Investment Migration Program Winners & Losers 2025: A Strategic Outlook for Golden Visa Investors

The Macro Shifts Reshaping Investment Migration

Investment migration – often grouped under “golden visas”, “residency by investment” (RBI) and “citizenship by investment” (CBI) – has moved from the fringes of private wealth planning to the mainstream. At the same time, it has come under tighter regulatory, political and public scrutiny.

Broadly, three forces define the 2025 landscape:

• De-risking by governments: pruning weaker programs, especially those perceived as light on due diligence or heavy on transactional real estate.
• Institutionalisation: shift toward regulated fund vehicles, clearer compliance and economic value creation, particularly in OECD countries.
• Optionality demand: families seeking education, healthcare, diversification and “Plan B” rights, not just passports.

For managers like Explorer Investments, these shifts reinforce a simple thesis: programs linked to regulated, real-economy investment have a structurally stronger foundation than those tied to purely transactional assets.

2025 Winners: Programs Gaining Ground

Rather than ranking every program numerically, it is more useful to highlight the characteristics of the “winners” and where they tend to cluster:

1. Fund-based EU residency routes

Portugal’s Golden Visa fund route is the reference point in this category. By requiring a minimum €500,000 subscription into a CMVM-supervised fund, the program channels capital into private equity, growth and infrastructure strategies that support the real economy.

For professional and semi-professional investors – particularly from the US, Latin America and the Middle East – this model feels familiar: regulated vehicle, prospectus or information memorandum, limited partnership-like economics and a defined time horizon.

2. Serious business and entrepreneur visas

Jurisdictions that ask investors to build and scale businesses – rather than simply park capital – are also gaining traction. New Zealand’s Business Investor Work Visa, for example, explicitly targets investors willing to buy and operate established companies locally, with job creation and governance at the centre of the design.

For families already comfortable with private equity or direct deals, these “hands-on” programs can sit alongside more passive fund allocations in Europe.

3. High-quality talent & digital-nomad regimes

Although not classic golden visas, long-stay digital-nomad and talent visas in Europe, the Middle East and Asia have become an important part of the mix for younger founders and professionals. These routes rarely require large investments but often coexist with fund or business allocations designed for long-term residency.

Models Under Pressure & “Losers”

On the other side of the ledger are models that face sustained headwinds – not always because they are “bad”, but because they sit uncomfortably with current policy and reputational trends.

1. Purely transactional real-estate plays

Programs that link residency or citizenship directly to the purchase of a single apartment or villa are increasingly targeted by regulators and the media. Where these routes survive, minimums often rise and due diligence intensifies. For many families, the binary “buy a flat, get a visa” narrative has simply lost its appeal.

2. Opaque or lightly regulated CBI schemes

Citizenship-by-investment programs with limited transparency on source-of-funds, security vetting or use-of- proceeds have come under coordinated pressure. Banks and wealth managers are also more cautious about clients who rely on these passports as their primary mobility tool.

3. Schemes misaligned with OECD tax norms

Structures marketed primarily as tax arbitrage vehicles – rather than as part of a balanced, on-the-record planning strategy – are also increasingly fragile. The direction of travel is clear: substance, transparency and alignment with global standards.

Portugal’s Fund-Based Golden Visa in Context

Portugal sits at the intersection of these trends. With real-estate-based options phased out, the flagship route is now the €500,000 fund investment into a CMVM-supervised vehicle that meets specific criteria on maturity, asset allocation and governance.

For Explorer Investments, this is not simply a legal box to tick. It is an opportunity to direct capital into productive assets – mid-market companies, platforms and infrastructure – using private equity and real-economy lenses that we have refined across cycles.

For a deeper dive on how this interacts with US rules like PFIC, FATCA and CRS, see our dedicated piece US Tax & PFIC Rules for Portugal Golden Visa Funds (2025 Guide).

The US Investor Lens: Tax, Regulation & Optionality

US citizens and long-term residents approach investment migration with an additional layer of complexity: worldwide taxation, PFIC rules, FATCA, SEC considerations and, in some cases, family-governance dynamics across multiple generations.

Three principles tend to guide robust US strategies:

• Nothing “off the grid”: credible, fully-reportable structures designed to work with US tax and regulatory disclosure, not around them.
• Investment first, visa second: the underlying allocation – often private equity, growth or infrastructure – must stand on its own merits.
• Multi-jurisdiction resilience: residency options in Europe, potentially Asia-Pacific and sometimes the Middle East, layered onto a globally diversified portfolio.

In this context, fund-based residency routes in Portugal and business-investor programs in places like New Zealand can complement each other rather than compete.

Building a Multi-Jurisdiction Mobility Portfolio

Thinking about investment migration through a portfolio lens is often more productive than chasing individual programs. A typical high-level architecture might include:

• A European anchor via a regulated Portugal Golden Visa fund allocation.
• An Asia-Pacific operating base via a business investor visa – for example, New Zealand – anchored in a real company.
• Core US onshore assets and global liquid portfolios for liquidity, risk management and long-term wealth creation.

The precise mix will vary, but the underlying idea is constant: residency programs are a tool for structuring where you and your capital can move, not a replacement for a coherent investment process.

Explorer’s Perspective: Private Equity at the Core

Explorer Investments is first and foremost a private equity and real-economy investor. Our role in the investment migration ecosystem is to design and manage regulated funds that:

• Target resilient, cash-generative companies and platforms.
• Align investor and manager incentives over multi-year horizons.
• Comply with CMVM and other regulatory frameworks.
• In some cases, qualify as eligible vehicles for Portugal’s Golden Visa regime.

“Our starting point is always the investment thesis. The fact that certain funds also support a residency or golden visa outcome is a consequence of how they are structured – not their primary purpose.”

From there, we work alongside independent immigration, legal and tax advisers chosen by each family to help ensure that the capital allocation, the structures around it and the residency objectives move in the same direction.

FAQs: Winners & Losers in Investment Migration 2025

Conclusion & Next Steps

In 2025, the clear winners in investment migration are programs that treat investors as long-term partners in the host economy – not as short-term buyers of passports or apartments. Fund-based routes in Portugal and serious business-investor visas in jurisdictions like New Zealand are emblematic of this shift.

For Explorer Investments, that shift aligns naturally with a private equity mindset: deploying capital into resilient companies and platforms, within transparent, regulated vehicles that can support – but never define – a family’s residency strategy.

If you would like to explore how a Golden Visa-eligible fund allocation could sit inside a broader multi- jurisdiction plan, our team can work alongside your existing legal and tax advisers to map out potential scenarios and constraints.

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