Spain plans to eliminate a “golden visa” program that allows wealthy non-European Union citizens to buy residency rights by investing 500,000 euros or more (about $540,000) in cash in real estate, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said.
Sánchez connected the move to concerns about affordable housing. “Housing is a constitutional right and not a mere speculative business,” he said in a social media post on Monday.
The move would make Spain the latest country to reevaluate its so-called “golden visa” program in recent years, after Portugal, Ireland and Australia made changes to their own in the past two years.
Sánchez said that such visas were linked to property investment “in major cities that are facing a highly stressed market and where it’s almost impossible to find decent housing for those who already live, work and pay their taxes there,” Reuters reported. The government will begin the process to eliminate the scheme at a meeting Tuesday.
The program has been connected to only a small fraction of houses purchased in Spain and experts do not expect it to significantly impact the housing market. But the reevaluation is part of a wider tightening of such policies in Europe and elsewhere, amid concern over security, inflation and whether the programs are actually boosting economies.
“It’s a red herring. It’s not actually going to change housing prices very much,” said Max Holleran, a lecturer in social policy at the University of Melbourne who has written about the program in Spain. He called the change a “political maneuver with a smidgen of xenophobia.”
Spain’s golden visa stood out in that it allowed foreigners a path into the country through relatively inexpensive real estate, Holleran said, noting he was surprised it wasn’t scrapped or modified earlier. Through the program, investors could receive an initial three-year residence permit, renewable for five years, after which they can obtain permanent residence, according to Henley & Partners, a company that consults on citizenship and residency by investment.
The program was born out of the economic crisis, according to Holleran.
“It’s heartless in some ways,” he noted. “It’s not ‘send us your poor and needy,’ it’s like, ‘send us your wealthy and potential buyers of yachts.’”
Golden visas are described by Henley & Partners as programs that “give high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) the option of physically relocating to a favorable jurisdiction.” They require a kind of investment and are offered by dozens of countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain, Singapore, Italy and elsewhere.
The programs made news in 2022 when the European Commission called for them to be repealed amid concern that they could allow Russian or Belarusian nationals subject to sanctions or in support of the war in Ukraine “privileged access to the E.U.”
Spain is among several countries reassessing their golden visa programs.
Neighboring Portugal recently stopped allowing foreigners to obtain residency rights through real estate purchases, although investors who invest 500,000 euros in some funds still qualify, according to Reuters.
In 2023, Ireland shut its plan, which allowed individuals with at least 2 million euros (about $2.17 million) in wealth to obtain residency if they invest 1 million euros (about $1.08 million) in an Irish business or make hefty philanthropic donations, according to the Irish Times.
Australia earlier this year halted a program for investors investing more than 5 million Australian dollars, or $3.3 million, in favor of allowing more skilled workers in.
“It has been obvious for years that this visa is not delivering what our country and economy needs,” Australian Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil said in January, the BBC reported.
The goal of many of these policies is for investors to drive business economic growth across the country more broadly, said Anna Boucher, a global migration expert at the University of Sydney, but “wealth is not the same as being entrepreneurial.”
“Some of Australia’s biggest entrepreneurs are actually from a refugee background,” she noted. “A person might be extremely entrepreneurial and have limited wealth when they first come.”