Making a Profit From Portable Patriotism

By day, Jeffrey Burns works in marketing for a Denver software firm. On the side, he sells citizenship.

“There’s a demand, or I wouldn’t be doing it,” he says. “I think citizenship is moving away from patriotism and more toward a general marketplace--who can offer what out there.”

Well, St. Kitts and Nevis will grant dual citizenship if you buy $150,000 worth of real estate. Costa Rica will give you a passport if you invest $50,000 in reforestation.

Burns, 32, has carved out a highly specialized niche: selling passports from the Central American country of Belize to people in Russia. The government charges $50,000 for a passport and related paperwork, while Burns adds a brokerage fee of $14,000 to cover his commission, not to mention shipping and handling.

Burns, an American who speaks Russian, traveled to the former Soviet Union as communism began vanishing to scout entrepreneurial opportunities. He made a couple of side trips to the civil war in Angola (“Deals with Russians, let’s leave it at that”) but found a real calling when he got into the auxiliary-passport business.

“Russians still are very restricted in terms of where they can go without a visa,” he said. “Belize being a British commonwealth, they can travel to 80 or 85 countries without a visa.”

Most of his business comes from an elaborate World Wide Web site on the Internet, he said. Belize Passport Consultants Ltd. lists brokers around the world, along with “six reasons why you should consider a second passport.” These include litigation by a former spouse, tenacious creditors, political instability in your particular country and basic lack of travel freedoms.

Other Web sites hawk dual citizenships from other places, sometimes bundled with such things as offshore bank accounts, Caribbean college degrees, even diplomatic appointments.

Burns figures he’s sold 18 or 20 Belizean passports in the last two years, which comes out to about $1.2 million in business. He typically refers potential customers to a contact in Moscow and arranges the paperwork with authorities in Belize. He’s just a cog in the machine.

“I’m a paper pusher in the whole process. I make sure the paper goes where it’s supposed to. The money arrives. And I [ship] the package to the people and they’re happy.”

He said he would never knowingly sell a Belizean passport to, say, a member of the Russian Mafia, but, “Who knows? If it’s someone who we feel is not on the up and up, we don’t deal with them. I turn copies of the passports over to the people in Belize, and they do what they have to do.”

Very few of his clients ever have a chance to get misty-eyed when they see a Belizean flag flapping in the little country’s Caribbean breezes. “They do not go and live there and sing the anthem and stuff,” he said. “There’s only one that I know of who’s even visited the country.”

Some of his clients just like to flash their passports. Like a new Rolex, a supplemental citizenship can be more status symbol than practical possession.

“In Russia, there is no such thing as a savings account,” Burns said. “When you have money, you spend money. You want to collect as many status items as you can. Mercedes. A dacha in the country. And a second passport. It’s definitely a status thing. I’ve seen them do it. They pull it out and flash it around.”

But business isn’t very stable, Burns said. The program is reviewed every April, and at any time the government could call a halt. Or, he said, Belize could get taken over. It’s had a border dispute with Guatemala for more than a century.

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Sometimes, Burns has his doubts about the business. He’s been to Belize several times and says there’s not much there.

“My question to Belize is: ‘How much of this is going into the economy?’ I heard they [sold passports to] about 250 families a year How much of that do they put back into the economy, into roads and schools?”

He said selling passports is extremely competitive. One Russian company had the nerve to charge $100,000 for a Belizean citizenship--a 100% markup.

“What scares me about this thing is the type of countries that are jumping on this bandwagon,” Burns said. “There’s an island off New Zealand charging $40,000 for citizenship. It’s 100 square miles. I asked them what the benefits are, and the benefits are ridiculous. Visa privileges to, like, eight countries.

“You got places like this advertising now, that’s going to dilute it and give this kind of thing a bad name.” Burns grew up in Lansing, Mich., and stayed in Colorado, where he attended college.

He didn’t want to identify his day job, saying that his employers might not be pleased with the publicity. Asked if he could suggest a few satisfied citizenship customers, Burns said he’d already tried to line up testimonials for marketing purposes.

“Not one has agreed,” he said.