BTW with an Italian (which is part of the EU) passport they're free to live in any EU country, and EEA (Switzerland, Norway, Iceland) maybe with some limitations. They could even just work as unskilled labour, e.g. a restaurant dishwasher, and enjoy almost the same rights as a host country's citizen.

The article says "with a passport from a country in the Schengen zone, her children will be able to live and work in most of Europe.", but this is inexact. If this were the year 2015 (pre-Brexit), the UK and Ireland were not part of Schengen but part of EU, and a EU citizen would've been able to live and work and travel without restriction in and out of those countries as well.

> I wouldn't even consider it without fluency in Italian.

For the affluent, obtaining a second passport though e.g. citzenship-by-investment programs is all done through intermediaries. You pay a law firm a few tens of thousands of euro and they take care of everything – the only action required from you is going to an office to pick up your passport at the very end of the process. Since these affluent individuals are so used to relying on expert assistance, no knowledge of the local language is ever really necessary.

For less affluent people, especially those obtaining citizenship through ancestry, there are sometimes requirements to prove a B1 command of the local language, so in that case actually learning the language is a must.

I think GP isn't talking about the passport acquisition process but really the experience of living there. The culture shock is real and you're in for a rough surprise if you think Europe is anything like the US. For starters, you're going to find your that the role of English as a lingua franca is largely overstated. Depending on your personality, you may not completely adapt and end up going back home.

Yes, but the experience of living there might be very different for the highly affluent people who can invest over a million euro in a citizenship-by-investment program. Many of them don't do their own shopping or will ever deal directly with a plumber or electrician – that is all taken care off by hired staff. Opportunities for culture shock are limited because they have little exposure to the overall local culture, instead they live in a cosmopolitan bubble with people of similar wealth.

It's still not that easy. Many citizenship-by-investment options are on a level of buying a very fancy house. Yes, those people are relatively rich, but not "surround yourself with English-speaking house-help" rich. If they want to move for the retirement, it may still be a hard social experience.

True. However, often affluent people using citizenship-by-investment programs in e.g. Malta, Greece or Bulgaria have no intention of ever actually living in that country. They simply want a passport of an EU country so that they can freely move to any other EU country, and in that other EU country they may already speak a local language or be confident of their ability to do most things in English.

They can always move back. And for that matter just having another passport gives you options even if you aren’t planning on moving today.

I would guess this to be an easier move for someone who has retired than somebody in their working years.

That's the whole point of "dual" citizenship, the rich can get the best of both worlds.

It's a hedge against the fall of American society. Nobody wants to live in a society that's all about FU, I got mine. And the rich have a means to escape it.

> It's a hedge against the fall of American society. Nobody wants to live in a society that's all about FU, I got mine. And the rich have a means to escape it.

The rich often absolutely do want to live in a society that is about that, who do you think “has theirs” and is saying FU you everyone else, in the first place?

But the rich, some of them at least, realize that that is unsustainable, but rather than investing in fixing the problems they've created it's cheaper to buy an exit ticket so they can go create the same unsustainable but beneficial-for-them-in-the-short-term situation somewhere else.

> Nobody wants to live in a society that's all about FU, I got mine.

Maybe, but most super-wealthy people/corporations want to profit from such a society, including those in less "FU, I got mine", more socialist societies, like many in Europe. That way they get to enjoy the quality-of-life benefits that come with more redistributive societies while also enjoying the profits that come from the US's environment.

The example that immediately comes to mind are non-US pharmaceutical firms whose business model for developing medication is sometimes predicated on selling them in the US market, with it's unregulated medication prices.

This phenomenon rolls down the increasingly "FU society" hill from the US, too. One need look no further than the US' supporting fascist dictators in Latin America in exchange for more friction-less resource extraction from those countries.