More and more wealthy Californians are seeking 'golden visa' residency outside the U.S.

If all goes to plan, Jae Kim, Annie Akin and their 4-year-old son will soon be residents of Portugal. By then, the San Francisco family will have had their birth certificates notarized, had European officials record their fingerprints and transferred half a million Euros into an international investment fund.

Kim and Akin are among a rising number of wealthy Californians using their capital to seek residency and citizenship outside the U.S.

It’s often called citizenship by investment, or a golden visa, and refers to a process in which individuals who invest a hefty amount of money into a country, either through buying property or direct investment, can more easily become permanent residents or citizens.

“Affluent families are starting to say, ‘Hey, this is actually really good to have alongside all of my investments. Why don’t I diversify where I can live?’” said Basil Mohr-Elzeki, a managing partner at Henley & Partners, a residency and citizenship firm with an office in Beverly Hills.

While no agency tracks these cases nationwide, three firms that help secure these kinds of residences said interest in so-called golden visas has skyrocketed in the past five years.

In that time, the number of Californians one firm has worked with grew from roughly three clients a year to more than a hundred. Firms say Californians now make up as many as one in five clients from around the globe seeking residency in another country, a statistic not entirely surprising since the state is home to a large number of the world’s wealthiest people .

“That’s 85% of my clients from America,” said Eric Major, head of Latitude, a citizenship by investment firm with U.S. offices in Denver, Miami and New York. Major estimates that the average net worth among his California clients hovers near $250 million — a million of which they’ll likely end up spending to get another passport.

“They’re wanting it for — what if the wheels fall off America? Then I need, just like World War II, a place to go,” he said.

The number of wealthy Californians scrambling to nab exit options has grown alongside the number of Americans in total, according to the citizenship-by-investment firms.

In 2019, Major said, fewer than 5% of his clients seeking residency and citizenship came from the U.S. Now, as the total number of his clients has grown, Americans make up three-fourths of his work.

Among those using their wealth to rack up passports is tech billionaire and former Californian Peter Thiel, who according to the New York Times is pursuing citizenship in Argentina out of a concern for where the U.S. seems to be headed, including a tax on billionaires in California that will go to voters later this year.

Most wealthy Americans, and particularly Californians, are interested in residency in a European nation, which affords someone the ability to live or work in more than two dozen countries in the European Union. In Europe, the most popular residency programs, firms said, tend to be in Portugal and Malta.

A much less costly way to get European citizenship is by descent.