permanently exposed to whatever currency restrictions and emergency decrees Buenos Aires imposes next.
Nigeria and Egypt have both run severe foreign currency shortages in recent years, making it close to impossible to move money out through official channels at the official rate.
China caps individual foreign exchange purchases at $50,000 per person per year, one reason Chinese buyers have routed property payments through workarounds that regulators keep closing.
Controls attach to assets located inside the country and to accounts held in its currency. Money already sitting in another jurisdiction, in another currency, and ideally in another geopolitical bloc is outside the reach of any single government’s controls.
3. Exit Taxes
An exit tax is a bill triggered by the act of leaving the tax system rather than by selling anything. The government treats your worldwide assets as if you sold them the day before you left, then taxes the paper gain, even though no cash has changed hands.
Most countries that impose one tie it to tax residency. Canada, Australia, Norway, Japan, France, and Germany all run some form of deemed disposal when you stop being a resident.
The thresholds vary. Japan’s regime starts at 100 million yen in covered assets, enough to catch an ordinary equity portfolio. France applies its charge to shareholdings worth €800,000 or more, or at least 50% of a company. Germany’s Wegzugsteuer targets holders of at least 1% of a corporation.
The United States is the outlier that ties the tax to citizenship itself. An American cannot end the obligation by moving abroad, because the country taxes its citizens on worldwide income wherever they live. Only renunciation ends it, and renunciation is what triggers the exit tax.
That charge falls on covered expatriates, a status you reach by meeting any one of three tests: a net worth of $2 million or more, an average annual net income tax liability above $211,000 over the prior five years for 2026, or a failure to certify five years of full tax compliance. For 2026, the first $910,000 of net unrealized gain is excluded, and gains above that are taxed at capital gains rates.
The exit tax attaches to the tax residency or the citizenship you are shedding. When wealth and tax residence are both concentrated in one high-charge country, the departure bill lands in full, and there is little a second passport can do about it after the fact. The realistic defense is timing and structure put in place before the gains accrue, not a document acquired on the way out.
4. Conscription
Conscription is compulsory military service, backed in many countries by exit controls that keep service-age men from leaving.
Between roughly 60 and 85 countries conscript at least part of their citizenry, and the number is rising. Latvia reinstated conscription in 2024, Croatia is following from 2026, and Germany cleared a new service law in December 2025.
Ukraine is the hardest current case. Under martial law, men aged 18 to 60 generally cannot leave, subject to exemptions, and they need a military registration document to cross the border. Since August 28, 2025, men aged 18 to 22 have been allowed to leave freely, but the restriction holds for everyone older.
South Korea can call up dual-national men, sometimes catching them on a visit. The singer Yoo Seung-jun, who had publicly promised to serve, took US citizenship in January 2002 before his scheduled enlistment, and Seoul has blocked his return for some 24 years, a ban he is still litigating. Israel, Greece, Turkey, and Russia all assert service obligations on citizens abroad under various conditions.
Germany’s new framework reaches beyond the draft itself. Alongside a conscription register, it extended a dormant provision into peacetime, requiring men aged 17 to 45 to seek permission before leaving for more than three months.
The Defense Ministry exempted everyone from that requirement in April 2026, but it remains on the statute book, a border control a G7 democracy can switch back on when it chooses.
This is where a second passport helps least. Conscription attaches to your first citizenship, and acquiring a new one rarely cancels the service obligation of the old. Renouncing the original citizenship may be the only clean exit, and some states make that difficult or condition it on completing service first.
5. Tax Clearance Certificates
A tax clearance certificate is a different mechanism from a charge or a limit. Here the government requires an affirmative sign-off, a document confirming your tax affairs are in order, before you or your money can go.
South Africa runs the clearest active version. Financial emigration through the Reserve Bank was scrapped in March 2021 and folded into a process run by the South African Revenue Service (SARS).
A South African who wants to move money offshore has a discretionary allowance of 1 million rand a year, raised to 2 million rand in 2026, that needs no clearance. For larger sums, SARS requires that anyone moving up to a further 10 million rand a year obtain a Tax Compliance Status confirmation and an Approval for International Transfer.
Above that combined ceiling of 12 million rand, the transfer needs a manual letter of compliance from SARS and Reserve Bank sign-off on top. Ceasing tax residency can trigger a capital gains charge on the way out as well.
Moving your wealth out of the country, in other words, requires the tax authority’s documented blessing.
The United States keeps a dormant version of the same idea on its books. The tax code requires that departing resident and nonresident aliens, with some exceptions, obtain a certificate of compliance from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), filed on Form 1040-C or Form 2063 and known as a sailing permit, confirming their US tax is settled before they go.
The rule is more than a century old and rarely enforced, and most people who technically owe it have never heard of it. It has also never been repealed, which means it sits ready whenever a government decides to use it.
Clearance requirements attach to your standing as a taxpayer in that jurisdiction. A second residence does not remove your home country’s certificate, but it does mean your financial life is not wholly dependent on one tax authority agreeing to stamp the form.
6. Passport Revocation for Unpaid Tax
The last tool is the government cancelling the travel document itself. A passport is state property, and a growing number of debts can cost you the right to hold one.
The United States ties this directly to tax. A 2015 federal law, the FAST Act, added a provision that lets the IRS certify a seriously delinquent tax debt to the State Department, which can then deny a passport application, refuse a renewal, or revoke a passport already issued. If you are overseas when it happens, the department can limit your passport to a single trip home.
For 2026, a seriously delinquent tax debt means more than $66,000 in unpaid federal tax, including penalties and interest, with a filed lien or a levy behind it. The figure is adjusted for inflation each year from a base of $50,000.
The same lever reaches beyond tax. The State Department moved in 2026 to start revoking the passports of parents with large child-support arrears, beginning with those owing $100,000 or more and eventually reaching the program’s $2,500 threshold, under a debt-collection program that has pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars since 1998.
Revocation attaches to the passport, which attaches to the citizenship. For someone who holds only a US passport, a revoked document can strand them inside the country with little warning.
For a dual national, the same event is an inconvenience rather than a grounding. A second travel document keeps you moving while you resolve the debt, which is exactly why a single passport is a single point of failure.
What They All Have in Common
Run back through the six, and the same shape appears each time: an exit ban that needs you physically inside the country, capital controls that reach the money you left behind, an exit tax on the residency you are shedding, conscription tied to the citizenship you were born with, a clearance certificate that depends on one tax authority, and a passport a single government can withdraw.
Each of them bites hardest when citizenship, banking, and assets all sit in one place. That concentration is the common variable, and it is the one you can actually change.
None of this means the tools are common. Most people will never face an exit ban, a frozen account, or a revoked passport, and most who move abroad will deal with an exit tax at worst.
Diversification is also not a cheat code. A second passport does close to nothing against conscription in your first country, and it will not erase a US exit tax. Frozen funds in a country enforcing capital controls stay frozen whatever else you hold.
What a second citizenship, a second tax residency, and assets spread across jurisdictions actually do is remove single points of failure: a backup travel document if one passport is pulled, an account in another bloc if one banking system freezes, a tax residence that answers to more than one authority, and a landing spot you can enter without anyone’s permission.
The investment migration market has always made this case for itself. A second citizenship functions as insurance, a fallback for the day a government decides your exit is conditional, and its value rises as governments add more tools for making that call.
Most people plan a move around the destination. The more useful exercise is to look back at the country you are leaving, ask what leverage it still holds over you once you have gone, and decide how much of that leverage you are willing to concentrate in a single government’s hands.
