Many countries demand that all jobs created go to their citizens. Some countries have requirements of a minimum of $1M investment in a business in order to emigrate. Residency and citizenship are two different things, as well.
I don’t know about Costa Rico, but many Caribbean countries will not sell land to non-citizens. Everything is long-term leases. You may be able to keep ownership of a home, but not the land under it.
Things may have changed. My information is 10-30 years old, depending on the country involved. Specifically British Virgin Islands and Bonaire, NA.
Be aware and informed before making any plans. We knew folks back in the 90s who received two very sizeable severance packages from IBM. With that and the sale of a home, they left for Bonaire, planning to open a deli. They could not work in the business themselves. Every job had to go to Bonaireans. An employee doesn’t have the passion for a business that owners have and the deli failed, eventually. The couple was also bored in paradise and I believe ended up going back to the States.
Back in the 70s-80s, we knew another couple who got out of the real estate market in Texas at the top. They were very well off. They built a lovely home on St. Johns. He was a jeweler and bought a tremendous quantity of gold. In fact, he had a vault incorporated into his new shop just for that. Over the years, their property taxes/fees rose, sometimes with no notice, just a bill in the mail. Gold rose and then slid. We last saw them at a trade show in Hawaii in the early 90s and they were crying the blues.
In the late 1980s, we had a chance to purchase a home on Bonaire. It was so appealing, the prices were low, especially for the amazing diving and weather and DH could work as both a jeweler and a dive master. We had some really intense marital discussions where I kept saying it could be too much of a risk. Well, by the late 1990s, others we knew who had bought on the island and who had jobs with American resort corporations, paid in US$, with US benefits of the period were desperately trying to sell those very same homes for 10x what they originally paid. No one wanted them at that price. The American corporations were being hit with *mattress taxes* and whatever else the government could think of. Tourism was down. Business for jewelry and even the better restaurants was down. Diving stayed great, but by then, 10 years later, a new crop of local young people, many coming home from having amassed a nest egg in Holland, were competing for the dive industry jobs. The government allowed managerial level employees to be American or Brit, but the dive master jobs went to the locals. There were loads of ocean going sailboats languishing in the harbor, up for sale. Most had to be taken back to Fort Lauderdale to find buyers. We lost touch and these folks may have recovered, but at the time, they were bitter, although all still young enough to think about leaving for somewhere else.
We all think we could be smarter than anyone who has tried something and failed or been at least badly impacted. But we cannot see the future and it rarely is a nice, safe, status quo.
Some of these companies that expatriate could easily find themselves hit with overnight increases in fees and taxes that suddenly make a Restored USA (Please, God!) with a lower tax rate and the possibility of ownership once again appealing, while their present domicile is becoming more and more expensive.
If that happens, and more people in the country go unemployed, then hopefully it will wake up the American electorate and make them realize what they have enabled Washington to do. As much as I hate to say it, it may take another depression to wake people up.