Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/24/how-to-buy-a-second-citizenshi.html
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Getting a serious Snow Crash vibe off this story.
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My ex MiL tried to get my kid Polish citizenship, but she failed to navigate the bureaucracy. It would have been cool, but oh well.
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Here’s a woman who explained how she obtained a second citizenship.
Specifically, she’s a highly privileged digital nomad who’s a cryptocurrency promoter who says she was looking for a more “economically free” nation-state than her home country (ironic given all the bureaucratic hurdles she had to jump and the large on-sale “donation” that she had to make to the state to get citizenship).
I also like how she warns early on that a criminal record would be a “hiccough” in the citizenship process – she obviously knows her audience.
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The modern day cosmopolitan colonialist
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It took about 8 months for the citizenship, and another 4 months to get a passport for St. Kitts and Nevis.
And then what? Move to St. Kitts and Nevis, just in time for global sea level rise?
Or maybe St. K & N has diplomatic reciprocity with the Principality of Sealand.
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Permanent Legal Residence in the US with future right to citizenship can be purchased for about $250K for an individual and $500K for an immediate family.
Generally under the category foreign investor visas
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Heh, how funny. She’s a citizen but doesn’t know how to pronounce the name of her country (Nevis)
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Unless she renounces her US citizenship, doesn’t she remain just as “economically enslaved” as she was when she did not have dual citizenship? (You will still have the same income tax obligations.)
She said that, now, she “has the ability to live abroad more easily, pursue her passions much more freely.” Just how did having (only) US citizenship impede her lifestyle?
Her affect and presentation remind me of someone peddling New Age woo, except her woo — the casual incineration of $200,000 USD — is a lot more costly than super blue-green algae capsules or a crystal.
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To “travel and live abroad more easily” and “pursue her passions”? I mean, unless you want to travel to North Korea, you can travel just about anywhere you want as a US citizen. I mean, is this just 100% about hiding her money from the IRS? What else would she be gaining?
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My guess is that she’s under the mistaken impression that this will protect her profits whenever she cashes out of her cryptocurrency holdings, per @MattAttac’s comment.
There are some reasons why holding an extra passport might be useful, but she didn’t present them in this video.
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I guess she could renounce her US citizenship without becoming stateless? And that would enable her to do things like buy Iranian oil?
She could hide money from the IRS without becoming a citizen of St. Kitts. People do it all the time. Tax havens aren’t picky about that sort of thing.
With St. Kitts & Nevis, she can now access their public healthcare system, but it’s limited in scope and she might still have to come to the US, where our healthcare is the most expensive in the world but not the best. She or her children could also access St. Kitts’ public education system. Also, she can now by real estate in St. Kitts & Nevis, although there is also a non-citizenship path to that.
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“Today, I’m coming to you from Bali, so enjoy that background”, she starts off with. Nice. Born on third base, maybe? (I really don’t know, I didn’t get more than a minute into this vid, and I’ve never heard of this person before.)
Now, the whole concept of dual citizenship has never sat level in my mind. What’s the idea of being a dual (or more) citizen? In the extreme, what if both your countries go to war with each other, whose side are you on? Seems you could be tried for treason by both sides.
And like @petzl suggests, it seems you have obligations not to just one country, but more than one in terms of taxes, voting, possible compulsory military service, and more. But perhaps the advantages are there too, such as having more than one embassy to turn to in case you run into trouble in some third (party) country. What else?
I encounter dual citizens in some of my circles and when they talk about it, usually in happy terms, I just bite my tongue for fear of inciting unpleasant conversation. In my mind, since there is a whole concept of being a “citizen” of a certain “country”, if you become a citizen of another country, how is that not like, say, taking on two religions, or multiple spouses? Does loyalty factor into the equation at all? I get a sense of cognitive dissonance. Help me out, Boingers, what am I missing?
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I dunno, I don’t think it’s so weird to hold to multiple religious traditions or spouses either, so I may not be a candidate to help in splainin this.
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I believe this is a tax thing, but a slightly twisted one.
Not too long ago (5 - 10 years maybe), the US changed the banking rules for expats. It was supposedly to prevent people off-shoring their money to avoid taxes. Of course, is was implemented in such a way that it didn’t fix anything, and caused significant new problems for people who weren’t actually trying to do anything other than live abroad.
The rules require any bank holding funds for an American citizen in a foreign country (think Deutschebank in Germany, for example) to jump through enough hoops to report the money that most banks won’t do it.
In this case, I am guessing the trick is she will open the account as a St. Kitt citizen. Problem solved because the account wasn’t opened by an American citizen.
Note: I am not speaking to the ethics of doing this or the ethics of the individual who made the video. I am simply trying to explain the trick I think being performed.
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If one of your passports is a U.S. one, you’re not getting out of paying federal taxes. Arguably, one of the reasons it’s extra difficult to renounce U.S. citizenship is because of its unusual tax policy (namely, no matter where a U.S. citizen lives he’s still obligated to pay U.S. taxes unless a treaty allows him to pay in his country of residence).
There are benefits to dual citizenship. For example, if an American also has EU citizenship that immediately expands her employment opportunities, because citizenship = working papers. Dual citizenship can also make a refugee’s life far easier – an at-risk person with Honduran and American citizenship could travel on a plane to NYC rather than make the dangerous and uncertain border crossing. And some people see multiple citizenships as a way of transcending nationality, although in practise they’re now beholden to the obligations of more than one nation-state.
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150K? Worth every penny if you want to toss 150K in the trash.
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Presumably. Which is extra-super-dumb, since as others have pointed out the IRS still has a claim on her money if she’s a dual, and if she isn’t put off committing tax fraud as a dual citizen, why would she be put off committing it as a U.S. citizen?
Oh, and even renouncing U.S. citizenship, as others have mentioned, isn’t a get out of jail free card. Uncle Sam doesn’t take kindly to it. The rules have changed over time, it looks like at the moment you can either remain subject to U.S. taxation even though not a U.S. citizen, or you can pay a (presumably hefty) exit tax, either one is aimed at capturing the tax revenue one way or the other.
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