Every citizenship a person can pursue passes through one of ten legal doors.

The market sells thousands of branded products built around them: Golden visas, freedom passports, heritage certificates, digital nomad tracks that mature into naturalization. Underneath the branding, the legal mechanism is always one of the ten below. IMI’s Citizenship Catalog, which maps every path to citizenship in every country, contains nothing that operates outside them.

Two mechanisms sit outside the ten because nobody applies for them. When states split or merge, citizenship transfers by succession, as it did for millions when the Soviet Union dissolved, and a handful of jurisdictions issue honorary or functional citizenship, such as the Vatican, which ties nationality to office, or Laos, whose honorary grant confers less than full citizenship.

Both happen to people. Neither is a door anyone opens.

The order in which you check the ten matters. Roughly half depend on facts fixed before you made a single decision: Who your parents are, where you were born, whom you married, which passport you hold, what your ancestors lost.

Those doors typically cost hundreds of dollars in registry fees. The rest cost years, achievements, or six figures, and several of the cheap doors are closing.

Eric Major, CEO of Latitude, says the sensible opening question is not which program to apply for but “which rights might already exist within my family.”

He argues that descent, birth, family relationships, and restoration claims should all be examined before a family commits years of residence or substantial capital, because good citizenship planning “begins with a complete audit, not with the most visible product in the market.”