The global rich like Peter Thiel are eyeing the exit door. Argentina wants to be a ‘serious contender’ in the migration game
An incoming citizenship-by-investment scheme could turn Argentina into the next backup plan for the ultra-wealthy hedging against risks at home
Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel made headlines when he decided to relocate with his family to Buenos Aires earlier this summer, purchasing a mansion in an exclusive neighborhood and meeting with President Javier Milei and senior government officials.
This is exactly the plan, it turns out — Argentina wants more people like him. The country has been preparing for the last year to launch a full citizenship-by-investment scheme. In July 2025, Decree 524/2025 established an Investment Citizenship Programs Agency within its Ministry of Economy that would allow, for the first time, foreign investors to apply for citizenship without needing to reside in Argentina first. The exact parameters are still being worked out, with the Financial Times reporting that wealthy foreigners may be able to obtain Argentine citizenship in exchange for a non-refundable donation of about $500,000 or buying $1 million in zero-coupon government bonds, citing people familiar with the government’s plans.
The sheer scale of the plan is what sets it apart from anything the citizenship-by-investment industry has tried before, according to Nuri Katz, the founder of Apex Capital Partners, who said he has spent considerable time in Argentina and is aware of the government’s processes.
“This is a country of over 40 million people, and the opportunities, the business opportunities that are available in Argentina are endless,” he told Fortune. The largest countries to previously offer citizenship for investment—Montenegro and Malta—are small nations by comparison, he noted.
Katz pointed to several selling points for wealthy investors. The country sits on Vaca Muerta, one of the world’s largest shale oil and gas formations, which has been geologically compared to the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas by experts, alongside major lithium, gold, silver, soy, corn, beef, and wheat industries. He cited the roughly $22 billion a year in trade that Argentina has with the European Union as further evidence of the scale of opportunity.
The push builds on reporting the government has been developing to court prominent wealthy figures to what a former official described as a “new land of freedom” for billionaires.
“I think it will be a serious contender and player in the wealth migration, investment migration space,” Dominic Volek, who advises ultra-high-net-worth families on residence and citizenship planning at Henley & Partners, told Fortune.
The appetite for such an option isn’t hypothetical. Wealthy families in the U.S. are actively searching for safe havens. A proprietary survey of 1,800 Americans commissioned by Katz’s firm found that 61% would consider moving out of the United States within the next five years—a number Katz called “incredibly shocking.”
For years, wealthy Americans looked to New Zealand, Portugal, Greece, and the Caribbean as backup plans. Now Argentina—long associated with inflation, capital controls, and default risk—is trying to sell itself as a Plan B for outsiders with money.
Argentina’s passport already grants visa-free access to a long list of countries, Volek noted, but citizenship would come with an added bonus: settlement rights across the nine-country Mercosur bloc – which includes Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador — similar to what an EU passport confers across Europe.
“There’s increased optionality available to you,” he said, explaining that Argentina’s remoteness from the U.S. while also being in a similar time zone makes it “incredibly attractive.”
Katz also said the flight to Buenos Aires, while nearly as long as a trip to Europe, doesn’t come with the jet lag that a European trip does. “That’s a huge, huge thing for somebody, especially an American business person, whose life is travel,” he said.
Katz also pointed to a bigger-picture safety pitch: South America is currently the only continent besides Antarctica that isn’t at war, and Argentina itself hasn’t fought one in decades.
Thiel’s arrival is a signal, but the open question is whether Argentina can turn billionaire curiosity into durable capital, or whether it is selling a safe haven in a country still defined by volatility. Volek’s firm expects Argentina’s citizenship-by-investment program to go live by the end of the year and is already holding a roster of clients ready to apply the moment it does.
“For our business and for the investment migration industry as a whole, it will be quite a game changer,” he said.
Difference between safe havens and tax havens
“There’s really no such thing as a golden visa,” Katz told Fortune. “These are temporary statuses, and they can go away.” Only citizenship, he said, gives someone the assurance that they’ll be able to remain in a country indefinitely.
Despite the Argentine government’s framing of the program through a tax lens, advisors caution against reading Argentina’s push—or the broader boom in second citizenships—as primarily a tax play, at least for Americans. The U.S. taxes its citizens on worldwide income no matter where they live, so acquiring Argentine citizenship changes nothing for a client’s IRS bill unless they go through the far more drastic step of renouncing U.S. citizenship.
Instead, getting a second citizenship applies the logic of wealthy people’s portfolio diversifying instincts to passports.
“Why on earth would you have one country of citizenship and only one country that you can live in when you have the financial capacity to build a portfolio of options?” Volek said.
David Lesperance, a leading international tax and immigration advisor with over three decades of experience, tells American clients to think of their citizenship and residency options as a hedge against whatever their personal “wildfire” might be—a hurricane, an earthquake, political violence, antisemitism, mass shootings, or a punitive new tax.
“If you look at these alternative residences and citizenships as fire insurance, and people incorporate them into a fire escape plan, they may not actually leave unless the literal wildfire happens,” Lesperance told Fortune. “But I recognize that it could happen, and I have the means to protect my family from it.”
Crucially, Lesperance said, a move like Thiel’s doesn’t require moving money along with it.
“You need to separate where you live from where your assets are,” he said, describing having considered relocating his own family to Buenos Aires before ultimately choosing Koh Samui, Thailand.
“If you’re going to physically move yourself and your family to a place like Argentina, that does not require me to move my wealth to Argentina,” he said. A client might simply like Buenos Aires and consider it safe for their family, he said, while making an entirely separate decision about where to bank and pay taxes.
Lesperance has seen South America’s profile rise sharply among his American clients over the past year to 18 months, alongside longer-running interest in Europe. But for now, both advisors and their clients are in wait-and-see mode.
“Everyone is sort of waiting for the program to actually be available before they’re making any sort of decisions,” Volek said.
