IMI Podcasts

In this fourth installment of the Mobility Standard, we spoke to Murat Coskun of Get Golden Visa, a man who's been closely involved with the Portugal Golden Visa's fund investment option since the very beginning. We asked him a range of questions about RCBI fund options, including:

• Which investment migration programs out there, beyond Portugal, have a fund option, either explicitly in their regulations or as a hypothetical possibility under their legal frameworks?
• Why don’t any of the Caribbean CIPs have such fund investment options?
• Now that Portugal has decided to raise the minimum investment for the fund category from 350,000 to half a million euros starting next year, will the funds struggle to attract investors?
• In the last several years, only a double-digit number of golden visa investors have picked the fund option, but there are already more than 20 funds available. With such an unfavorable ratio, how can fund managers expect to raise enough capital?
• Portugal has proven that there’s an appetite for investment fund options among investor migrants. Which other programs are likely to take advantage of this market next?
• What are the common pitfalls of fund investment? Which factors should you take into consideration when evaluating a fund? 
• What are the tax advantages that fund investment has over real estate?

In this third episode of the Mobility Standard, we had the pleasure of hosting David Lesperance, an internationally recognized expert on what he himself calls “backup plans”, by which he means comprehensive structures aimed at protecting your person, your family, and your assets from anything from black swan events and natural disasters to avaricious politicians and criminals. 

We asked David about a range of his favorite subjects including:

• US expatriations
  What’s really going on with Americans renouncing their citizenships? Some say the numbers falling, others insist it’s at all-time highs but that the real numbers are obscured. What’s the reality?
• Wealth taxes
  What are the latest developments around wealth taxes around the world? How are the rich protecting themselves against quickly rising tax burdens by investing in alternative citizenships and residencies?
• The bulletproof backup plan
  As globalization increasingly goes into reverse and a more regionalized, geopolitically less stable world emerges in the wake of COVID, what does a bullet-proof Backup plan look like? If you want to keep being able to enjoy global freedom to travel, trade, and settle, what flags do you need to plant and where? 
• Citizenship-based taxation during the remote-work era
  At the very same time that the highest earners have discovered they can work remotely, the states and countries in which they live have decided to raise taxes drastically. A lot of them will be asking, “why shouldn’t I move to a lower-tax jurisdiction”. What will the political reflex in rich countries be? Is it a proliferation of citizenship-based taxation?

Below, you’ll find an excerpt of some of the more salient moments of the episode:

US missions “refusing to schedule” renunciation appointments

Questioned as to the true levels of Americans giving up their citizenship, David Lesperance offered a detailed account of the disparity between the number of Americans trying to renounce, the number that is able to, and the number of renunciations that are reported.

“You have a huge backlog,” commented Lesperance. “In fact, the US embassy in Bern is reporting they have 400 people on their waiting list to schedule appointments for renunciation. And you have to remember: That’s just one of 307 US missions abroad.”

The reported numbers don’t reflect current demand, explains Lesperance, first because there’s a 12-18 month lag between the renunciation and the publishing date of that event, and second because many US diplomatic missions downright decline to take renunciation appointments, ostensibly out of public health concerns.

The press, he adds, were quick to attribute record renunciations in late 2016 to Trump’s election, and the even greater numbers in early 2020 to COVID, neither of which were related events.

“COVID wasn’t even a twinkle in a bat’s eye at the time those [renunciations] that were only now getting reported actually took place.”

See also:

• Yes, American Citizens Can and Will Leave to Avoid Wealth Taxes
• Record Numbers of Americans Renouncing Citizenships Has Nothing to Do With The Pandemic

For investment migration, 2020 was a year of both setbacks and of considerable advances. While the pandemic brought record global awareness of the usefulness of alternative citizenships and residencies, it also made putting investment migration plans into practice far more difficult.

Some programs have seen record application volume while others have seen it collapse. Service providers speak of a sharp rise in demand, but also difficulty in catering to it.

In this second episode of our new podcast, the Mobility Standard, we discuss how different investment migration programs performed in 2020, and ask which lessons may be gleaned from those observations.

We’ll try to explain the divergence in performance during the pandemic between Greece and Portugal, and why the Caribbean was able to carry on with business as usual. We want to know whether there is something besides the pandemic that explains the sharp decline in EB-5 applications over the last year, and also try to map out the regional center program’s future beyond its June 30th expiry date.

Ahmad wants Stephane Tajick, our guest in this episode and the designated Canadian, to explain why Canada, an ostensibly immigrant-loving country, keeps making it harder to immigrate.

We want to know if 2020’s reportedly sharp rise in inquiries will translate into actual applications in 2021, and also try to understand which markets will be the biggest sources of investors in the next few years.

Finally, we have to talk a little bit about the biggest news story this week; the heralded opening of a North Macedonian CIP, and what effect that will have on the competitive balance of European CIPs.

Timestamps:

• 02:16: What explains the sharp divergence in performance between the Greek and Portuguese golden visas in 2020?
• 07:36: Why were applications and approvals for the Caribbean CIPs relatively unaffected by the pandemic?
• 11:31: What, except the pandemic, explains the sharp downturn in applications and approvals for the US EB-5 program in 2020?
• 13:00: Moment of Truth for the EB-5 program. What happens after June 30th?
• 19:46: Why does “immigrant-loving” country Canada keep making it harder for people to immigrate?
• 24:43: Many firms have reported tremendous increases in the number of inquiries about investment migration programs in 2020 but, so far, this hasn’t translated into a corresponding increase in applications. What’s behind this schism?
• 32:03: Which are the next big source markets for investment migration?
• 36:52: A small crisis in the Vietnamese investment migration market
• 39:06: Which programs will absorb the strong demand that existed for the now-closed Cyprus CIP?
• 44:57: How will the increasingly likely prospect of a North Macedonian CIP affect the competitive position of other CIPs in Europe and the Caribbean?

2020 has seen a surge in investment migration among applicants from countries we tend not to think of as typical outbound investment migration markets and we ask:

• Is this just a flash in the pan that will revert to normal when the pandemic is over?
• If not, what does it mean for investment migration programs, service providers, and applicants?

We discuss how different citizenship and residence by investment programs have evolved to cater to the preferences of non-Western applicants, and how they might need to change to start attracting a Western audience.

We also ask: Now that the pandemic has kickstarted awareness of investment migration products among Americans, how can the industry capitalize on this unique historical period to make sure that awareness remains and even grows?