My twins were born in 2016. When they turn thirty, the world they will navigate will look different from the one in which I built my practice — different in ways I can partially anticipate and in ways that will surprise all of us. What I can say with some confidence, after eighteen years in this field, is this: the jurisdictional decisions their parents and grandparents make today will shape the starting conditions of their lives in ways most families do not fully account for when those decisions are made.

This is the part of investment migration that almost nobody talks about. The conversation is usually framed around the individual — their tax position, their mobility, their hedge against political risk. These are real considerations. But they are incomplete ones. A residency or citizenship is not a point solution for the person who holds it. It is a structural element that the next generation either inherits, builds upon, or has to reconstruct from scratch because nobody thought about it in time.

What different generations are actually solving for

Over eighteen years of practice, I have sat across from clients from nearly every generation currently active in the world, and I have noticed that the question each generation brings to this work is shaped as much by the historical moment they came of age in as by their personal circumstances.

The generation that built serious wealth through the 1980s and 1990s — what is broadly called Generation X — tends to arrive at this work with a stability mandate. They have spent their careers building. What they want now is to protect what they have built: to ensure that the systems they depend on — healthcare, financial infrastructure, legal continuity — do not become fragile at the moment they need them most. A second residency for this generation is often a quiet insurance policy, held precisely so it never has to be used in urgency.

The generation that followed them — broadly the Millennials, now in their late twenties to early forties — arrives with a different set of questions. They grew up watching systems that their parents trusted prove more fragile than advertised. They came of age during a financial crisis and a pandemic. They have built careers that are already international, already digital, already decoupled from a single geography. For them, a jurisdictional position is less about insurance and more about alignment — getting their formal legal status to catch up with the life they are already living.

The generation now entering its first decade of adult professional life — broadly Generation Z — has inherited a world in which the idea of building an entire life in one country already seems like a peculiar constraint rather than a natural default. What they are looking for is not a hedge or an alignment. They are looking for architecture that supports a life they have not yet built, in directions they cannot yet fully specify. This is a different kind of brief, and it requires a different kind of thinking.

These are not rigid categories. I have advised clients in their sixties who think with the flexibility of someone a generation younger, and clients in their thirties who want exactly the kind of solidity their parents’ generation sought. The generational frame is useful not because it determines anything, but because it illuminates the assumptions people bring to the conversation before they have articulated them.

The compounding that most people miss

What I find myself returning to, particularly now that my own children are approaching the age at which these decisions begin to matter for them rather than just for me, is the compounding logic of jurisdictional positioning.

A residency obtained today in a country with a clear pathway to citizenship becomes, in ten years, a citizenship. That citizenship, held by a parent, creates — in most jurisdictions — an entitlement for the child. The child who might otherwise have to navigate a program, meet investment thresholds, and build their own position from the beginning instead starts from a position of established access. The architecture built in one generation becomes the platform for the next.

I have watched this play out across the families I have worked with over nearly two decades. A client who obtained a European residency in 2009 for entirely personal reasons — they wanted a base in southern Europe, a place to spend extended time — came back to me in 2023 because their eldest child had been accepted to a university in that country and the residency, now mature, opened doors that would otherwise have required its own separate strategy.

The reverse is also true. Families who deferred these decisions — who intended to address them eventually, who thought the programs would always be available on the same terms — have sometimes returned to find that the window closed. Programs are amended. Investment thresholds rise. Due diligence requirements tighten. The European Union has applied pressure to several member states on their citizenship by investment programs. Some have been restructured. Some have been suspended entirely. The family that waited missed something they cannot recover.

What this means in practice

I am not arguing that everyone should move with urgency. Most of the decisions in this field are not urgent in the way a fire is urgent. They are urgent in the way a long-term investment is urgent — which is to say, the cost of delay is not immediately visible, but it compounds in the wrong direction.

What I am arguing is that the question is worth asking earlier than most people ask it. Not “do I need a second residency right now” — but rather: “what do I want my family’s jurisdictional position to look like in twenty years, and what does that mean for what I put in place today?”

My twins will make their own choices. I cannot design their lives, and I would not want to. But I can ensure that the architecture they inherit is spacious enough to hold those choices — whatever form they take. That is what this work is, at its best. Not a product. Not a transaction. A structure built to outlast the decision that created it.