But why would you want a second passport?
Mobility came first. That was the whole point, once. Picture real money tied to a passport from somewhere poor, or sanctioned, or coming apart at the seams. The friction never lets up. Hardly anywhere waves you through. The banks stall. There is always one more form. A second passport made most of that disappear. Pick up citizenship in Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada or St Kitts and Nevis and the Schengen Area, the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong open up for short visits with no visa at all. To an entrepreneur whose own passport opened almost nothing, that was worth a fortune. These days it is rarely the reason anyone calls.
The new driver: rich-country nationals buying a Plan B
The bigger change is that people from wealthy, stable countries are now buying second passports in large numbers, something the investment migration press has called the structural story of the decade. Most of them can already travel wherever they like, so this was never really about mobility. They are insuring themselves against their own governments.
1. Citizenship-based taxation and the fear it spreads
For most of modern history only two countries taxed people by nationality rather than residence: the United States and Eritrea. An American who moves abroad changes nothing by doing so. Keep the passport and you keep the US tax bill and the annual filings, wherever you happen to live. The only genuine way out is to renounce, which is the point at which citizenship by investment stops being a luxury. What has changed is that Europe is now flirting with the same idea. In France, La France Insoumise has tabled amendment after amendment to tie tax to French nationality. In late 2025 the National Assembly went further and passed a separate amendment reviving the original long exit tax, with a fifteen-year holding period before latent capital gains are cleared on departure. Neither measure made it into the final budget. But the direction of policy is already enough to unsettle wealthy families.
2. Americans: renunciation, the exit tax, and why the passport comes first
The American case is different. Each quarter, the United States publishes a list of people who have renounced their citizenship. The figures are incomplete and are usually delayed by a year or more. The IRS list recorded about 4,900 people in 2025. Other federal records show higher numbers. Advisers report that a growing number of wealthy Americans are preparing the option to leave. The United States taxes its citizens by nationality, so renunciation is the only way to exit the system completely. A person who renounces without holding another nationality becomes stateless. The State Department warns against this, and no serious adviser allows it. For this reason the order is fixed: the second citizenship must be obtained first, and renunciation second. An American with no Irish, Italian or Polish ancestry cannot inherit an eligible citizenship and has to acquire one. Citizenship by investment is the fastest method.
The exit tax is the final cost. It has applied since 2008 to covered expatriates. A covered expatriate is broadly someone with a net worth of at least USD 2.0M, or with a high average income tax bill over the previous five years. Such a person is taxed as if they had sold all of their assets on the day before renouncing. In 2026 the top rate is 23.8%. It applies to unrealised gains above USD 910K, which is excluded. Few people who renounce reach this threshold. Wealthy individuals usually do, and they need to calculate the cost before renouncing, while they still hold the citizenship.
3. Conscription and war
Military service is an obligation of citizenship, so it travels with the passport no matter where its holder lives. And it has stopped being a theoretical worry. Conscription is back across Europe and beyond. In the past ten years Ukraine, Lithuania, Sweden, Latvia and Croatia have all brought it back or widened it. Germany shows most clearly where this is heading. Its Military Service Modernisation Act came into force on 1 January 2026. Under it, every 18-year-old man has to register and sit a medical screening. If too few people volunteer, parliament can switch on needs-based conscription with a single vote. And men between 17 and 45 now need the armed forces' permission to leave the country for longer than three months. For now the service is voluntary and that permission is automatic. But the legal machinery to stop roughly 20 million men from leaving is already written into law, which shows how quickly a state can tighten its grip on its own citizens. For a family with teenage sons and a single passport from a country that conscripts, whether South Korea, Israel, Ukraine, Russia or, increasingly, parts of Europe, a second nationality is the way out.
4. Dissent and the passport as a weapon
Governments regularly use nationality as a lever against citizens they would rather be rid of. An entrepreneur, journalist or activist who is politically exposed and holds only one passport is vulnerable in a way that is easy to overlook. Applying for residence or a passport somewhere else means producing documents the home state controls, a police clearance certificate for instance. And China, Russia or Singapore can insist that a national come back in person to obtain or authenticate that paperwork. For someone the government already dislikes, that trip home is exactly where things go wrong. With a single nationality there is nothing to fall back on if it is taken away, and leave the planning too late and you may lose the ability to leave at all. That is why dissidents have never been able to rely on one passport, and why the same reasoning now applies to wealthy Americans who never expected to need a backup.
