Residency · Insight
What actually survived the golden visa era
Portugal closed the property route. Ireland closed its programme. Cyprus closed citizenship. What is left, and what does it tell you about how these programmes change?
Between 2023 and 2025, a substantial part of the investment-migration market was rewritten. Portugal removed real estate from its golden visa. Ireland closed its Immigrant Investor Programme outright. Cyprus had already closed citizenship by investment in 2020. The Netherlands ended its investor route. Several programmes were repriced rather than closed.
The pattern is consistent enough to be a planning assumption rather than a surprise: programmes aimed purely at passive capital attract political pressure, and programmes that create employment, substance, or genuine economic integration survive it.
What closed
- Passive real-estate routes in Portugal — no longer qualifying for residency as of October 2023.
- Ireland's Immigrant Investor Programme — closed in 2023.
- Cyprus citizenship by investment — closed in 2020 after due-diligence failures.
- Several Caribbean programmes increased minimum contributions and tightened scrutiny following EU pressure.
What survived
The routes that survived share a characteristic: they require the applicant to do something economically real. Qualifying investment funds, job creation, business establishment, research activity, and genuine income-based relocation — the D7 and D8 routes in Portugal, the Employment Pass in Malaysia, the Self Economic Solvency and Friendly Nations routes in Panama.
The programmes that survived are the ones that ask you to participate rather than deposit.
The planning implication
Treat any programme built on a passive financial threshold as having a finite life. That does not mean avoid them — it means build the risk into the plan. Concretely: prefer routes that lead to permanent residency directly rather than through repeated temporary renewals; prefer routes where you would still want the residency if the tax benefit disappeared; and get the application filed while the terms are current, because grandfathering provisions usually protect applications already in process but rarely protect intent.
The second implication is about advice quality. A meaningful share of the content still circulating describes programmes that no longer exist on the terms stated. If an adviser quotes you a real-estate golden visa for Portugal, they are working from a file that is years out of date — which tells you something about how they will handle your application.