Kristin Wilson creates excellent videos on global travel, digital-nomad lifestyle and opportunities, living abroad, and work/residency/immigration issues. Providing global residency/work consulting is basically her full-time work.
In this video, she announces she intends to live in Europe full time, and thanks to her immigration privilege of Romanian ancestry, she has applied for citizenship in Romania. As noted many times on this blog, a right of descent residency visa or citizenship is a real thing – and truly a privilege to those who have such access. Many, such as I, do not have immigration privileges and do not have access to secondary passport privileges.
Since Covid days, I realize that having a second- or even a third-passport, is an elite symbol available to those with unique privileges. Perhaps worse, though, is I now know people with more passports than the number of countries I have been too!
Right of descent immigration and residency programs also create a two-class society based on immutable personal characteristics. Post-Covid, I now see the value in having more than one passport – but if you are over 45-50, and lack immigration privilege, it is extremely difficult or impossible to get a 2nd passport, except in a few countries that have investment or golden passport visa options (these require making a sizeable investment running from about $100k to $10 million, depending on the country).
I have about half a dozen LinkedIn connections (people I used to work with) who have dual U.S./EU citizenship – some through right of descent, and some because they were born in an EU country. With dual citizenship, they work as tech industry consultants – and can readily take projects in either North America or Europe, with no need to apply for visas. This gives them a major competitive advantage in their consulting work.
Related:
- Immigration: Bloomberg says up to 40% of Americans may qualify for EU citizenship due to ancestry – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking
- Immigration: The media myth that Americans can just move abroad for a better life – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking
- “Immigration Privilege” is real – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking
- Immigration: The end of “Golden Visas”? – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking