Investment migration people in the news this week included:
- David Lincoln of Lincoln Global Partners
- Basil Mohr-Elzeki of Henley & Partners
- Eric Major of Latitude
- Paul Williams of La Vida Golden Visas
- Mo Bennis of Arton Capital
- Khatia Gelbakhiani of Nomad Capitalist
- David Lesperance of Lesperance & Associates
- Pavel Reshetnikov and Aleksandr Razinkov of Immigrant Invest
- Cyrus Mehta of Cyrus D. Mehta & Partners, PLLC
- Brennan Sim of EB5 United
The Ritz Herald – The G20 Passport Nobody Saw Coming
David Lincoln is Founder and Chief Executive of Lincoln Global Partners, a citizenship and residency advisory firm with a Latin America–first focus. He holds Paraguayan permanent residency, has been based in the Southern Cone for seven years.
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Expected pricing points to a contribution route starting at USD 350,000 for a single applicant, scaling with family size, or a government bond subscription of USD 800,000. These figures are not yet official and I will not present them as though they were. But hold them against the market for a moment.
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We keep a running record of every confirmed development — decrees, rulings, procurement steps and expected terms — in our Argentina citizenship by investment programme guide, updated as official detail emerges rather than as speculation circulates.
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If Argentina executes this well, it does not just add a programme to the market. It changes what the market is for. Every Latin American government with capital needs and an underused passport is watching, and Argentina is writing the template.
News Tribune – Wealthy Californians seeking ‘golden visa’ residency outside US
“Affluent families are starting to say, ‘Hey, this is actually really good to have alongside all of my investments. Why don’t I diversify where I can live?'” said Basil Mohr-Elzeki, a managing partner at Henley & Partners, a residency and citizenship firm with an office in Beverly Hills.
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“That’s 85 percent of my clients from America,” said Eric Major, head of Latitude, a citizenship by investment firm with U.S. offices in Denver, Miami and New York. Major estimates that the average net worth among his California clients hovers near $250 million — a million of which they’ll likely end up spending to get another passport.
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“They’re wanting it for — what if the wheels fall off America? Then I need, just like World War II, a place to go,” he said.
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In 2019, Major said, fewer than 5 percent of his clients seeking residency and citizenship came from the U.S. Now, as the total number of his clients has grown, Americans make up three-fourths of his work.
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Mohr-Elzeki said his clients from California are also interested in New Zealand, which offers a faster path to residency than many European countries.
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“This is a little bit like having an insurance policy,” said Paul Williams, CEO and founder of La Vida Golden Visas, a firm based in London. “You don’t know if your house is going to burn down or if a plane is going to crash into it, but you take out the policy just in case.”
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“I can’t take my private jet to London?” Major said, summing up the sentiment he heard from clients.
The Epoch Times – The Rise of the ‘Backup Passport’: Why More Canadians Are Seeking a Second Citizenship
Basil Mohr-Elzeki, head of private clients for the Americas at Henley & Partners, a global advisory firm specializing in residence and citizenship planning, said many Canadian clients are seeking second passports even if they don’t plan to relocate anytime soon.
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“Most Canadians and Americans, believe it or not, don’t relocate,” Mohr-Elzeki told The Epoch Times. “They just want it in their back pocket.”
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Mo Bennis, senior vice-president at Arton Capital, which helps people secure alternative residency or citizenship, said seeking an additional passport has “gone from niche to mainstream,” with the company seeing substantial growth in demand from North Americans since the pandemic.
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“North America just woke up to the fact that these kinds of programs exist, whereas they’ve been there since the ‘80s,” he said.
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Khatia Gelbakhiani, head of product at Nomad Capitalist, a company that advises high-net-worth individuals on international residency, said her Canadian clients most often cite concerns over the erosion of personal freedoms, declining trust in government, high taxes, health-care wait times, and housing affordability as reasons for seeking additional passports.
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Gelbakhiani said additional passports have become a permanent “Plan B” for some individuals, giving them the option of relocating quickly if political, economic, health-care, or personal circumstances change.
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David Lesperance, a lawyer who has advised clients on citizenship, residency, and expatriation for more than three decades, said clients are not necessarily expecting Canada to cease functioning or suffer an economic collapse, but many want options if government policies or other conditions become incompatible with their priorities.
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“They may say, ‘I don’t like pandemic policy. I don’t like gun policy. I don’t like tax policy. I don’t like whatever policy,’” he said.
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Gelbakhiani said changing policies are one reason prospective applicants should not delay pursuing a second citizenship if they are interested, although Lesperance cautioned that creating a sense of urgency can also be a sales tactic used by commission-driven firms.
Financial Times – China launches global tax hunt going back decades
David Lesperance, an Asia-based lawyer whose clients include wealthy families in Hong Kong and China, believed that AI has enabled Chinese officials to carry out forensic analysis of investment records at a much faster pace and at a lower cost than previously.
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Lesperance added that as the pressure has mounted this year at least six of his ultra-high-net-worth Chinese clients have “pulled the trigger” on plans to leave the world’s second-biggest economy.
Business Insider – A golden visa firm says ‘plan B’ passports are going middle class
Pavel Reshetnikov, a consultant at Immigrant Invest, told Business Insider that the cost of citizenship programs has stayed relatively stable in recent years. This indicates that more Americans with savings are looking for a “Plan B” amid heightened political division in the US and global geopolitical volatility.
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“The great majority are US-Americans living in the USA, rather than expatriates already abroad, and they have no intention of leaving, or at least not yet,” Basil Mohr-Elzeki, Henley and Partners‘ head of private clients in the Americas, said in the report.
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Immigrant Invest said that as recently as 2021, Americans in general showed little interest in its citizenship-by-investment programs, with middle class clients particularly rare. “Five years ago, I think it was just a very, very small percentage of US clients,” Reshetnikov said. “Now it’s a completely different story.”
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For many of those Americans, the appeal is less about leaving the US than knowing they could in the future. “They would like to have an option and insurance for the whole family to move somewhere very quickly,” Aleksandr Razinkov, who handles press relations for Immigrant Invest, said.
Business Insider Africa – Africa’s second-largest economy among world’s leading citizenship-by-investment programs, starting at $250,000, with visa-free access to 49 countries
The programme is part of a broader global market in which wealthy individuals use investment migration to obtain alternative citizenship or residence rights. Henley & Partners describes citizenship by investment as a legal route through which qualifying individuals can obtain citizenship by making a government-approved economic contribution.
Forbes – Trump Immigration Policies Make It Harder To Get And Keep Citizenship
People with criminal convictions face the greatest risk of denaturalization. “If you get convicted of a crime after you have naturalized, and the facts supporting the indictment or charges go back before you naturalized, that would be grounds to denaturalize the person for either failure to maintain good moral character within the relevant five-year period or for not truthfully answering the question on the N-400 on whether you committed a crime for which you were not charged or arrested,” said immigration attorney Cyrus Mehta in an interview.
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The Trump administration has not attempted to strip citizenship in employment-based immigration cases. “I still have not seen the Trump administration try to denaturalize citizens for what they may perceive as irregularities in the labor certification process such as not conducting a good faith test of the labor market or where the business necessity justification may not have been present,” said Mehta. “This is because the government has a heavy burden. In Maslenjak v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the federal government cannot strip a naturalized citizen of their U.S. citizenship for making a false statement unless the lie directly influenced the procurement of that citizenship.”
Forbes – EB-5 Was Designed To Do More Than Issue Green Cards
Brennan Sim of EB5 United writes an op-ed for Forbes.
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Over three decades, EB-5 has financed some of the most economically significant development projects in the country. Mixed-use towers, hospitality projects, residential communities and commercial developments in major cities have collectively created or supported millions of jobs, generated billions in tax revenue and catalyzed broader neighborhood transformation.
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That said, Congress did identify an imbalance worth correcting. Capital naturally flows toward the projects that are easiest to finance, easiest to sell to investors and most likely to produce a clean immigration outcome. For most of the program’s history, that meant large urban markets with deep comparable transaction bases and established exit liquidity. The result was that rural communities and smaller markets were consistently passed over because EB-5 investors and their advisors had no structural reason to look there.
