The global escape hatch attracting wealthy Californians

As high-profile moguls make permanent moves to places like Texas and Florida to avoid California’s proposed billionaire tax, millionaires in the state are quietly making their own international relocation plans. 

For this subset of wealthy California residents, these moves are not about avoiding taxes but instead about diversifying holdings and, perhaps most importantly, having a “plan B” if they need to flee the country. Rather than fleeing California, they’re positioning themselves to keep their home base while enjoying the luxury of an entirely different country through the growing popularity of golden visas. 

No central database tracks how many Americans apply for residency abroad through “golden visas” — programs where individuals make significant economic investments abroad in exchange for residency in a country — but government and industry data show interest has grown exponentially since 2019. Henley & Partners, a global citizenship and residency advisory firm, said its U.S. client applications rose more than 1,000% between 2019 and 2024 and doubled again in 2025. In New Zealand, Americans filed 305 applications between April 2025 and September 2026, and in Portugal, approvals rose from just 65 in 2019 to 406 in 2024.

“We don’t know what the world will look like in 100 years from now or 50 years from now, so it’s just good planning,” Basil Mohr-Elzeki, a managing partner at Henley & Partners, told SFGATE, explaining that his clients enjoy the “lifestyle options, educational options, travel options” that come with residency abroad.

Mohr-Elzeki said the primary reason most people come to use the company’s services is to diversify assets, but he’s increasingly seeing U.S. applicants think of golden visas as a form of “legacy planning.” “We’re seeing affluent families who are not thinking of the first generation, they’re thinking of the second, third,” he said, explaining that most programs include all named dependents on an application and will pass down. “So then the kids have it, the grandkids have it, the great-grandkids have it.”

Of any state residents, the firm helps the most New Yorkers, but Californians aren’t far behind. Within California, most of their clients are in the Bay Area, followed by Los Angeles, though the company declined to share exact numbers. Mohr-Elzeki said only about 4% of their clients from the U.S. actually relocate — most retain their primary residence — but they embrace flexibility for where they call “home.” 

New Zealand’s investor visitor program, called Active Investor Plus Visa, offers residency through a minimum investment of $5 million NZD (about $3 million in U.S. dollars) and has become particularly popular since its debut in September 2022. “The climate is similar. It’s English speaking, first-world country, stable financial system, so it seems like a really nice complement to being in California,” Mohr-Elzeki said. 

Depending on the country’s program, a golden visa or similar residency program could cost as little as $150,000, Mohr-Elzeki said, to as much as $8 million. “By getting citizenship today for the whole family, not only are you hedging different risks if you deem that one of the reasons, but you’re also providing a lot of optionality on the lifestyle factors, educational, healthcare factors for yourself and the next generations to come,” he said. 

David Russell, an international investment adviser who manages a fund used to obtain a golden visa in a place like Portugal, said most of the applicants he sees are “from the coast, traditionally very wealthy, left-leaning, Democrat voting, people who want a plan B who hate Trump, who hate the administration and they’re looking at something else.” 

A common way to get this type of visa is by investing in real estate, but not every program allows that. Portugal changed its rules in 2023, and now, New Frontiers, the investment fund Russell manages, primarily pours money into early-stage Portuguese solar projects. “What’s quite attractive for a large cohort of wealthy U.S. and actually U.K. nationals is they are very keen on doing something positive with their money for Portugal, the country they’re going to live in,” Russell said.

In 2017, rumors began to swirl after LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker that Silicon Valley elites were buying up land in remote areas of places like New Zealand for “apocalypse insurance.” David Simoes Fitas, an immigration lawyer in Portugal, said most of his clients like the idea of having “a second passport as a plan B,” but mostly, the reasoning is far more ordinary. “They don’t feel welcome anymore in the United States because of their religion, because of their race, because of their sexual orientation. Or just because they don’t see themselves in line with the values,” Fitas said.

Fitas said between 80% and 90% of his clients are wealthy retirees-to-be from the U.S. “They want the option. They don’t want to retire where they have lived,” Fitas said.

Programs in Greece, Italy and Spain are also growing in popularity with that subset, Fitas said. 

The United States has its own golden visa program that launched in December 2025, requiring a $1 million contribution for foreigners seeking residency. The “Trump Gold Card” had only attracted 338 applicants as of May 2026. Julie Fry, an economist and migration policy specialist, said these programs change frequently as each country tries to devise what it deems is the best way to attract both money and talent from across the globe. Many programs were historically focused primarily on big capital infusions, but in addition to reportedly being abused for illicit activity, the upside for many countries wasn’t enough. 

Now, “I think it’s really shifting,” Fry said. A lot of programs are redesigning and reevaluating their programs to try and boost the skills and knowledge brought in rather than just investment. Many entrepreneurs have also discovered the benefits of building businesses in places like New Zealand instead of the U.S. “You can build things without the regulatory constraints that you would find in other places,” she said.

The good weather doesn’t hurt either. 

She said these programs will continue to evolve, and people’s desires will likely evolve alongside them. “The economic value of just having capital isn’t that great, particularly if people are investing passively,” she said. “There’s this desire to see this produce more than just nice people with capital.”