• Today, the country requires that a foreigner invest about $1.8 million in Uruguay in order to apply for a residence visa;
• The idea is to reduce this amount and make other conditions more flexible, such as the need to stay in the country for six months without traveling abroad.

According to BBC News, the new president-elect of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou, wants to try to increase the size of the country’s population by facilitating the entry of foreign residents. With his inauguration scheduled for March 1, Pou must announce a package of “measures to” relax “the current rules of residence, both bureaucratic and fiscal, in order to attract residents from abroad to the country, which is a neighbor of Brazil and has one of the smallest populations in South America “, wrote correspondent Marcia Carmo.

In an interview with BBC News Brasil, the future Minister of Tourism of the government of Lacalle Pou, Germano Cardoso, said that Uruguay is taking inspiration from European countries to “increase its population and ‘activate’ its economy, without” harming “the fiscal suitability of the country”.

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“We do not want illicit capital, but families and investors, who prove their resources, who want to live and prosper in our country,” Cardoso said, by telephone, to the publication.

Today, the country requires that a foreigner invest about $1.8 million in Uruguay in order to apply for a residence visa. The idea is to reduce this amount and make other conditions more flexible, such as the need to stay in the country for six months without traveling abroad.

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With 3.5 million inhabitants, Uruguay has had almost the same population for 30 years. While some opponents say that such measures could make the country a tax haven again, others say that it should attract only the rich and investors. But everyone admits that it would be better to have a larger population, and, most importantly, more people of working age in the country.