How to Give Your Child a Lifelong Gift

By Simon Black

We routinely talk about how to obtain residency and citizenship—important ‘flags’ to plant to ensure that you don’t have all of your eggs in one sovereign basket.

But there’s another angle to this approach that we’ve seldom discussed—having a baby in a foreign country.

My friends Brooke and her husband Chandler are US citizens who decided, while pregnant, that they would like to give their child a great gift right from the start—a second passport.

They were exploring options of having the baby in different countries, and in the end decided on Chile. The baby is just a few weeks old, and as I’ve just returned to Chile, one of the first things I did was sit down with them to understand their story:

Brooke, thank you for sharing your experiences in what surely must be an exciting time for you. What made you decide to have your baby in Chile?

What drove us to this decision was that we wanted to ensure that our child would have a second passport from the get go. Neither of us can pass one down to him, so that meant having him in a country that granted citizenship to those born on its soil.

I had read the interview with your friend Jackson in an SMC issue earlier this year, in which he discussed choosing to have a baby in Brazil. Brazil does indeed seem very promising in the big picture, but we already had contacts in Chile, and I speak Spanish. Neither of us speaks Portuguese, and the opportunities we wanted to create, financially, were not going to happen in time in Brazil.

Chile is another great option, which is of course why you spend so much time here. The economy is booming, and the fact that it's gorgeous here is a real plus. We also knew we could get good medical care here, which was key.

Simon Black is Senior Editor  at SovereignMan.com. Follow Sovereign Man on Facebook, Twitter, Google+