Moving to another country is a legal process. The law is not known for being easy for outsiders to understand. So, in order to make sense of information about moving abroad, it helps to get a general familiarity with the terms and how things work.

Generally, the first step is to apply for a passport in the country you were born in. If you have a passport from a country, it means you’re a citizen of that country. Aside from investment schemes, known as golden passport programs, you cannot just apply for citizenship in another country.

From foreigner to citizen

In order to enter another country, you usually need a visa. If you have a US, Canadian, or EU passport, you may have visited plenty of countries without having ever applied for a visa. In this case, you’ve entered countries through a visa waiver agreement or, as is common in Central America and SEA, gotten a visa at the border. If not for these agreements, you’d need to apply for a tourist visa at the embassy or consulate of the country you want to visit.

If you’re moving to another country, generally you will need to apply for a special kind of visa that’s convertable into a temporary resident permit. This is usually something that a consulate employee or border guard will affix to your passport. When I moved to Portugal, I first recieved a D7 visa from the consulate in Toronto. This allowed me to enter Portugal and apply for a temporary resident permit while in the country. This is why lots of programs are called visas, like a digital nomad visa. You apply for a visa and then exchange it for a temporary residence permit.

Most people move to other countries as a temporary resident. You may be able to become a temporary resident by studying in that country or finding a job willing to sponsor you. Free trade and mobility agreements may provide you with an easier (or even automatic) temporary residence permit. Often there are special temporary residency programs for young people (generally those under 30 or 35), people willing to teach English, agricultural workers, and childcare workers. There are also temporary residency programs in many countries for those who do not plan on working, often known as “retirement visas,” “passive-income visas,” or “non-lucrative visas.” Nowadays there are also many digital nomad visas, allowing people who are working remotely to live in a place for longer than a is possible with a tourist visa. Temporary residence visas are temporary. They typically allow you to live in a country for one, two, or three years. It may not be possible to renew your residency permit, or it may only be renewable a set number of times.

After a few years of living in a country as a temporary resident, you can usually become a permanent resident. Permanent residents generally have more rights than temporary residents. In order to become a permanent resident, you may need to show that you’ve learned the language, paid your taxes, and have a clean criminal record.

Some countries, like Canada, want to attract people looking to spend the rest of their lives in a place. In Canada, they’re giving out fewer temporary resident permits and encouraging people to immigrate as permanent residents. If you’re a young person with a profession or skilled trade, you may be able to move to Canada without a job offer like I did. When I moved to Canada, I became a permanent resident the day I arrived and a few years later I became a Canadian citizen.

Some countries don’t allow people to become citizens except by birth. If a country allows people to become naturalized citizens, you can apply after you’ve lived there for a certain amount of time. Often you need to prove you speak the language and are familiar with the country’s culture and history.

Most countries have programs that allow you to bring your family there to live with you. In most of the EU, if a member of your immediate family is a citizen of an EU country, they can simply register you as a temporary resident. In Canada and the US, people can bring members of their family to the country as permanent residents. If you’re married to an Italian or Portuguese citizen, they can sponsor you for citizenship after three years of marriage (or less if you’re living in that country or have children together).

There is one case where you can start the process of moving abroad by applying for a passport, and that’s through citizenship by descent.

Citizenship by descent

In the US we have birthright citizenship. Anyone who is born on US soil is a US citizen. This isn’t the only way of allocating citizenship. In many countries, including the US, any child born to (or adopted by) a citizen is a citizen, too.

This is how most citizenship by descent “programs” work. It’s not really a program. You’re not applying for citizenship, you’re applying to get paperwork and an ID. You are already a citizen, you were always a citizen, and you just need to do the things parents normally do when they have a child while living abroad, like register the birth, get a citizenship certificate, and get a passport or citizen card.

The chain of required documentation can get quite long. If your great-great grandparent was a citizen, so your great grandparent was a citizen, so your grandparent was a citizen, so your parent was a citizen, so you’re also a citizen…you’ve got a lot of administrative work ahead of you. You need to retroactively get the documents required for each person, until your parent has proper documents and then you can apply for your own ID.

Your parent needs to have been a citizen when you were born. Sometimes older siblings are citizens of the country your parents came from and younger ones aren’t, because the parents became naturalized citizens of the country their children were born in and lost their original citizenship.

Until recently many countries did not allow dual citizenship. If you became a citizen of another country, you automatically lost your original citizenship. Many countries now allow you to reclaim citizenship lost in this way (where it was not formally renounced or revoked), even for relatives who are deceased.

Some countries only allowed citizenship to pass to children born abroad through the mother (matrilineal descent) or the father (patrilineal descent) and now allow it to pass from either parent. Some countries have retroactively changed the law, either retroactively making people citizens from birth or allowing them to claim it.

There’s another potential layer to it because many countries are actually quite new, legally speaking, even if we grew up on tales of an eternal history. Canadians were British subjects until January 1, 1947, when Canadian citizenship became a thing. The Republic of Germany was established in 1990.

Speaking of Germany, some countries which stripped people of their citizenship for political, ethnic, and religious reasons now allow people who would have been citizens to reclaim citizenship, including their descendants. Places with these policies tend to have also lost a lot of records due to time and war.

If you can get proof that your parent was a citizen of another country at the time of your birth and that country allows citizenship by descent, it’s generally a quick and inexpensive process to get proof of your citizenship. Otherwise, it can balloon into a complex and costly process to claim citizenship by descent.

American refugees and asylum

Applying for asylum or refugee status is an act of last resort. People who apply for asylum often spend years waiting for a decision on their case, unable to work while they live in uncertainty. If you can move abroad through any other pathway, that’s the best choice.

If you need to leave immediately, you can look into countries that offer:

• entry without a tourist visa for people from your country (a visa waiver program)

If you don’t have a lot of money in savings, you can look into countries that offer:

• work exchange programs for young people (commonly called working holiday visas)
• easy or automatic work permits through free trade or mobility agreements
• easy work permits for language teachers, au pairs, and agricultural workers
• special programs for people in specific trades and professions

If you’re under 35, you can look into countries that offer:

• work exchange programs for young people (commonly called working holiday visas)
• long tourist visas (6 months or 1 year)
• tourist visas renewable with border runs (you leave the country every 3 or 6 months and come back the same or next day)

If you work remotely, you can look into countries that offer:

• digital nomad visas
• retirement visas without age restrictions that allow remote work
• long tourist visas (6 months or 1 year)
• tourist visas renewable with border runs (you leave the country every 3 or 6 months and come back the same or next day)

If you’re retired, you can look into countries that offer:

• retirement visas
• long tourist visas (6 months or 1 year)
• tourist visas renewable with border runs (you leave the country every 3 or 6 months and come back the same or next day)