A new Golden Visa is luring wealthy Americans to New Zealand with minimal stay requirements and a fast track to permanent residency—just as uncertainty grows back home.
3 min
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New Zealand has created a new, easier path to residency for wealthy people, and it’s attracting attention from Americans looking for an alternative to living in the U.S.
According to New Zealand Trade and Enterprise—the government’s international business development agency—70% of incoming inquiries into a revised program leading to permanent residency in the country are from the U.S.
A spokesperson with the agency said it remains to be seen whether those inquiries turn into the same level of visa applications. Still, the inquiries are evidence that Americans are interested.
“There’s a huge increase in demand from the U.S.,” said Dominic Jones, managing director of Greener Pastures New Zealand, which helps those applying for the country’s so-called Golden Visa to find investment opportunities.
Many U.S. citizens are seeking residency in New Zealand—as well as other countries —as a “plan B” during President Donald Trump’s administration, according to immigration attorney David Lesperance. Many of these are applicants who worry Trump could exact retribution on them or their families for perceived slights, in addition to those who have family members that could face discrimination because of their sexual orientation. Some are concerned about the future of the U.S. economy.
For those with the money, reallocating $2.88 million in assets from the U.S. to New Zealand for three years—as the new requirements allow—isn’t a heavy lift, Lesperance said. “Depending on foreign exchange and returns on investment over this time, the cost could easily be zero or positive,” he wrote in an April 2 blog post.
The island country is also only requiring applicants to be physically present for 21 days over three years, depending on which category of investment visa they pursue.
“These applicants are people who are in a financial position to look at this as an asset reallocation and one or two vacations in the next three years in exchange for a permanent insurance policy in a first-world country,” Lesperance told Barron’s.
U.S. citizens have long been interested in living in New Zealand. About 38% of applicants to a previous program with stricter requirements that was in effect from September 2022 through April 1 this year were from the U.S., according to the trade and enterprise agency.
That program required a four-year investment of between NZ$5 million and NZ$15 million ($2.88 million and $8.4 million) in the country, with the amount varying depending on the type of investment. It also required being in the country at least 117 days over four years and passing an English language test—which was more an annoyance than an impediment for U.S. citizens.
Wealthy investors consider New Zealand as a residency option because of the country’s lifestyle, climate, and dramatic, beautiful landscapes, according to Jones. It’s also a stable, English-speaking democracy with a free economy, and it’s safe, he said.
“We’re on the other side of the world,” Jones said. “We don’t tend to get involved in global conflicts. The drive to safety isn’t why all people all choose Golden Visas, but it’s why people choose the New Zealand option.”
The revised New Zealand Active Active Investor Plus Visa program that went into effect on April 1 eases up on the previous requirements through the introduction of two categories for obtaining permanent residency.
Under a “growth” category, applicants need to invest $2.88 million for three years directly into privately owned New Zealand-based companies that have been approved by the trade and enterprise agency, or in New Zealand managed funds that are invested in the local economy, Jones said.
Applicants are only required to be in New Zealand for 21 days during the three-year investment period, and they don’t have to pass an English test.
A second “balanced” category requires a minimum $5.6 million over five years, but allows it to be invested more passively in listed stocks, government bonds, and New Zealand-based corporate bonds, Jones said. It also requires applicants to be present in the country for at least 105 days over five years.
Once the requirements are met during the three- or five-year period, applicants achieve permanent residency in New Zealand, even if they no longer spend time in the country, according to Lesperance.
The growth category was structured to be quicker and more attractive, to encourage applicants to make meaningful, active investments in the country with the potential to spur economic growth and create jobs.
“What our government is trying to do is attract capital, but also put it into forms of enterprise where the impact on the economy is material,” Jones said.
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Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
