On Thursday, 20 August, the Saeima will vote for the second time, at an extraordinary sitting, on the new Immigration Law. The law adopted in June was not promulgated by the President of Latvia and was returned to the Saeima for reconsideration, with the President calling on the Saeima to reassess the matter and consider retaining in the law a strictly regulated possibility for citizens of NATO, OECD and European Economic Area countries to obtain a temporary residence permit if they purchase real estate or make investments. On 12 August, the responsible committee rejected this proposal. On 20 August, the law will most likely be adopted without taking the President’s recommendation into account. After that, the President will no longer be able to return the law for reconsideration.
What does this mean for Latvia’s economy?
I have worked in immigration law for more than twenty years — from the first visa applications and residence permit cases, including cases in which, as an attorney, I attended interviews conducted by the State Security Service with residence permit applicants, to litigation that reached the Supreme Court. It is precisely this experience — including experience of the security authorities’ perspective — that prompts me to ask a question that was never raised in any of the debates, either in June or in August: do we actually know which groups of immigrants contribute to the country and which impose costs on it?
Policy must be based on data
Denmark, whose migration policy is regarded as one of the strictest in Europe, consistently does what Latvia has never done. It counts. Since the mid-2010s, the Danish Ministry of Finance has regularly published a report entitled “Immigrants’ Net Contribution to Public Finances” (“Indvandreres nettobidrag til de offentlige finanser”). It calculates how much each immigrant group pays in taxes and how much it receives in benefits, including in the form of education and healthcare. The data are publicly available. Danish policy is based precisely on these data, rather than on emotions.
Dutch researchers have gone even further. A research team led by economist Jan van de Beek, in the study “Borderless Welfare State” (“Grenzeloze Verzorgingsstaat”) and a subsequent academic paper, calculated the fiscal impact of immigration while taking into account the reason for migration. The calculations were based on microdata from Statistics Netherlands covering a period of more than twenty years.
No such balance is calculated in Latvia. However, publicly available data from the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs make it possible to draw certain conclusions. As of 1 July 2026, there were 81,490 valid temporary residence permits in Latvia. A total of 2,136 persons, including family members, held permits on the basis of real estate ownership. Another 376 persons held permits on the basis of investment in a company. This means that only 2,512 persons who obtained temporary residence permits did so on the basis of investment — just 3.08 per cent of the total. Moreover, excluding family members, there are only 1,171 investors, representing 1.44 per cent of all foreign nationals holding temporary residence permits.
The majority creates a negative perception
Last year, 444 applications were received from investors. The remaining 97 per cent of applications came from students, labour migrants and their families — groups whose fiscal contribution in Latvia has never been the subject of any published calculation. Yet it is precisely this much larger group that Latvian residents encounter most frequently in their everyday lives — both physically on the streets and in the information space. And it is precisely this group that creates the most negative perception of immigrants as a whole.
An investor’s profile is known from the moment the investor applies for a residence permit. The investor invests at least EUR 250,000 in real estate or EUR 100,000 in a company, pays into the State budget either five per cent of the value of the property or EUR 10,000, pays real estate tax, Land Register fees and State fees, must personally demonstrate sufficient means of subsistence, pays for their own insurance, and receives no social benefits. Under the Danish methodology, this would be the most important group. Yet our new Immigration Law is the first to exclude it.
The new law closes not only the possibility of obtaining a residence permit by investing in real estate. It will also no longer be possible to obtain one by investing in a bank’s subordinated capital. As regards investment in a company, the duration of the permit has been reduced from five years to two, and a condition has been added requiring the company to pay a specified amount in taxes each year. Otherwise, the permit will cease to be valid.
The only new route to a temporary residence permit for a foreign national willing to invest in Latvia is an investment of EUR 150,000 for at least five years in an alternative investment fund established by the State, together with a payment of EUR 10,000 into the State budget. And here lies a paradox that no one has addressed in the debates: the law being adopted in the name of security actually lowers the threshold for investors. Whereas an investment in real estate would require at least EUR 250,000 plus a further five per cent payment into the State budget — EUR 262,500 in total — an investment through the fund requires only EUR 160,000. Moreover, the fund units can be redeemed after five years, whereas real estate would remain in Latvia, generating regular payments of all applicable taxes and fees. If the problem is the so-called “golden visas”, the new law does not abolish them — it makes them cheaper and easier to obtain. Moreover, it was openly acknowledged during the committee meeting that no such fund has yet been established. The provision will become operational once the fund exists, and no one can say exactly when that will happen.
This law is being adopted in haste — three weeks before the end of the Saeima’s final parliamentary session and seven weeks before the elections. The haste is apparent from the text itself: the President returned it because of inconsistent cross-references and incomplete regulation. Even the transitional provisions contain a reference to a subparagraph that does not exist in the law. It would be more prudent not to adopt this law on 20 August, to leave the existing framework in force and allow the issue to be properly debated, including during the election campaign. The final decision should be left to the new Saeima. It may ultimately adopt a law that is even stricter than this one. But then it would reflect the will of the Latvian people rather than a pre-election decision adopted in haste.
Latvia needs caution in its migration policy. But caution does not mean making policy blindfolded. Before the State definitively prohibits a form of immigration that accounts for only three per cent of residence permits but brings millions into the State budget, it should do one simple thing — look at the data.
#ImmigrationLaw #Latvia #Investment #CORVUS