Having 3 Passports Gives Me Immense Peace of Mind
Because anything can happen
Please don’t hate me for listing some ways I’m fortunate when it comes to my material possessions.
I have, among other things:
- A nice small house and a low mortgage I can afford.
- Clothing to keep me warm in winter and appropriately covered in summer.
- A car with 120k+ miles on it that continues to run well.
- A 3x2-inch card that gets me great health care.
- A treadmill to get my running in when the weather prevents outdoor running — plus a TV (with Netflix and Disney+) to watch while on the treadmill.
- Three passports.
Yes, 3 passports. Those little booklets are three of my most prized possessions.
Every single one of them, even the Venezuelan one, despite the fact that no one would go live there right now. In fact, over the past few years, the country’s population has decreased — not enough people being born to make up for the number of people dying or leaving.
Guess what, though? You just never know.
What if North Korea’s Kim Jong-un finally had the capacity to land nuclear missiles anywhere on the continental US and actually launched a few?
Or preferably, if a miracle happens and Venezuela’s economy and political landscape make a turn for the better by the time I retire, I could move back and live like a duchess on minimal retirement income, or at least go on long vacations to Los Roques, an archipelago off the coast of Venezuela that has the most dazzling beaches I’ve ever seen.
In any event, I’d never give up being Venezuelan. On the one hand, Venezuela’s my country of birth and youth, the place that made me who I am the most. On the other, my Venezuelan passport’s the only one I got for no other reason than the fact that my existence started there.
I don’t know about other countries' rules, but you can always return to Venezuela with an expired Venezuelan passport. Getting out is a different matter.
Really, though, my plan is to stay in the US, so my USA passport is precious to me. I worked quite hard to have it too. It took me 8 years, untold persistence, and surmounting numerous obstacles and loads of uncertainty to become a US citizen, as I recount here:
Plus I like my life in the United States of America and have come to deeply love my adopted country.
My Italian passport’s the perfect backup passport. I could live in the middle of nowhere in Italy and still be close enough to one of its beautiful cities. The fact that the country has survived all kinds of wars and natural disasters is also reassuring. I speak the language and have family there, which would help a lot.
I have an Italian passport because I married an Italian man and because I crossed all the t’s, dotted all the i’s, and spent countless hours in the Italian Consulate in Caracas submitting document after document and waiting my turn.
It was a game of attrition, and I think they designed it to be that way. They give you a list of documents. You gather and submit them and then are told you also need three other ones and new signatures on the ones you just submitted.
You gotta want that passport really bad to not give up.
My father’s Italian as well but he had to renounce his Italian citizenship when he turned 18. He lived in Venezuela then and was made to choose. I still don’t understand if it was Italy or Venezuela that forced this choice.
Many years later, my father recovered his Italian citizenship and passport. But since I was born while he wasn’t Italian, I couldn’t process a passport through him. My youngest sister was still a minor when our father turned Italian again, so she did inherit a passport from him. Birth order really does matter.
If we die tomorrow, my husband and I may not leave our two sons any property or wealth, but we’ve already given them three passports and strong connections to the corresponding countries.
Right now, they might say they’d prefer to inherit a big house and a profitable family business. However, as an immigrant from Venezuela and the daughter of a man who migrated twice, I know the passports can be far more valuable.