The USA: Dual Dynamics in Wealth Mobility

The USA is home to more millionaires than any country on earth and attracts more of the world’s capital than any rival. It is also the country whose wealthy citizens are most active in acquiring residence and citizenship rights abroad. The two facts belong together. A nation that creates this many fortunes inevitably creates a large number of people with the means and the sophistication to plan across borders, and in an unsettled world, a great many of them now do. What they acquire abroad is insurance. The fortunes themselves stay, overwhelmingly, in America.

Why the World’s Wealth Still Comes to America

America’s hold on the world’s wealth remains formidable. More than a third of the world’s millionaires are American, and close to a third of all liquid private wealth sits inside the country, a concentration no other nation approaches. The reasons are familiar, and they remain decisive. American capital markets are the deepest in the world, the country’s lead in technology and finance now extends into artificial intelligence, and beneath it all runs a rule of law that lets a large fortune rest easy. For the very largest fortunes that combination exists nowhere else, which is why the billionaire tier keeps arriving from abroad even as part of the millionaire tier looks for a possible exit.

The formal routes into America tell the same story. EB-5, the principal investor visa, is filing at pace ahead of a September 2026 deadline that shields petitions lodged before it from any future lapse, and much of that demand comes from nationals of countries where capital is harder to hold or to move. They are buying into the same markets and the same legal certainty that wealthy families everywhere still treat as the safest home for a fortune.

Why Wealthy Americans Are Building Bases Abroad

The outflow is the other side of the story, and the more revealing one. No nationality acquires residence and citizenship abroad in greater numbers than Americans do. Almost none of this is about lowering a tax bill, since an American is taxed on worldwide income wherever they live. The motive is optionality: the value of holding a credible alternative before it is ever needed, in a world that has grown harder to predict. What used to be a simple precaution, a single spare passport set aside for emergencies, has become a deliberate discipline.

At the top of the market, families have begun to treat jurisdictions much as they treat asset classes, assembling a diversified set rather than depending on any one. A primary residence in one country, a second citizenship in another, a business base in a third, with banking and succession structures spread across several more, each chosen for a distinct purpose so that no single government holds the whole of a family’s life and capital. The result is a deliberate architecture: citizenship and capital managed along separate lines, the passports and residence permits supplying access and a hedge against political risk while the wealth stays where it earns the most.

We see the same pattern in our own practice. Demand from American clients has risen sharply, nearly doubling in 2025, and the USA has been our largest source of applications since 2023. The great majority are US-Americans living in the USA, rather than expatriates already abroad, and they have no intention of leaving, or at least not yet. Close to half pursue European programs, Portugal and Italy the most popular, drawn by access to a base in Europe and the mobility that comes with it. Around a quarter pursue Latin American and Caribbean residence and citizenship programs, which can be secured relatively quickly and held in reserve against a change in circumstances.

Capital Stays, People Diversify

The same impulse, on a smaller scale, is redrawing the map inside the country. The shift is clearest in Florida, where Jeff Bezos has relocated from Seattle, and Larry Page has moved his family office out of California, part of a steady transfer of finance and technology wealth towards Miami and Palm Beach. Here the calculation is largely about tax. California’s wealthiest residents face a proposed 5% tax on billion-dollar fortunes, while Florida levies no income tax at all, and within the USA a change of address is often enough to lower what a household owes.

Even so, the wealth itself rarely leaves the country. The billionaire who moves to Miami and the family that pairs a home in Lisbon with a trust in Singapore are responding to the same reality: in an era of growing uncertainty, mobility has become a form of risk management. People diversify where they live, hold residence rights, and educate their children, while capital continues to flow to the markets, businesses, and opportunities that offer the strongest returns.

That distinction helps explain the apparent contradiction at the heart of American wealth mobility. The USA remains the world’s pre-eminent destination for capital and entrepreneurship, even as growing numbers of Americans seek greater personal and geographic optionality abroad. The story is therefore not one of capital flight, but of increasingly sophisticated diversification. In a world where uncertainty has become a permanent feature of the landscape, access, flexibility, and choice are emerging as valuable assets in their own right.