Eight Bitter Mobility Truths For the Sovereign Individual in 2026
- Parviz Malakouti-Fitzgerald, Esq.
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
By Parviz Malakouti-Fitzgerald, Esq.
Most people who get excited about second citizenship, second passports, and international mobility focus on the upside. The flags, the options, and the freedom are exciting, but rarely the traps.
Article Outline:
You cannot be certain of all the countries where you hold citizenship
Visa-free travel for Americans is dying, and ETAs are not the equivalent
A single ETA denial can trigger a domino effect across your entire mobility profile
Citizenship by investment and citizenship by merit are under increasing attack
Social media following is not a proxy for accuracy in the mobility space
Here are eight bitter mobility truths that will catch a significant number of people off guard over the coming years.
Understanding them now is the difference between learning the easy way and acting prophylactically or learning the hard way through a hard fall.
1. You cannot be certain of all the countries where you hold citizenship
This surprises people when I say it, but it is actually true. Citizenship by operation of law is the dominant mechanism by which people around the world hold their nationalities. It does not require an application. It does not require your consent. It does not require that you have ever set foot in the country or had any contact with it whatsoever.
There are 195 different sets of domestic nationality rules on this planet, and they apply to you whether you know about them or not. Millions of people are citizens of countries they have never heard of, without any awareness of the legal status that attaches to them.
2. Visa-free travel for Americans is dying, and ETAs are not the equivalent
Electronic travel authorizations (“ETAs”) are being marketed as a simple online formality, but in practice they function much more like a visa than like true visa-free access. They are pre-travel applications. They are deniable. And increasingly, they are being denied for reasons that have nothing to do with criminal history.
The United Kingdom is already denying ETAs based on speech and political views (See Kanye, Valentina Gomez, Hasan Piker & Cenk Uygur). The United States under the current administration does the same thing. This trend will continue. Your public statements, your social media posts, your commentary, all of it will become fair game as ETA eligibility criteria expand. This might seem like a distant concern at the moment, but it is coming for ordinary people with even modest public profiles.
3. A single ETA denial can trigger a domino effect across your entire mobility profile
Most people do not realize that citizenship, residency, visa, and ETA applications in countries around the world routinely ask whether you have been denied these benefits - even elsewhere.
An ETA denial in one country is a negative mark you will have to disclose and explain in applications filed in other countries for years to come. A seemingly minor denial today can close doors across multiple jurisdictions down the road.
This is the mobility asset denial domino effect. It’s supercharged by the rise of ETAs.
4. Citizenship by investment and citizenship by merit are under increasing attack
This is true across the board, though the degree of pressure varies significantly by program. And it is not just the citizenship itself that is under attack. It is the springboard benefits: the visa-free access, the satellite residency rights, the treaty benefits that a third country extends to your CBI nationality.
Those springboard benefits are being restricted, degraded, and even sometimes eliminated for citizens by investment and citizenship by merit where the “merit” is based on a financial investment or donation. I expect this trend to accelerate.
5. No government is bound by the promises a salesman made you
The Portuguese Golden Visa situation is an obvious case study here.
A large number of people paid significant money based on marketing representations about what their investment residency would lead to, specifically a guaranteed path to naturalization, an EU citizenship. But the government changed course. An unfortunately predictable attack vector - risk of legislative change during the path to naturalization eligibility.
Generally, there is no legal mechanism to hold a country to a promise made by a citizenship marketer or immigration consultant with no authority to bind anyone to anything. Before you commit serious money to a residency or citizenship path by investment, understand the actual legal basis of what you are buying, not just the glossy pitch.
6. Social media following is not a proxy for accuracy in the mobility space
Some of the most widely followed citizenship influencers and marketing websites regularly publish information that is substantively wrong. Chronic slop pushers.
The reason this is sustainable is that the subject matter - citizenship and mobility law - is highly technical. The vast majority of the audience does not have the foundational knowledge to evaluate mobility influencer claims critically. In my experience, real practitioners who work in the trenches can usually identify nonsense in the first two minutes of watching a video or reading a social media post, but unfortunately most citizenship enjoyers cannot.
Don’t be fooled into thinking high follower count = legitimacy.
7. Mobility influencers do not know the law, and mobility lawyers tend to be light on preventative strategies
Those are two different blind spots that both matter.
Influencers are not reading primary source law. They are not consultants versed in the legal architecture of what they are recommending. That is a serious deficiency. But lawyers oftentimes have their own problem: most legal work comes in when something has already gone wrong, which means lawyers tend to develop frameworks built around fixing problems through direct engagement with legal systems.
The most powerful mobility strategies are often preventive or proactive. Best practices and insightful heuristics applied before problems arise are the ounce of prevention to save a pound of cure.
8. Citizenship privacy is a genuine security concern
If people know which countries you hold citizenship in, they know which extraterritorial legal frameworks can be applied to your conduct. That’s dangerous for anybody with any remotely public persona.
When someone else knows your citizenships, they can know which legal rules apply to you, even extraterritorially. That set of laws can be cross-referenced with publicly available information about your conduct, statuses, and speech to determine where you may have run afoul of the law. The rise in AI makes this exercise cheaper than ever.
That knowledge can then be assembled into an information package and submitted to relevant law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies. Even if an investigation leads nowhere, the process itself can be financially and personally devastating.
While this might seem alarmist at the moment, I predict this will be an established, known tactic within the next three years. Don’t post your passports and residency permits online.
Video Explainer
These eight mobility truths are real concerns that are already in motion.
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Each immigration and citizenship case is particular and you should consult with a qualified immigration and citizenship lawyer about your case before taking any steps. The Law Office of Parviz Malakouti does not guarantee the accuracy of information presented nor assume responsibility for actions taken in reliance of this information. The information in this page could become outdated. Attorney marketing.
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