Assessing Interest in Group Trip to Secure Panamanian Residency [Imminent Rules Change]
4symian
1Josh Jacobson
3ozziegooen
3Josh Jacobson
3ozziegooen
3ozziegooen
3Josh Jacobson
3ozziegooen
-7Jiro
New Comment
Trying to fill out form and getting this error:
You need permission
This form can only be viewed by users in the owner's organization.
Try contacting the owner of the form if you think this is a mistake. Learn More.
This sounds potentially extremely promising to me. It seems really nice to have some legitimate backups of residency, just in case various things turn bad. Thanks so much for work here.
Do you have any idea on how annoying being a dual resident would be? My impression is that it's fairly easy to revoke, and the forms would be fairly simple (after you have residency). If it were the case that it's a whole lot of extra tax work, that could be a significant downside.
I don't think it'd be very annoying at all. If, for example, you weren't doing significant economic activity in Panama on an ongoing basis, your US taxes would be unaffected and you wouldn't need to file any taxes in Panama (pretty confident).
If you're aiming for citizenship like I would be, then the main work is:
- The upfront time and monetary investment
- Showing investment / interest in Panama and knowledge about it for the 5 year later evaluation (probably involves at least 2 more visits to Panama during that time)
- Then renewing your passport every 5-10 years
Another issue with Panama, long-term (I'd expect the main benefits to come 6 to 30 years from now), is climate change, perhaps with political stability.
I couldn't find much on the topic in an incredibly limited search, but here's something: (though the source isn't great)
https://www.adaptation-fund.org/project/adapting-climate-change-integrated-water-management-panama/
Panama is considered a highly vulnerable country to climate change impacts. Panama experiences a series of extreme weather events including intense and protracted rainfalls, windstorms, floods, droughts, wildfires, earthquakes, landslides, tropical cyclones, tsunamis and ENSO/El Niño-La Niña events.
I did a bit more investigation on this:
https://internationalman.com/articles/the-easiest-country-to-obtain-residency-panama/
The duel citizenship thing seems possibly messy. I imagine it's moreso for people outside of the U.S.
It is true that on paper Panama does not recognize dual citizenship and requires you to renounce your previous citizenship in order to be naturalized. However, this does not mean you have to really give up your existing citizenship.
The Panamanian nationality law requires an oath of renunciation of former citizenship as a condition of naturalization. However, currently the US court system interprets this oath as “non-meaningful” and therefore it will not result in the loss of US citizenship, unless the US citizen renounces their citizenship directly to the US State Department, which will then result in loss of US nationality.
That said, it is not necessary to renounce US citizenship to the US State Department to become naturalized in Panama.
FWIW, this, and similar practices that imply dual citizenship isn't allowed, anecdotally seem to be a very common (perhaps the standard) situation. For example, the US doesn't expressly allow dual citizenship, and there's language in multiple places about renouncing other citizenships, but I've seen estimates that ~5-10% of US citizens have another citizenship and multiple US Congressmen are public about having multiple citizenships as well. I haven't heard about any US enforcement against multiple citizenships.
Having looked into many citizenships and residency programs, this situation is common amongst a high percentage of them, and outside of a few rare country exceptions (not present here) everyone seems to move forward being dual citizens without issue despite this. I do wish laws were clear and explicit about these sort of things, and that there was express permission for multiple citizenship, but it does seem that for a long time across many (most?) international jurisdictions multiple citizenships have been and are allowed in practice, even when commonly 'officially' disallowed.
For example, I mentioned this in response to a comment about Netherlands citizenship on the original post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jHnFBHrwiNb5xvLBM/?commentId=psZcBFaZfQnzJDXeq
I do think, however, moving forward on this does require some willingness to accept that in-practice behavior differs from what may be implied by a country's official regulation, and that isn't a fit for everyone. For what it's worth, to me, after learning quite a bit about this issue moving forward doesn't feel messy at all, but I certainly understand others feeling differently.
Curated and popular this week