Paraguay admitted 6,561 foreigners to permanent residence in 2024. Brazilian nationals took 3,434 of those places, more than any other nationality.
In the same year, Paraguay’s Supreme Court issued 45 resolutions granting naturalization. One of them went to a Brazilian.
Argentine nationals took 1,816 permanent admissions in 2024, roughly half the Brazilian figure. Thirteen of them became Paraguayan citizens.
Two government datasets produce those numbers, and they have pointed in opposite directions for a decade.
The gap opens at the point where an administrative permit becomes a judicial petition.
Where the two sets of numbers come from
Paraguay’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística publishes both series in its statistical yearbook, the Anuario Estadístico. Neither is an estimate.
One table counts inmigrantes en admisión permanente, people admitted to permanent residence, broken down by country of origin. The Dirección Nacional de Migraciones supplies those figures.
The other counts resoluciones sobre carta de naturalización dictadas, resolutions on naturalization charters issued, broken down by nationality. The Supreme Court supplies those.
The two tables measure different events. One is an administrative grant from an immigration authority.
The other is a judgment from the Supreme Court.
Brazilians lead the permit table in every published year
Brazil has topped Paraguay’s permanent admissions table in every year the statistics office has published since 2015.
The margin is wide. Brazilian nationals took 7,902 permanent admissions in 2019 against 2,436 Argentine ones, and 7,598 in 2021 against 1,289.
The lead survived the drop in overall volume after 2022. Paraguay admitted 15,372 permanent residents that year and 6,561 in 2024, and Brazil led both.
Migraciones reported the same order for 2025. Brazilians took 58 percent of all residencies granted that year, ahead of Argentina in second place.
Argentines lead the citizenship table in almost every year
The naturalization table reverses the order almost everywhere.
Argentine nationals took 17 of the 62 naturalization resolutions issued in 2016, against six Brazilian ones. In 2022 the figures were 10 Argentine and four Brazilian, out of 42.
Two years break the pattern, and both are close. Brazil took three resolutions to Argentina’s two in 2020, a year when Paraguay issued ten in total.
The two countries tied on three each in 2023.
One caution on 2019. The statistics office published that year as 72 resolutions in its 2020 edition and revised it to 64 in the 2023 edition, so the article treats the year’s total as approximate.
The annual totals themselves are small and they move sharply. Paraguay issued eight naturalization resolutions in 2015, 83 in 2017, 10 in 2020, and 45 in 2024.
The court counts from a different starting line
Article 148 of Paraguay’s Constitution requires that applicants complete a radicación mínima de tres años en territorio nacional, a minimum of three years of residence in the national territory. The constitutional text says nothing about permanent residence.
Article 42 of Acordada 464/2007, an internal regulation of the Supreme Court, reads those three years as beginning when a foreigner obtains radicación permanente. That regulation is what moved Paraguay’s starting line.
Paraguay has never passed a law implementing Article 148, so a 2007 court regulation fills the gap. The naturalization bill’s explanatory memorandum calls that absence the source of the problem.
The regulation asks applicants to live there
Two clauses in Article 42 explain the conversion gap better than the timeline does.
One clause requires that an applicant have an established domicile inside the Republic. The regulation rules out the obvious substitute in plain terms, because opening a commercial premises in Paraguay while maintaining a domicile abroad does not satisfy the residence condition.
The other bars naturalization where the applicant has been absent from Paraguay for periods longer than three months in any of the three years before the petition. The regulation writes the test as a limit on absence.
That stands against the earlier stage, where the fine print of Paraguay’s Investor Pass gives investors direct access to permanent residence.
Article 46 adds an examination. The court tests elementary knowledge of one of the official languages, Spanish or Guaraní, along with Paraguayan history and geography and the constitutional rules on loss of nationality.
The President of the Court or a designated representative evaluates it.
Article 43 requires that the court gather an Interpol report on the applicant’s criminal record, a public registry report on whether the applicant can freely dispose of their assets, and a judicial statistics report on any lawsuits from the previous three years.
The Prosecutor General then has five days to deliver an opinion under Article 47, and the full Court has a maximum of 30 days to grant or refuse under Article 48.
Why a Brazilian resident has little reason to apply
A Brazilian national with permanent residence in Paraguay already has the permit and the cédula.
Naturalizing would add an examination, an absence limit, a lawyer, and a Supreme Court file.
Mercosur is part of the answer. Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay founded the bloc, and Mercosur’s nine-country settlement bloc already gives a Brazilian national the right to settle in Paraguay without becoming Paraguayan.
The bill now before Paraguay’s Chamber of Deputies points at a further reason. Its exposición de motivos says the current procedure imposes la renuncia obligatoria a la nacionalidad de origen, an obligatory renunciation of the original nationality, among conditions it calls foreign to the constitutional text.
Treat that as the sponsor’s account of practice rather than as settled law. If it describes what applicants meet in the courtroom, it would weigh far more heavily on a Brazilian family with land and inheritance in Brazil than on an Argentine professional who has moved to Asunción.
One more measure complicates the picture, and it belongs here in the argument. Brazil leads the annual permit flow, and Paraguay’s most recent national census counted more people born in Argentina living in the country than people born in Brazil.
Flow and stock are different measures, and the naturalization table tracks people rather than permits.
Brazil’s foreign ministry counts far more Brazilians living in Paraguay than the Paraguayan census counts people born in Brazil. It ranks Paraguay third among countries with Brazilian communities, after the United States and Portugal.
The ministry’s estimate rests on figures from Brazil’s consulates and embassies, and it covers second- and third-generation Brazilians, many of them dual nationals.
Paraguay’s census counts anyone born in Paraguay as native, whatever the person’s nationality. A child born in Paraguay to Brazilian parents appears in the census as native.
One timing point belongs with this comparison. A naturalization granted in 2024 rests on permanent residence obtained in 2021 or earlier, so the two tables in any single year describe different cohorts.
Brazil led the permit table in each of those earlier years as well, which is what lets the comparison stand.
Advisers link the Brazilian gap to students and recent arrivals
Francisco Litvay, CEO of Settee, argues that students make up most of the Brazilian migration to Paraguay. Many of them study medicine, veterinary science, or dentistry.
For a long time, he notes, the migrants were mostly “the students who would then later come back to Brazil.”
Paraguay’s National Council of Higher Education (Cones) reported in 2025 that almost eight in ten of the country’s medical students were Brazilian, most of them at private universities.
A graduate who returns to Brazil cannot meet the domicile condition in Article 42 of the court’s regulation.
The profile of Brazilian arrivals changed in the last few years, in Litvay’s view, with remote workers, families, and entrepreneurs arriving. He describes “more and more people going to live for real.”
In his account, security comes ahead of taxes and the cost of living as a reason to move, and political stability follows.
Litvay dates a “big network effect” in Brazil to roughly the last two years, once Paraguay became national news there.
CNN Brasil reported that TV host Carlos Massa, known as Ratinho, had become a permanent resident of Paraguay, one of the cases Litvay cites.
Another is the Brazilian sock maker Lupo. It opened a plant in Ciudad del Este after finding large tax advantages in Paraguay, according to the Paraguayan daily La Nación.
David Lincoln, Founder and CEO of Lincoln Global Partners, is based in Paraguay. By his account, he has lived between Paraguay and Brazil for seven years.
He names three reasons Brazilians choose Paraguay for residence: “It’s close, it’s easy to maintain, and above all it’s a strategic hedge.”
Argentines, in his view, “have been coming to Paraguay and Uruguay in large numbers for years, driven by currency crises and economic instability.”
Lincoln reads the two tables as a question of timing, arguing that “Argentines arrived years ago and are now naturalising, while the Brazilian wave is recent.”
Over the next few years, he expects that to shift “as Brazilians become eligible.”
Brazil’s October elections, he adds, “could either fuel or cool that trend.” The electoral court scheduled the vote for October 4.
Brazilians led the permit table in 2015 and 2019 as well, and residents admitted in those years passed the three-year mark before 2024.
If students took a large share of the earlier Brazilian permits, Litvay’s account would explain why those permits produced few citizens.
The statistics office records each permanent resident’s country of origin and sex. Its tables do not record why a person moved, so they cannot test either account.
A bill would rewrite the procedure
Expediente D-2586152 entered the Chamber of Deputies in 2025, filed by Deputy Gloria María Johana Vega Insfran. It would replace the court’s regulation with a statute.
The Chamber of Deputies’ own account of the bill quotes its explanatory memorandum, which says the regulation as it stands “impone condiciones ajenas al texto constitucional, como exámenes de idioma o historia y la renuncia obligatoria a la nacionalidad de origen, exigencias que carecen de sustento jurídico.”
It imposes conditions foreign to the constitutional text, such as language or history examinations and the obligatory renunciation of the original nationality, requirements that lack legal support.
The same document describes legal uncertainty, administrative and judicial discretion, and proceedings lasting three to five years against a constitutional requirement of three years.
The bill would move the decision from the Supreme Court to the Juzgados de Primera Instancia en lo Civil y Comercial, give the Public Prosecutor nine days to respond and the judge twenty days to rule, and require that the Court build a database of everyone naturalized since 1992.
It remains in committee. The Public Prosecutor requested a technical opinion in 2026 and Migraciones supplied one later that year, so the file is active, and it is not law.
Panama takes investors’ naturalization files at its investment window
Horacio Mendoza, Director of Business Development at Panamanian developer Grupo Los Pueblos, sees in Paraguay’s procedure “a useful contrast with what Panama just did.”
In his view, the gap exists because “the permit and the citizenship petition run through two different institutions, on two different legal bases, with a regulation from 2007 filling in for a law that was never written.”
Panama’s Executive Decree 17 of 2026 took “the opposite approach,” Mendoza argues. Under its Article 14, qualified investors and their dependents can apply for naturalization after five consecutive years of residence.
Investors file those applications with the Ministry of Commerce and Industries (MICI). Mendoza describes the office as “the same MICI window that already handles the investment file.”
IMI’s report on Decree 17 found that it does not define how much physical presence residence demands.
The contrast “doesn’t mean one is better than the other,” Mendoza notes. He calls it “a good reminder that ‘residency’ and ‘passport’ can be two very different products depending on how a country chooses to build the plumbing between them.”
What this means if you have a Paraguayan permit
Jorge Kronawetter, director of the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, described the sequence to ABC Color. Applicants face up to two years of temporary residence, renewable to four, then a minimum of three years of permanent residence before an application.
His own arithmetic puts the route beyond five years.
The court that decides the citizenship limits your absences to three months a year for three years, and it issued 45 grants in 2024.
Anyone weighing the route should price the permit and the passport separately, because Paraguay does.
