Buying a second passport is legal, and a crisis doubles the line

The idea Muzamil spent his life misreading

Muzamil opens the episode by admitting something most Pakistani listeners will recognise in themselves. For as long as he can remember, he assumed that buying a second nationality was a dodge — money laundering, mulk se khayanat, a quiet betrayal dressed up as a Caribbean passport. The conversation with Talha Bin Saleem exists, in part, to dismantle that assumption. Citizenship by investment, he learns, is perfectly legal, openly priced, and run by governments that screen applicants harder than most banks do.

This is the second episode recorded in the Dubai studio, and Muzamil frames the trip plainly: Pakistan’s economic problem now has one honest answer, which is to export — products, services, or human capital. To do that, you first have to understand what the rest of the world actually wants. Talha sits at an unusual vantage point on that question. He sells nationalities to the world’s wealthiest people for a living, and a large share of his clients are Pakistani.

A boy thrown into the deep end

Before the passports, there is a long stretch of the conversation about how Talha got here, and it earns its place because it explains his entire worldview. He was born in Karachi to parents from Pindi, sent at thirteen to Pakistan Steel Cadet College — “thrown,” in his words, into the deep end. He was a privileged, curious, badly-behaved student who kept failing exams until an incentive appeared. His father promised him: score over 80% in matric and you can come home. He scored 85-plus. The lesson he and Muzamil pull out of it is one the episode keeps returning to — give a human being the right incentive and their performance is extraordinary. Take it away, and they drift back into the comfort zone.

England was the rupture that made him. His mother sold all her jewellery to send him; his father believed that once a boy leaves, he never comes back. Talha arrived in London barely able to speak conversational English despite years of textbook study. His first job was touting taxis outside a nightclub at midnight in February, sub-zero, asking strangers spilling out of a disco whether they needed a cab — “sir, do you need a taxi?” — and getting mocked for the accent. They never called him back. He moved on to leafleting in the snow for ten pounds a batch, then a souvenir shop, then making pizzas at Papa John’s, washing dishes until he nearly threw up. A privileged Karachi kid with a driver and a cook at home was suddenly scrubbing pans.

He does not narrate this with self-pity. He narrates it as gratitude. “Please get your children out of the house,” he tells parents listening. “Make them work. Expose them to real-life situations.” His own younger brother, raised softer, is visibly a different person at the same age. The deep end, in Talha’s theology, is the maker.

Why the privileged kid did the jobs Pakistan looks down on

Muzamil presses on a tension that runs through a lot of Pakistani migration stories. At home, an average middle-class kid grows up with a helper and an aspiration to a salaried officer’s desk, and quietly looks down on blue-collar work — taxi driving, retail, sales. Abroad, the same person will happily do all of it. Why does the disturbance exist only on one side of the border?

Talha’s answer is partly cultural and partly circumstantial. Pakistani parents tell children to get a bachelor’s, a master’s, a foreign degree — they rarely focus on real, sellable skills. And he, specifically, was given no choice. First year’s fees covered, nothing after that, figure it out. When you have to make ends meet, the snobbery evaporates and you do what you have to do. He worked retail at Gap in Piccadilly, sold electricity contracts in a call centre, did real estate lettings, cycled through hotels. Each firing pushed him somewhere new. None of it matched his hospitality degree, and that bothered him at the time — but the human experiences, he insists, are what actually built the operator he became.

Dubai, and the good mornings that paid off

By 2013 the UK visa had run out, Pakistan offered him a restaurant manager job at 25,000 rupees, and he decided it was not worth coming back. He landed in Dubai on a thirty-day visit visa, stayed with his sister, and sent out roughly 3,000 job emails before arriving. Not one reply. The recurring obstacle was blunt: “Pakistani? We’ll get back to you.” Coming from London’s equal-opportunity hiring, where you cannot even ask an applicant’s nationality, the open filtering enraged him.

On the twenty-fifth day he got an interview — for a job advertised for “a good-looking pretty girl” as a guest services agent at a private members’ club. His profile fit anyway. The Capital Club in the DIFC was the who’s-who of Dubai, and his first role was to stand at the door at five in the morning, in a sharp suit, saying good morning to members as they arrived. A month in he was asking himself what he was doing with his life — but he could not quit, because he was now the sole breadwinner for his family back home. The good mornings paid off. Sales was his gift; he was moved into membership, then made membership manager on commission, and by twenty-five was earning 20,000 dirhams a month with the apartment and food covered.

How a sales guy fell into selling nationalities

The pivot to passports came through the network. The club put Talha shoulder to shoulder with people who owned banks and large businesses, and he made a habit of sitting with them and asking how they did it. One member, a Canadian-Lebanese man, pulled him into a B2B training and development firm — leadership and sales courses sold to the likes of Citibank and Standard Chartered. Talha was good one-to-one and miserable at B2B; the approvals, the departments, the long CEO-sign-off cycle drained him. He is, by his own account, a B2C creature.

While he was there, a few people from the old club asked whether he knew anyone who did second passports. He did — a director he knew at a firm called Artan Capital. He made the introduction. The Pakistani client ended up buying a Cyprus passport, then a two-million-euro Eurozone product (since closed), and Talha’s bank account received a substantial referral fee. He had spent eighteen months cold-calling about training courses. One warm introduction in the passport business had paid more. “That’s when I found out a passport is a thing you can buy,” he says. In 2018 he joined Artan as a junior sales executive, opened the Pakistan market when most people still assumed second passports were a scam, and is now its vice president covering Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa.

What you actually get, and what it costs

This is the part of the episode that does the public a service, because it replaces rumour with structure. There are two broad categories: residency and citizenship, and a third hybrid where residency leads to a passport. Some programmes require you to move; some do not.

The cheapest citizenship programme starts at $100,000. Dominica begins there for an individual, around $140,000–$150,000 for a family package — a Commonwealth island passport that ranks among the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth strongest in the world and carries European Union access. Turkey is the no-questions-asked market: there is no source-of-funds inquiry, a $100,000 property buy gets residency, and citizenship has climbed from $250,000 to roughly $400,000. Portugal’s Golden Visa has been the favourite of well-off Pakistanis who do not want to leave Pakistan — you invest, spend roughly a week a year there, learn the language after five years, and collect the passport without relocating. Greece offers a residency-for-property route around a quarter of a million; Talha cites a figure he half-remembers of four billion dollars raised through such a programme. At the top sit Canada — the brand that sells itself, with its startup-visa and Quebec investor routes — and the US EB-5, which runs close to a million dollars all-in and requires the investment to create a set number of jobs.

The legality is unambiguous in the issuing country. The governments insist on clean source of funds, no civil or criminal cases, and they refuse politically exposed persons. “We only assist clean people,” Talha says. Whether your own government recognises a second passport is a separate question, and one he deliberately does not advise on. India bars dual nationality; Pakistan, less famously, holds treaties with nineteen countries whose passports a citizen may legally also hold. The Caribbean is not on that list, so those who take a Dominican or Antiguan passport tend to hold it quietly.

Mobility is the least of it

The instinct, especially from Pakistan, is to assume people buy passports to travel. Talha corrects this firmly. Travel mobility is a small slice. His clients come from everywhere and for many reasons. Americans walk in wanting to give up the US passport. Romanians, Hungarians, Poles want a Caribbean exit because there is war in Europe and they fear conscription — he describes a Romanian founder with ten million dollars invested in US tech, three children, living in Dubai, who took an Antiguan passport precisely so he could not be called to fight. Indians come for a plan B and tax. The throughline is not wanderlust. It is the security of a family and the protection of wealth.

Which is why the business is, brutally, counter-cyclical to global stability. When the world breaks, his phone rings. Inquiries from Pakistan rose roughly 300% after May 9. When the Russian war started, before sanctions, the firm pushed hundreds of passports through. South Africa’s troubles, Hong Kong’s protests, India’s unrest — each one moved capital and clients toward the desk. “Anywhere we see crisis, the inquiries double up,” he says.

The Dubai dream, not the American one

The conversation widens into a thesis on the Gulf that Talha clearly believes. Countries everywhere need investment and talent; Pakistan, in his framing, prefers to lose both. Dubai and Saudi do the opposite — golden visas for investors, but also for doctors, scientists, and people of special talent, including a wave of Pakistani celebrities. The green visa, the ten-year golden visa, and one day, he hopes, a path to permanent residency and citizenship, are all moves in a global talent war.

He credits leadership above everything: rulers thinking a hundred years out while the rest of the world plans for fifty. The Middle East, he argues, is the new Europe, possibly the future financial capital of the world, and the safest place to live while Europe boils and Asia drifts toward a new cold war. The recent Saudi-Iran thaw and the winding-down of Yemen look, to him, like a European-style decision to cooperate and grow. He pushes back on the cliché that Dubai is all plastic and Bulgari — he has gone a year without visiting the touristy Marina, plays cricket, watches his mother fly in for every Ramadan because the mosques are clean and the power never cuts. Proximity to Pakistan keeps him anchored; he has fast-food franchises in Karachi, Islamabad and Multan, and once flew home three times a month. “Go where you are treated best,” he tells Muzamil. He is treated best in Dubai, pays no taxes, and is not leaving. In his forecast for 2050, it is the Dubai dream, not the American one, that people will aspire to.

Muzamil closes at the ninety-minute mark by handing the real question back to the audience. Does taking a second passport make you a ghaddar, a traitor — or a global citizen exercising a perfectly legal option? After ninety minutes with someone who does this for a living, the more useful question is the quieter one underneath: in a world where every crisis doubles the line outside his office, who can still afford to assume they will never need to be in it.