Re hedging, a common technique is having multiple fairly different citizenships and foreign-held assets, i.e. such that if your country become dangerously oppressive you or your assets wouldn’t be handed back to it. E.g. many Chinese elites pick up a Western citizenship for them or their children, and wealthy people fearing change in the US sometimes pick up New Zealand or Singapore homes and citizenship.
There are many countries with schemes to sell citizenship, although often you need to live in them for some years after you make your investment. Then emigrate if things are starting to look too scary before emigration is restricted.
My sense, however, is that the current risk of needing this is very low in the US, and the most likely reason for someone with the means to buy citizenship to leave would just be increases in wealth/investment taxes through the ordinary political process, with extremely low chance of a surprise cultural revolution (with large swathes of the population imprisoned, expropriated or killed for claimed ideological offenses) or ban on emigration. If you take enough precautions to deal with changes in tax law I think you’ll be taking more than you need to deal with the much less likely cultural revolution story.
Permanent residency (as opposed to citizenship) is a budget option. For example, for Panama, I believe if you’re a citizen of one of 50 nations on their “Friendly Nations” list, you can obtain permanent residency by depositing $10K in a Panamanian bank account. If I recall correctly, Paraguay’s permanent residency has similar prerequisites ($5K deposit required) and is the easiest to maintain—you just need to be visiting the country every 3 years.
I was initially pretty excited about the idea of getting another passport, but on second thought I’m not sure it’s worth the substantial costs involved. Today people aren’t losing their passports or having their movements restricted for (them or their family members) having expressed “wrong” ideas, but just(!) losing their jobs, being publicly humiliated, etc. This is more the kind of risk I want to hedge against (with regard to AI), especially for my family. If the political situation deteriorates even further to where the US government puts official sanctions on people like me, humanity is probably just totally screwed as a whole and having another passport isn’t going to help me that much.
I spent some time reading about the situation in Venezuela, and from what I remember, a big reason people are stuck there is simply that the bureaucracy for processing passports is extremely slow/dysfunctional (and lack of a passport presents a barrier for achieving a legal immigration status in any other country). So it might be worthwhile to renew your passport more regularly than is strictly necessary, so you always have at least a 5 year buffer on it say, in case we see the same kind of institutional dysfunction. (Much less effort than acquiring a second passport.)
Side note: I once talked to someone who became stuck in a country that he was not a citizen of because he allowed his passport to expire and couldn’t travel back home to get it renewed. (He was from a small country. My guess is that the US offers passport services without needing to travel back home. But I could be wrong.)
Re hedging, a common technique is having multiple fairly different citizenships and foreign-held assets, i.e. such that if your country become dangerously oppressive you or your assets wouldn’t be handed back to it. E.g. many Chinese elites pick up a Western citizenship for them or their children, and wealthy people fearing change in the US sometimes pick up New Zealand or Singapore homes and citizenship.
There are many countries with schemes to sell citizenship, although often you need to live in them for some years after you make your investment. Then emigrate if things are starting to look too scary before emigration is restricted.
My sense, however, is that the current risk of needing this is very low in the US, and the most likely reason for someone with the means to buy citizenship to leave would just be increases in wealth/investment taxes through the ordinary political process, with extremely low chance of a surprise cultural revolution (with large swathes of the population imprisoned, expropriated or killed for claimed ideological offenses) or ban on emigration. If you take enough precautions to deal with changes in tax law I think you’ll be taking more than you need to deal with the much less likely cultural revolution story.
Permanent residency (as opposed to citizenship) is a budget option. For example, for Panama, I believe if you’re a citizen of one of 50 nations on their “Friendly Nations” list, you can obtain permanent residency by depositing $10K in a Panamanian bank account. If I recall correctly, Paraguay’s permanent residency has similar prerequisites ($5K deposit required) and is the easiest to maintain—you just need to be visiting the country every 3 years.
I was initially pretty excited about the idea of getting another passport, but on second thought I’m not sure it’s worth the substantial costs involved. Today people aren’t losing their passports or having their movements restricted for (them or their family members) having expressed “wrong” ideas, but just(!) losing their jobs, being publicly humiliated, etc. This is more the kind of risk I want to hedge against (with regard to AI), especially for my family. If the political situation deteriorates even further to where the US government puts official sanctions on people like me, humanity is probably just totally screwed as a whole and having another passport isn’t going to help me that much.
I spent some time reading about the situation in Venezuela, and from what I remember, a big reason people are stuck there is simply that the bureaucracy for processing passports is extremely slow/dysfunctional (and lack of a passport presents a barrier for achieving a legal immigration status in any other country). So it might be worthwhile to renew your passport more regularly than is strictly necessary, so you always have at least a 5 year buffer on it say, in case we see the same kind of institutional dysfunction. (Much less effort than acquiring a second passport.)
Side note: I once talked to someone who became stuck in a country that he was not a citizen of because he allowed his passport to expire and couldn’t travel back home to get it renewed. (He was from a small country. My guess is that the US offers passport services without needing to travel back home. But I could be wrong.)