Mexico made its residence visa rules tougher May 16. The change lands hardest on foreigners hired by Mexican employers. Amendments to the General Guidelines for the Issuance of Visas took effect that day. The Interior and Foreign Affairs ministries had published them a day earlier, in the evening edition of the Official Gazette. They tighten […]

Americans in Turkey show up in two different counts that don’t match. About 9,621 hold US citizenship as registered residents. Roughly 30,100 are US-born. The gap is the story. Both numbers come from the Turkish Statistical Institute’s address-based population register. One counts current passport-holders. The other counts birthplace, regardless of which passports a person carries […]

Canadian citizenship by descent just became one of the easiest second-passport routes available to Americans, and the country’s immigration agency has the application backlog to prove it. In January 2026 alone, nearly 2,500 Americans filed for proof of Canadian citizenship, ten times the figure from second-place United Kingdom and more than the next nine source […]

More than 500 Golden Visa investors, predominantly American, are organizing a collective lawsuit against the Portuguese state after Lisbon raised the citizenship timeline from five years to ten years for most non-EU nationals (and to seven years for EU and CPLP nationals). The group is coordinating through WhatsApp and plans to register as a formal […]

Grenada citizenship by investment for Americans drew 27 applications in both 2024 and 2025, according to figures published by the Investment Migration Agency of Grenada. The annual American count held steady even as the program’s total intake fell from 2,297 applications in 2023 to 469 in 2025. Grenada raised its minimum non-refundable contribution to the […]

The share of US passport holders reached 48% of the American population in 2024, up from 5% in 1990, according to State Department figures cited in a January 2026 Congressional Research Service brief. The Bureau of Consular Affairs issued 27.3 million passports in fiscal 2025, a single-year record. More than 183 million valid US passports […]

US asylum claims in Canada reached 634 in 2025, more than triple the 204 filed the year before and the highest annual total on record outside the first Trump administration. The figure comes from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB), which publishes claims by country of alleged persecution. Another 858 US claims sat […]

American naturalizations in Italy reached 824 in 2024, up from 280 in 2014, according to Eurostat’s citizenship acquisitions dataset. The trajectory is the steepest on record for Italian citizenship by descent for Americans, a five-year compound annual growth rate of about 15.6%. Then, in March 2025, Italy slammed the door on the route that produced […]

American students studying abroad reached roughly 90,000 in the most recent reporting year, up from about 50,000 in 2019, Institute of International Education data tracked by CBS News shows. The strongest single-country signal sits in the United Kingdom, where US undergraduate applications through UCAS rose 14% in the 2025 cycle, the largest annual increase since […]

US brokerage account closures have become one of the least-visible costs of American emigration. Major firms have restricted or terminated accounts held by clients with foreign addresses, citing the cost of complying with overlapping regulatory regimes for small numbers of non-resident clients. The list of institutions that have pulled back from servicing Americans abroad includes: […]

Americans moving to Spain received 15,638 first residence permits in 2024, more than double the 7,383 issued in 2015 and the largest American pipeline in Europe after France. The stock figure is bigger still: Spain holds 57,379 American citizens with valid residence permits, alongside 76,180 US-born residents, a gap reflecting decades of dual nationality. American […]

Overseas voter turnout tripled in the 2024 General Election, but the new high-water mark still left 89% of eligible Americans abroad on the sidelines. About 11.0% of the estimated 2.2 million voting-age U.S. citizens living outside the country returned a ballot, according to the Federal Voting Assistance Program’s 2024 Overseas Citizen Population Analysis. Domestic turnout […]

German citizenship for Americans hit a record 1,275 acquisitions in 2024, up from 225 the year before. The five-fold jump in 12 months tracks directly to a single legal change. Germany’s reformed Nationality Act took effect June 27, 2024, allowing non-EU citizens to retain their original passport for the first time as a general rule. […]

The US passport decline accelerated in 2026, with the Henley Passport Index ranking the United States 10th globally, down six places from 4th in 2006. The Henley Passport Index 2026, compiled from International Air Transport Association data, marks this as the third-largest two-decade decline of any country, behind only Venezuela and Vanuatu. Americans now have […]

A recent survey of American Citizens Abroad (ACA) members found 57% support extending Medicare to cover medical services received outside the United States. Thirty-four percent backed full reimbursement, 23% backed partial. AudienceNet and NP Agency conducted the survey for ACA in October 2025 with 833 US citizens living overseas. It was published May 19, 2026. […]

Americans moving to Uruguay filed 616 residency applications in 2025, more than double the 303 filed in 2024 and the 298 filed in 2023, per figures from the Dirección Nacional de Migración (DNM) obtained by El País Uruguay. January 2026 added another 56. The historical stock of American residents in Uruguay has hovered around 3,000. […]

Americans moving to Portugal received 4,345 first residence permits in 2024, up from 550 in 2015. That’s an eightfold rise in nine years, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of about 31%. The volume is small. The slope isn’t. Stock figures track the same trajectory. US citizens holding valid Portuguese residence permits reached 12,443 […]

Finland permanent residence got harder starting at the beginning of 2026. The Finnish Immigration Service began enforcing amendments to the Aliens Act that raise the basic residence requirement from four years to six, add a Finnish or Swedish language test and require two years of work history. President Alexander Stubb signed the changes Dec. 22, […]

Dual citizenship in Latin America has been the easiest second-passport option in the world for Americans. Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Panama, Costa Rica and most of their neighbors all permit it without renunciation. The region accounts for the bulk of US-citizen naturalizations abroad each year, with more than 125,000 Mexican-American dual citizenships granted in 2025 […]

Americans are part of a record wave of foreigners submitting Paraguay residency applications. The country closed 2025 with 47,687 applications, a 63% jump from the year before and the largest annual increase since the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones (DNM) began publishing monthly application data in 2019. The agency granted 40,600 permits over the same period, […]

The US Croatia tax treaty is one step closer to taking effect after Washington and Zagreb signed a protocol on April 28, 2026, designed to resolve the Senate objections that have kept the 2022 agreement on hold. Americans in Croatia have been waiting on it for more than three years. U.S. Ambassador Nicole McGraw and […]

American residence permits in Mexico concentrated in three federal entities in 2024, with Mexico City, Jalisco and Baja California Sur accounting for 40% of national permit activity from January through October, according to the Instituto Nacional de Migración’s permit database. The top six entities together carried 63% of the 23,502 events recorded over the 10-month […]

The Canada business immigration system is effectively closed as of May 2026. The Federal Entrepreneur Program shut down on January 1. The Federal Self-Employed Persons Program is paused indefinitely. The Start-Up Visa processes at “more than 10 years” with 46,200 applications trapped in the queue. And the Quebec Business Class, the last federally-processed route with […]

Cyprus permanent residence through a €300,000 ($340,000) property or fund investment is still the fastest legal route into the EU for Americans willing to write a check. The permit is lifetime. Fast-track Regulation 6(2) processes in two to six months. The income test sits at €50,000 ($56,800) a year from non-Cypriot sources. What the relocation […]