The US also has a "citizenship by investment" EB-5 visa program, minimum is 500k USD, actually cheaper than most EU countries (in the Netherlands apparently they expect an investment of minimum 1.25m EUR). I suspect that for most rich people who want to be residents it's much easier/cheaper/faster to get some domestic partnership papers. And I also know that in the NL you can get residence just with a corporation (25k EUR capital requirement), so it's actually pretty cheap if someone is doing it for business purposes. Although in all of the official EU programmes I see that the passport could take up to 5 years, except for Cyprus and Malta where you can get your passport right away. A lot of tax fugitives from the UK and other EU countries do this move to Malta thing where they still get an EU passport and evade home country taxes on recent or ongoing gains. A cheap alternative for a recent millionaire would be to deposit the cash in a swiss bank private account, buy a yacht for a couple of hundred K and hang out near the mediterranean/adriatic shore cities as long as they like to.
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