Though I believe they recently made an exception for Americans getting charged ridiculous fees to renounce if it was more than a month of income, or similar.

Thanks for making this! I'm a US citizen applying for naturalization in a few months. Here's to 7% more territory! Though really, the EU ought to be something of a block since it means the right to live and work throughout, not just in one country. For now, at least.

Also, worth noting that Republic of Ireland might get a bonus factor, in a sense, for soon being the only passport that lets you work throughout the EU and the UK.

I also have a friend that was born with both US and Japanese. Didn’t have to pick. However, US embassy indicates that even if you notify Japan that you pick Japanese and renounce other citizenships, it is in fact a very formal process (almost difficult) to lose US citizenship.

It’s quite irregular. As an American abroad, we get zero awareness or sympathy from people „back home“. They either assume it is normal among countries or that it doesn’t exist.

Taxation treaties only go so far. Declaration overhead, schedule category, and tests make the process hellish. And I haven’t even begun to mention the FBAR and other disclosures. It hurts everyday Americans abroad and barely differentiates against real versus nominal income and cost level.

Not only that, you are required to disclose all of your foreign bank accounts and their balances on a special "FBAR" form to the FinCEN (separate agency from the IRS). Penalties for any "violations" start at $10,000 each (for so-called "non-willful" violations such as using the wrong currency conversion rate or a different bank branch address) and go up to 25% account value for willful violations (everything is conveniently considered "willful" whenever possible to FinCEN in absence of fact, even the aforementioned common mistakes). Many expats get screwed because they simply didn't know about this esoteric form. Hiring a professional to properly prepare your FBAR with their signature on it is necessary as a form of "insurance" (you are welcome to roll the dice and self-prepare), and of course, it is also an expensive proposition.

There is also no clear guidance for what the disclosure requirements are for foreign cryptocurrency exchange accounts or wallets. Anyone living inside or outside the US with a Binance account could get slammed at anytime in the future for not submitting an FBAR.

If before leaving the US, you lived in California, you also have to pay California state taxes on all world-wide income every year, since you are still considered a California "resident."

There is a foreign earned income exemption up to around 100k. This applies to ordinary income only, not capital gains (e.g. cryptocurrency), and you have to meet rather-stringent requirements to qualify. Also, the exempted income still pushes up your capital gains bracket to the highest applicable rate. This exemption does not apply to your California taxes, only your federal taxes.

You almost never hear about how disfavorable the US tax laws are for expats because there are only 8 million of us.

No taxation without representation, right?

https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2016/11/02/am...

Foreign banks are required to report information about accounts owned by US citizens to the FinCEN (this is called FACTA). You may remember being asked if you are a US citizen when you opened your foreign account -- this is why. If the banks don't provide this information to the US government, then they are heavily sanctioned. Many criticize FACTA for its world policing, and past attempts at repealing it, spearheaded by none other than Rand Paul, have been struck down by the courts.

If something doesn't match up between what the banks reported about you and what you reported, then this triggers an audit. Then, the IRS will request documentation, and if you do not provide it or if it does not match, then you are criminally charged with tax evasion, facing heavy fines and jail time.

This whole sour experience of being an expat and getting screwed in multiple ways has literally turned me into a tax reform lobbyist. It's quite a different experience than importing your W-2 into Turbo Tax in 30 minutes and getting a refund every year like 99% of Americans.

There are exceptions for local taxes, but you still have to file tax returns.

Same for The Netherlands[1]

[1] https://www.government.nl/topics/dutch-nationality/dual-nati...

... well, I guess that means I’m a lucky person when it comes to passports. When I reverse search, the best second passport for a German is “Application Error”, and I sure have plenty of those as well :)

The UK situation, for example:

>"Officially called a “Tier 1 investor” visa in the UK, the scheme gives individuals residency in exchange for investing £2m in UK bonds or shares through a bank, with applicants eligible for indefinite leave to remain, and even full citizenship, after five years. That is, unless they can stump up more cash: those offering £5m can settle after three years, and those with £10m after just two." (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/04/golden-visa-...)

Now it's the Grauniad so I don't expect it to be completely right but I expect it's close -- [THIS BIT IS WRONG, PROPERTY INVESTMENT IS EXCLUDED: so make a company to buy your small pied-a-terre in London for a few £Million and you get access to citizenship.]

Things have tightened up recently for Russians, not sure about others.

See also https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-investor.

I believe it's for everyone, you basically have to indicate where your money is coming from to a higher degree of detail. It's an anti-money-laundering measure, I think, more than anything. The situation had become shameful, with London being the black-economy capital of the world.

I just don't see it being that accessible in Africa.

Keeping two passports up to date is a non trivial amount of work and expenses, and perhaps travel. Depending on the two countries, of course.

Unless you travel a fair amount, it is often not worth the effort. I've given up on keeping my old passport current, and feel good!

Mind you these are two Nordic countries so it is not much of a difference either way.

Even for voting, which the tool misses, is conviently done. I vote in country B elections from country A. They have lists of country B social security number with a name for the eligible votets, I have the paper which they mailed to me from B and present that while I prove myself using passport/driver's license of country A. Then I vote remotely, in advance to the actual voting day.

Voting in EU elections works the same way, but is done for one country only.

I'm a dual citizen for the United States and Mexico, and it's fairly easy to update my Mexican passport here in the United States - not sure if that's the case inversely.

I live in vancouver so my choices include a 4.5 hrs flight to Toronto, paying very close attention when they travel to Vancouver (which is effin rare, see https://ottawa.mfa.gov.hu/eng/page/kihelyezett-uegyfelfogada... -- right now if you try to get an appointment you simply get a 'no appointments available' error) or just renew my passport in Hungary. For me, that's relatively easy since I am back there at least twice a year so that's OK. But the bastards just changed the procedures so the valid date is your last birthday so when I recently renewed I got 9 years and 1.5 months instead of ten years. And, if all goes by plan in a few years I won't travel to Hungary ever again so this will become a major hassle but as long as the idiot government doesn't pull a Huxit it's still worth it because it gives me free movement in the EU.

I have been hit with $150-200 visa fees 2-3 times with my US passport that my European one would have avoided, but in hindsight it was a good deal.

Cape Verde (through economic citizenship)

Belize (though economic citizenship)

Dominica (through economic citizenship)

Grenada (through economic citizenship)

Saint Kitts and Nevis (through economic citizenship)

Ireland (island) (through lineage)

Canada (through naturalization)

The United Kingdom (through naturalization in a British Overseas Territory)

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-greatest-number-of-citizen...

Curious why you added (island)?

Most passport rankings are by total number of places you can go. But given I already have one passport, what value do I get from a second passport? For example, Canada, USA, Uk, etc have fairly similar sets of countries you can go to. But maybe there's a passport that gets me access to the various middle Eastern and African countries I don't have access to. So maybe something lower overall rated is better as my 2nd passport.

It'll show you what you get out of a second, third etc passport.

For example, I'm personally planning to move to Ireland relatively soon; in part because it's one of the easiest to get dual citizenship (5 of the last 9 years)[1].

[1] https://www.quora.com/Which-EU-country-has-the-easiest-citiz...

Lots of houses have been connected in the last 2-3 years.

https://passports.io

I was actually going to work for the US government during my junior to senior year at school. I had 3 internships lined up. One in Germany, one with a REU doing gold nanoparticle fabrication at an IVY league school, and one with the government. But at the last moment got burned because I wasn't able to gain security clearance. I even did drug tests etc and the process took me several months, I accepted the position many months prior before summer started

They never gave me a valid reason but I was grilled on the fact a few weeks prior that I recently renewed my 10 year contract with my birthplace's citizenship.

I live in America. The government treats it as a moral gray area for you to work in high secure areas while having a dual citizenship, especially if its recently renewed (which was the case for me, my 10 yr dual citizenship was going to expire around same time I was going to work for US government). The other citizenship I had was a 1st world country as well with very good relations to USA, so it was kind of weird.

It could include better information for dual citizenship. For example, I searched for China, which does not allow dual citizenship at all, and the search results showed the results for the reciprocal relationship country. Because of the complexity of countries reciprocal relationships, I guess this would need to be a 1-1 mapping country to country.

I liked you used the term 'Select your current passport:' and avoided the term 'country' because some passports are for territories.

So I checked a territory, Hong Kong. There wasn't an option whether this is the modern HKSAR or the old British National (Overseas), or could it be British Overseas Citizenship? These are all edge cases, cumulatively edge-cases for 10s of millions of people, but perhaps they're better solved by local services rather than a general solution.

The main problem of dual-citizenship I've seen is when one embassy says they can't deal with a problem, so go to the other embassy. The other embassy says the same. A bit of a no-man's-land.

That said, always been planning on using my 2nd citizenship to live in Europe for an extended period of time. My wife is British, and pretty soon, might need the connection through me to have EU benefits...

https://multinational.io/best_passport/the%20United%20Kingdo...

It's not part of the Schengen zone, so will allow people to enter visa free but presumably you need visitor rights to the country you're coming from (compare Andorra).

The dual citizen status is actually very common. If a child's parents are Chinese citizen working/studying in US with a temporary visa (H1b, F1) and the child was born in US, the child is eligible to be a Chinese citizen, thus a dual citizenship.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/brexit-ai...

[1] https://www.thelocal.dk/20141218/denmark-passes-dual-citizen...

I know for a fact the Danish state allows for dual-nationals because I just renewed my Danish passport and because of new biometrics requires dual-nationals to give a copy of this Report.

There's one big downside to all this, since Denmark now knows very clearly I am two people. Should the state decide to revoke this law I will most likely be forced to choose. Which would be unfortunate, since I can't imagine living in just one or the other country.

I.e. if I'm a US Citizen, it would probably be more advantageous to have an EU Nation 2nd Passport so I have unrestricted access to all EU member countries

My utility function optimizes for having a secondary citizenship in a stable place should the U.S. go down the toilet even more than it has. Switzerland it is for me. (it’s self-standingly awesome enough to want citizenship here outside of the aforementioned).

Also: maybe I want to slum it a bit more elsewhere in Europe without having to have a specialized visa to permit my working somewhere without a well-paying job, which is basically a requirement for Americans in Europe.

Also also: the old world is really nice place to raise a child and is family friendly.

I.e. I get told that the best second nationality I could get is Serbian... Why though?

That’s due to agreements between non-aligned counties signed by Jugoslavia that Serbia inherited.

You cannot still enter those countries without a visa with an EU passport, thus making a Serbian passport quite advantageous if you are a EU citizen.

I should have said that Jugoslavia had different friends that most other European countries, and Serbia inherited some of those agreements.

Looks like it takes "territory" (+40%) as a major input. Russia, China and Mongolia are big countries by land area which have a good understanding with Serbia, but nothing special with EU states. Guessing most Europeans will also hit Serbia. What's the actual most useful second passport to an Irish person? Probably American.

(FWIW I'm an American)

As far as I understand tax deductions work like: Initial Income - Deduction = Adjusted Income. Then, you owe full taxes on the Adjusted Income.

Let's say European Tax Rate is 40%, American Tax Rate is 20% (hypothetically!)

Foreign income is 100k USD equivalent.

You pay 40k taxes in Europe and are left with 60K.

You deduct 40K from Initial Income, leaving you with adjusted income of 60K. You then pay 20% of that (12K) to the IRS, leaving you with 48K.

So you’re in this hypothetical tax range taxed at less than US+European tax, but still have an effective tax rate much greater than not having US citizenship.

Simple formula I think:

Effective Tax = Income x EuropeanTaxRate + (Income-Income x EuropeanTaxRate) x AmericanTaxRate

Factor out income etc. I’m on my phone :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_earned_income_exclusio...

Also, you do get an additional separate exemption/deduction (i.e. NOT a credit) up to around the first 100k of foreign earned income, if you meet some rather stringent qualifications.

There are ways to structure things using a foreign corporation to reduce your tax liability. This is changing though with the new 2017 Trump Tax "Cuts" and Jobs Act, which now requires expat business owners to report even their leftover business income as their own personal income (GILTI).

Many expat small business owners stand to be financially devastated because the law even taxes previous business income from the last 30 years in a so-called "transition tax." Ouch.

It's normal for troublesome countries to give more more security to journalists and other American citizens, and the US government rescues idiots stuck North Korea all the time. Most other countries wouldn't lift a finger for their citizens if that would have a significant monetary cost.

As you already have the EU covered, US, China or Japan would be good ones. I think Japan does not allow for dual citizenship though.

> I think Japan does not allow for dual citizenship though.

Like Japan, China and the US also do not allow a second citizenship through naturalization. The US oath of allegiance requires you to "renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty". The loophole is that most countries don't allow you to renounce your citizenship just by informing some foreign flunky, so just saying it doesn't make it so. For naturalization, none of China, Japan or the US require documentary evidence that you are no longer a citizen of another state.

That's because international law doesn't allow for states to make citizens stateless. E.g. in The Netherlands, a condition of getting citizenship is that you promise to renounce other citizenships within x time, and your Dutch one will be taken away if you don't. Not saying that any of the countries you listed have similar requirements, I don't know about that, I'm just adding some nationality law pedantry.

It's listed as the Republic of Ireland, afaict.

I guess it's similar to Germany being the "Federal Republic of Germany", or China being either the "People's Republic of China" (mainland) or the "Republic of China" (Taiwan).

Also some countries are hard to find even in alphabetical order. e.g. South Korea == Korea, South == Republic of Korea == Korea, Republic of

I have just driven down West Africa, and I can tell you the "visa requirements" are very fluid, and what applies one day does not necessarily apply the very next!

[1] is the most I've written.

I documented where you can get every single Visa while on the move, and how much they each cost in my eBook "Overland Travel Essentials: West Africa: Myths, Misconceptions and Misnomers" [2]

[1] - http://theroadchoseme.com/west-african-visas

[2] - https://amzn.to/2O75Uxr

Is this really true?

I had the impression I can't simply go to USA whenever and as long as I wanted, which sounds like needing a visa to me.

Eg for a lot of asian countries, we european can go at will, without a visa, as long as you stay for 30 days or less. It's not a visa on arrival either, they merely stamp your passport with the entry date. But if you want to stay longer, you need to ask for a visa (and for some countries, you can do that visa on arrival, in the airport).

However for the US, us european still need to apply to the ESTA, which is a visa in anything but in name. I'm not sure why the EU is not forcing the US to drop it for us, or force it back on US citizen coming here, because this seems to be a trickery against the "no visa required" deal.

US Can do without tourism (it's actively sacrificed tourism with successive post 9/11 travel restrictions) but the EU countries would suffer greatly.

Like if I already have 2, and am trying to decide on a 3rd, it'd be difficult to compare all 3.