Wealthy Californians Buy Golden Visas as Political Escape Hatches

The people who built the system are now buying their way out of it. Citizenship-by-investment firms report that Californians now make up as many as one in five clients worldwide seeking second passports through “golden visa” programs, and the firms are not subtle about why. Eric Major, head of the citizenship firm Latitude, says 85% of his American clients are motivated by fear of political instability. His average California client has a net worth near $250 million. “They’re wanting it for, what if the wheels fall off America?” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Then I need, just like World War II, a place to go.”

A place to go. Spare a thought for the millions of Californians who also sense the wheels wobbling but don’t have a quarter-billion dollars to buy a Portuguese insurance policy. They don’t get to diversify where they can live. They get to stay and absorb every consequence of the political crisis the wealthy helped engineer, funded, or at minimum profited from while it unfolded.

New Zealand rewrote its Active Investor Plus visa in April 2025, slashing the residency requirement from three years to three weeks and dropping the investment threshold. The result: 573 applications representing 1,833 people, up from 116 over the previous two and a half years. Americans account for nearly 40% of applicants. The scheme has pulled in $3.39 billion in investment. Immigration Minister Erica Stanford calls it a win for productivity and jobs. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers because of a weak economy, high living costs, and unemployment. The government is rolling out a carpet for foreign capital while its own people pack their bags.

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The pattern is global. Portugal trades residency for a 500,000-euro investment. Malta sells access to the European Union. Peter Thiel, the billionaire who bankrolled Trump’s 2016 campaign and then reportedly grew uneasy about where the country was headed, is now pursuing Argentine citizenship. The man who helped light the fire is shopping for a different building to stand in.

And Trump himself introduced the “Trump Gold Card” in 2025, offering U.S. residency to anyone who contributes $1 million. The program is being challenged in court. So the same administration that stoked the instability driving wealthy Americans to flee is simultaneously selling the door on the way out. The grift is vertical: manufacture the crisis, then monetize the exits.

What this story exposes is not a conspiracy. It is the plain mechanics of how capital operates when politics turns volatile. Wealth buys mobility. Mobility buys safety. And the communities left behind, the ones whose schools and hospitals and transit systems depend on tax revenue from exactly the people now wiring half a million euros to Lisbon, get nothing but a notarized goodbye.

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Annie Akin, a San Francisco parent pursuing Portuguese residency, told the Times she worries about her 4-year-old son being caught up in future wars. Her husband, an AI architect at Microsoft, framed the passport as one of the best things money can buy: options. They are not wrong to be afraid. The fear is rational. The response is what should enrage us, because it is available only to those who can afford the ticket.

The rest of us do not get a golden visa. We get each other. And the work of fixing what the wealthy are fleeing is the work they should have been funding all along.