Residency & Citizenship
Verified changes to residency, digital nomad visa and citizenship rules for people moving or living abroad, plus related news. Every item is dated and linked to its official source.
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South Korea makes its digital nomad visa permanent, and easier to get
2 years, flat income floor → 3 years, tiered income floor
After a 2.5-year pilot, the F-1-D ‘Workation’ visa became a permanent category effective 30 June 2026. The flat income requirement (2x national GNI per capita) is now tiered: applicants under 35 outside Seoul can qualify at 1x GNI, while those 35+ in the Seoul metro area still need up to 2x. Maximum stay extends from 2 to 3 years, and holders can now switch status without leaving the country to reapply.
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Portugal doubles the wait for citizenship
5 years → 10 years
Under Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026, in force since 19 May 2026, most foreign residents — including Americans on a D7, D8 digital nomad, or former Golden Visa route — now need 10 years of legal residence before applying for citizenship, up from 5 (7 years for CPLP/EU citizens). The clock also now starts the day your residence card is issued, not the day you apply, which matters given AIMA’s own backlog routinely runs 12–24 months. The regulation meant to clarify how pre-2026 residence time counts was due within 90 days of the law and still hadn’t appeared by late September — so anyone mid-process genuinely doesn’t know where they stand yet.
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Mexico roughly doubles residency fees
1-year temporary resident card: 5,328 → 11,140.74 pesos
Effective 1 January 2026, Mexico’s immigration authority (INM) raised nearly every residency-related fee by about 109%, per a schedule published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación. A 4-year temporary resident card rose from 11,984 to 25,057.82 pesos, and permanent residency from 6,494 to 13,578.96 pesos. INM referenced a 50% fee reduction for certain applicant categories, but as of mid-2026 had not published guidance on how to actually claim it — treat that discount as not yet usable in practice.
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Five Caribbean nations get a joint regulator for citizenship-by-investment
All five Eastern Caribbean countries running citizenship-by-investment programs have enacted legislation creating a shared regulator, ECCIRA, headquartered in Grenada. The $200,000 minimum investment floor across all five programs has been in force since July 2024; per a July 2026 Eastern Caribbean Central Bank communiqué, ECCIRA was targeting a September 2026 operational launch with mandatory biometrics (including for existing passport holders at renewal), standardized interviews, and shared applicant registries across the five countries. Whether ECCIRA actually began operating in September as targeted hasn’t been independently confirmed.
Source: Eastern Caribbean Central Bank ↗ · Reported by Investment Migration Insider