A man in his mid-forties sits across from me. Successful business, house nearly paid off, a portfolio he has thought hard about. He has read up on second passports and he opens with the question they almost all open with: which one should I get?
I ask him a question back. Which passports do your wife and children hold?
The silence that follows is usually the real consultation. He has spent months comparing Caribbean programmes and naturalisation timelines for himself. He has spent roughly zero minutes on the documents held by the three people he would actually be doing all of this for.
This is a composite, not one specific client, but I have had a version of this conversation more times than I can count. So let me write down what I actually tell people.
The Unit of Planning Is the Family, Not the Individual
Almost everything written about second citizenships treats the holder as a single unattached adult. The rankings, the visa-free scores, the comparison tables: all of it assumes one applicant, one passport, one life.
But the people who most need a Plan B are rarely single. They are parents. And a Plan B that covers the father but not the mother, or the parents but not the children, is not a Plan B. It is an escape hatch with a lock on the inside.
Think about what the plan is actually for. If the scenario you are hedging against ever arrives, whether that is war on the European continent, capital controls, or simply a state that has become unbearable to live under, you are not going anywhere without your family. Nobody boards that plane alone. Which means the binding constraint on your entire structure is not your best document. It is the weakest document held by anyone in your household.
I have seen structures where the husband held three residencies and a second passport while his wife held one passport from a country with visa requirements nearly everywhere. On paper, he was diversified. In reality, the family could travel exactly as far as her document allowed. That is not diversification. That is decoration.
What Your Children Get at Birth
Here it helps to understand the two great traditions of citizenship law, because they produce completely different family outcomes.
The first is ius soli, the right of the soil: you are a citizen of the place where you were born. The second is ius sanguinis, the right of blood: you inherit the citizenship of your parents, and the ground beneath the delivery room is irrelevant.
Broadly, and it is a remarkably clean split, the Americas run on soil and Europe runs on blood. The United States, Canada, and nearly every country in Latin America grant citizenship to almost any child born on their territory. This is not a loophole. In the American case it is the Fourteenth Amendment, and it has just survived a direct political assault: the executive order that tried to restrict birthright citizenship in 2025 was struck down, with the Supreme Court confirming in June 2026 that the constitutional rule stands. A child born in Texas or Toronto or Montevideo is a citizen, full stop.
Europe works the other way. A child born in Paris to two German parents is German, not French. Descent is the default, and territorial birth adds little or nothing in most countries.
Germany itself is worth a closer look, because the law changed materially in 2024 and many of my German-speaking readers still carry the old rules around in their heads. Since 27 June 2024, Germany's modernised citizenship law permits dual citizenship as the general rule. Germans who naturalise elsewhere no longer automatically lose their German passport, and foreigners naturalising in Germany no longer have to give up what they hold. Ordinary naturalisation now requires five years of residence instead of eight. There was briefly a three-year fast track for exceptionally well-integrated applicants; it was abolished again in 2025, which tells you something about how quickly these rules move. And children born in Germany to foreign parents receive German citizenship at birth if a parent has been legally resident for five years with a permanent right of residence, a modest ius soli element grafted onto a ius sanguinis system.
The practical consequence for internationally minded parents is enormous. Where your child is born can permanently add a citizenship to the family that neither parent holds. I know families who timed nothing in their lives around this, and their children hold one passport. I know others who understood the map, and their children hold three. Same parents, same means, completely different starting positions for the next generation.
The Citizenship That Dies Abroad
There is a less pleasant mirror image, and Americans abroad know it well. Citizenship by descent is not automatically infinite. Most countries attach conditions to passing it on from outside the territory, and the American version is strict: under the rules that USCIS applies to children born abroad, a child born overseas to one American parent and one foreign parent acquires US citizenship only if the American parent was physically present in the United States for five years before the birth, at least two of them after the age of fourteen.
Read that again as a parent. A young American who leaves at eighteen, builds a life abroad, and has children at thirty with a foreign spouse may discover that those children are not Americans at all. The citizenship simply fails to transmit. Other countries have their own versions: registration deadlines, consular declarations, generational cut-offs. Portugal has been tightening its nationality rules in the opposite direction of Germany's liberalisation.
The lesson is that a family's citizenship portfolio is not static. It can grow with a well-chosen birthplace, and it can quietly evaporate through inattention. Both of those are planning decisions, whether you make them consciously or not.
The Spouse Question
Spouses occupy a strange middle position in nationality law. Marriage to a citizen almost never confers citizenship directly anymore; that era ended decades ago. What it does, in most serious jurisdictions, is shorten the clock.
The United States lets the spouse of a citizen naturalise after three years as a permanent resident instead of five. Germany naturalises the spouse of a German after roughly three years of residence and two years of marriage, against five years for everyone else. Other countries have comparable discounts. The numbers differ; treat the ones here as orders of magnitude and check the current law before relying on any of them, because as the German fast-track episode shows, these rules can change between the day you plan and the day you apply.
Two things matter more than the exact figures. First, nearly all of these routes still require genuine residence. Your spouse cannot collect a citizenship from a distance; the discounted clock only runs while she or he actually lives in the country. Second, and this is where I see the most negligence, the derived route only works if you start it. I meet men who have optimised their own status for a decade while their wife remains one document deep. If your spouse cannot act independently in a crisis, whether that is selling assets or crossing a border, your plan has a single point of failure, and it is not you.
The Side Effects Nobody Mentions
Now the honest part, because citizenship is not a pure asset. It is a bundle of rights and obligations, and some of the obligations are severe.
The heaviest is American. The United States taxes its citizens on their worldwide income regardless of where they live, one of the only countries on earth to do so. The IRS states it plainly: a US citizen abroad has the same filing obligations as one living in Ohio, for life, even in years where exclusions and credits reduce the bill to zero. Add the foreign account reporting regime, add the fact that ordinary non-US investment funds are treated punitively under US tax law, and add an exit tax regime for wealthier citizens who eventually renounce, and you get to an uncomfortable conclusion: an American passport acquired for a child at birth is also a lifelong tax relationship acquired for that child at birth.
I am not saying US citizenship has no value. It has enormous value. I am saying that the parents who fly to Miami for the birth are making a real decision with a real price, and most of them have only priced one side of it.
Military service is the other side effect. A meaningful list of countries still conscripts, and several of them, Greece, Turkey, South Korea, Switzerland and Austria among them, apply conscription to their citizens abroad or make renunciation difficult for young men of service age. A second passport you added to your son's portfolio as a gift can mature into a draft notice. Sometimes that is acceptable, sometimes it is not, but it should never be a surprise. Check the service rules of any citizenship your children hold or acquire, before they turn eighteen rather than after.
Residence First, Passport as a Byproduct
So what is the right order of operations for a family? In my view it has not changed in twenty years, even as the products around it have multiplied.
Residence comes first. A second legal residence in a country you can actually imagine living in, with schools your children could attend and a banking system you can use, delivers most of the practical protection a family needs, and it delivers it within months, not years.
The passport then arrives as a byproduct of lived years. Five years in Germany. Five in Ireland or Malta on the ordinary track. Longer in Switzerland. The timelines vary, but the mechanism is the same everywhere: you convert time your family was going to spend living somewhere anyway into citizenship for every member of it, children included, usually at administrative cost rather than investment cost. Citizenship earned this way also tends to be politically robust. Nobody credibly threatens to strip naturalised citizens who spent seven years in the local school system. The same cannot be said for purchased passports, which the EU has been attacking for years.
Why I Talk Families Out of the Quick Buy
Which brings me to citizenship by investment. I am not ideologically against it; I have written favourably about specific programmes for specific profiles, and for a stateless person or someone whose home passport is genuinely dangerous, CBI can be rational. Our German-language overview of the whole field lives at Plan B Projekt if you want the map.
But when a client with children asks me about the quick buy, I usually talk him out of it, for three reasons.
First, instability. CBI programmes are political creatures. They get restricted, suspended, and repriced, and holders of already-issued passports have found their travel rights degraded after the fact. Argentina's whiplash this year showed how fast citizenship rules can be rewritten and unwritten. A document your child is supposed to rely on in 2050 should not depend on a programme that may not survive the next election cycle.
Second, cost against coverage. Pricing a family of four or five through a purchase programme multiplies fees and due diligence costs quickly, and what you get at the end is a travel document, not a life. It comes with no schools, no community, no second home your children know. In a real crisis, the family with a purchased passport and no established second base is still improvising.
Third, and most fundamentally: the purchase teaches the wrong lesson. A residence-based plan forces your family to actually build something abroad, language, friendships, familiarity, a place that is genuinely theirs. That, far more than the booklet with the coat of arms on it, is what your children inherit. The passport is the receipt. The life is the asset.
Cover everyone, or you have covered no one. That is the whole essay in one sentence.
Work with Sebastian
If you want to look at your family's citizenship and residence position as one structure rather than a collection of accidents, this is precisely the work I do with clients every week. Bring the passports of everyone in your household, not just your own. Book a consultation.
