Delving into a Growing Phenomenon
Countries are competing ever more fervently to attract the best and brightest, whether highly skilled migrant workers, students with potential, or athletes and others boasting exceptional talent. It should therefore come as little surprise that they should vie with each other to lure in the wealthy as well. Indeed, the past thirty years have seen a rapid rise around the world in legislation that enables people to acquire citizenship or residence rights in exchange for a donation or an investment. Though not a new activity, it had become comparatively rare more recentlyFootnote 1 – with Liechtenstein hosting a twentieth-century precursorFootnote 2 that set the stage for the famous Nottebohm case decided by the International Court of Justice in the aftermath of the Second World WarFootnote 3 – yet, since 1986 when Canada revised its Business Immigration Programme to allow passive investments to qualify for residence, investment migration has reached staggering proportions.Footnote 4 As of 2021, more than a third of the countries in the world offer paths to membership in exchange for a donation or investment into their economies.Footnote 5 Clearly, investment migration has obtained an established place alongside other modes of residence and citizenship acquisition. The implications are far-reaching for the established understanding of citizenship and residence in a number of the main disciplines engaged with them, from law to sociology, economics, philosophy and political science. Investment migration teaches us much about the shifting boundaries of belonging.Footnote 6
Indeed, this phenomenon upends many commonplace assumptions about the operation of citizenship and residence in the contemporary world. Since only a handful of countries demand a substantial physical presence in their territory to qualify for investment citizenship or residence, let alone retain that status,Footnote 7 the cleavage between citizenship and residence as legal statuses is pronounced in comparison to the common view that presumes a prior incorporation into a given imagined community. Upon reflection, a question emerges of how different this is in other cases: could Advocate General Sharpston be right in the argument that qualifying periods of residence are bound to be ‘necessarily arbitrary’?Footnote 8 Indeed, research reveals that many investment migrants seek options abroad not with the goal of moving to and settling in the target country. Rather, as Kristin Surak shows, they often desire an additional base of operations, perhaps one of many, or simply an open option should they decide to move. Indeed, given that any citizenship is a global status by default, many seek out citizenship and residence not for the rights it confers in the granting jurisdiction, but for the extraterritorial rights it secures outside of it, such as visa-free access to third countries or permit-free residence options outside of the country of new citizenship, alongside business investment options in third countries.Footnote 9 Think of a freshly minted Maltese citizen settling in Paris as of right by virtue of Maltese and European citizenship, or a brand-new Grenadian travelling to China visa-free, or of a box-fresh Turk opening a business in the US and thereby acquiring a residence permit as a ‘serial investor migrant’.Footnote 10
In other words, investment migration, crucially, often has little to do with migration per se, as this is understood in the classical migration literature as involving the crossing of international borders.Footnote 11 Rather, it is the global extraterritorial rights that the new status unlocks in the present or its function as an insurance policy for the future that many people seek.Footnote 12 Thus the act of migration, viewed as a unidirectional movement from A to B, is not a feature of investment migration in many, if not possibly the majority of cases. It is instead about the formal statuses of residence and citizenship obtained, which entitle the bearer to migrate to the country of the newly acquired citizenship and other mobility options. We could speak in this respect – and following Yossi Harpaz – of a ‘compensatory’ citizenshipFootnote 13 (as well as residence). Those whose birth citizenship is inferior to the global averageFootnote 14 may seek out a better status without necessarily relocating geographically: a Russian or a Chinese millionaire investor would thus remain at home in Russia or China, where the business is, without suffering the negative consequences of the suboptimal Chinese or Russian citizenship globally.Footnote 15 This is part of a broader trend. It is essential to realise that ‘compensatory citizenship’ is not only about the rich: birth tourism and strategic ancestral citizenship acquisition roughly produce the same results,Footnote 16 which, coupled with the fact that these channels are also relatively cheap, has seen a vibrant market emerge around them.Footnote 17
The bottom line – and one of the core findings of this volume – is the emergence of citizenship and residence as strategic and strategizable,Footnote 18 as opposed to simply blood-given and sanctified.Footnote 19 Citizenship and residence by investment are thus only an example of a much broader global trend of the diminished fetishisation of the outcomes of the proverbial ‘birthright lottery’Footnote 20 and evince what Christian Joppke has theorized as a strategic instrumentalisation of legal statusesFootnote 21 in the context of structural global inequalities, formalized and solidified by citizenshipFootnote 22 as one of their core tools.Footnote 23 Investment migration is thus a clear example of the mutual strategic use of state sovereignty in citizenship and migration domains.Footnote 24 Such strategic use is leading, on the demand side, to individuals seeking to multiply their ‘citizenship capital’;Footnote 25 and on the supply side, to state authorities cashing in on this desire.Footnote 26 Notably, global inequalities structure the market not only in terms of supply, but also demand. Because much of the utility of investor citizenship, just as any citizenship tout court, lies in the rights acquired not in the issuing country,Footnote 27 but outside of it, whether as mobility or business options, powerful third countries obtain considerable sway over the value of the product brought to market.Footnote 28 If the US were to cancel its E2 Treaty and China were to revoke its visa-free access from Grenada, the small Caribbean island would not be able to sustain its higher minimum investment amounts in comparison to its neighbours. The result is a complex geopolitics structuring the market.Footnote 29
To date, scholars have largely ignored the implications of this global trend. Early literature on investment migration concentrated on the pros and cons of offering citizenship for a price. Economists typically regard citizenship as like anything else that can be commoditised and traded on a market. Selling citizenship, they argue, is an efficient and egalitarian way to screen people for membership in a nation, little different to other selection mechanisms.Footnote 30 Those willing and able to pay would also have other desirable characteristics – being skilled, educated and talented – that any nation would want, and that would keep the individuals from drawing on state funds.Footnote 31 Differences among the economists writing on the subject come down to programme design. Citizenship could be allocated through a pricing system to maximise the total per capita income for the existing citizenry,Footnote 32 or through an auction for qualified applicants.Footnote 33 Residence could also be sold to those looking for faster access to a new country and unwilling to wait or to relocate.Footnote 34 Adjustments to the programme could ensure access for those unable to afford the cost of membership outright. The government or banks could offer loans to the underprivileged,Footnote 35 or poorer applicants could choose to forgo part of the upfront cost by paying an additional surcharge on their national income tax.Footnote 36 As such, the sale of citizenship could decrease the population of irregular migrants, in addition to securing a revenue source for integrating new entrants.Footnote 37
Yet, designing an effective operational investment migration programme is not a simple task at all, as Madeleine Sumption demonstrates in this volume.Footnote 38 As such, the likely net gains in financial and human resources that excite economists are possibly more muted.Footnote 39 Moreover, pricing mechanisms have proven a poor tool for regulating supply and demand in a terrain defined by shifting geopolitics and legal protocols. When Canada doubled the cost of its investor visa in 1999 and again in 2010, application numbers still outpaced availability. The result was a backlog of over 60,000 individuals when the programme was closed in 2014.
In contrast to the economists, a more wary camp, populated by political theorists and social scientists, has taken an apprehensive stance towards selling citizenship. Their trepidation draws from two sources: an Aristotelian conception of citizenship that selects political involvement as its foundationFootnote 40 and a Walzerian commitment to the maintenance of justice’s separate spheres, namely that inequalities in the sphere of wealth should not map onto those of political participation.Footnote 41 As such, on that view, granting ‘migrant millionaires’ – who may have never even entered a country – a voice within politics and a stake in the political community represents a fundamental threat to citizenship as an institution based on ideals of equality and participation.Footnote 42 It is thought to violate the crucial link of ius nexi – a genuine connection – that both roots political membership and ensures that participants are ‘genuine’ stakeholders.Footnote 43 Within this line of reasoning, investor visas that require a period of residence before citizenship is granted are less problematic,Footnote 44 but they do not avoid all concerns, as exchanging citizenship for money in any form threatens to corrupt democracy. If voting in elections is the core political right of citizenship, then selling the status is akin to selling political influence, a danger that could reinforce inequity within society.Footnote 45 And where political influence is presumed to be a form of blood aristocracy, given that 98% of citizenships are inherited by blood, selling aristocratic titles damages their prestige and violates their exclusivity.Footnote 46 Putting a price tag on membership in the body politic so organised restricts its benefits, as the story goes, exclusively to the elites at the cost of equality, both within a stateFootnote 47 and internationally.Footnote 48 Yet even if states adopting such schemes evinced a broader trend towards neoliberalisation,Footnote 49 such programmes might be structured, some have proposed, to advance global humanitarian goals, creating new forms of ius nexi for a global population.Footnote 50 Adherents to the camp demanding the purity of citizenship be restored and the marketization of citizenship and residence to be set aside thus rarely venture beyond condemnation of the new reality,Footnote 51 creating, together with some international institutions, a cottage industry of moral panics.Footnote 52 Given that condemnation does not equal understanding and coherent theorizing, the growing global phenomenon of investment migration has remained largely unaddressed by scholars: a lacuna this book aims to bridge by moving beyond the streetlight effect which plagues the dominant literature.
This volume is based on the premise that one can look at investment citizenship and residence not only as a dangerous deviation from some golden rule, but rather as a symptom of the changing function of citizenship statuses and residence entitlements as vehicles of exclusion.Footnote 53 Learning from the swift rise of investment migration suggests that its growth fits neatly within the general context of citizenship transformations over the last decades, marked by its purported thinningFootnote 54 and its simultaneously increasing contestation of the correspondence between the formal status and the rights formally associated with it.Footnote 55 Given that the key nexus of global inequality now lies between states, rather than within societies,Footnote 56 citizenships objectively acquire different levels of quality for their bearers,Footnote 57 becoming an instrument of oppression, not only liberation.Footnote 58 The discrepancy in quality between different citizenships is particularly stark in the context of growing inter-citizenship rights, allowing the citizens of the richest nations to enjoy almost full citizenship rights – including access to territory, residence, employment and non-discrimination – in many other countries beyond the one that issues their passport.Footnote 59 At the same time, wealthy countries are reluctant to admit people from poorer parts of the world visa-free.Footnote 60 While the world is open and welcoming for the super-citizens of the rich ‘West’ – the citizens of their former colonies and the former Soviet space experience this institution radically differently.Footnote 61 The racist nature of the status quo is usually ignored, if not embraced.Footnote 62
Thus investment migration is on the rise even as citizenship thins and the inequalities that citizenship sustains grow wider, and its core assumptions are increasingly contested. Besides the quality disparities evolving in parallel with citizenship’s thinning, while citizenship’s core assumptions are being contested, investment migration is further facilitated by the stable global trend of steadily increasing toleration of the cumulation of nationalitiesFootnote 63 coupled with tightening privacy rules.Footnote 64 Not only is it no longer necessary, in the majority of jurisdictions, to slough off a previous citizenship when naturalizing elsewhere: the very act of naturalization can more readily be kept secret to protect the bearer of the newly minted nationality – whether acquired through investment or not – from restrictive regulation back home, which can call the retention of the original citizenship into question.Footnote 65 These factors, taken together and coupled with the unequal economic growth around the world, facilitate the rise of investment migration and provoke a reassessment of the holy cows of citizenship theory, opening up a new perspective on the ethics of citizenship and its moral worth.Footnote 66
No one exemplifies the questionable starting points underlying the mainstream thinking about citizenship today better than investment migrants. They typically lead more transnational lives than what the presumptions of immobility built into modern conceptions of citizenship and residence assert: namely that citizens and residents should remain in ‘their’ states. Only some investor migrants settle in their new country; most are looking for the mobility, security and business opportunities that an additional passport offers.Footnote 67 Framing the present configuration against a background of the ‘golden days’ of citizenship does not adequately capture the transnational lives of those selecting the investor visa route in highly desired core countries. Canada’s Immigrant Investor Program, the largest and longest-lived investor scheme, which has served as a model for others, saw most participants maintain their centre of vital interests in East Asia, and many returned to their home region once permanent residence or a passport had been secured.Footnote 68 Yet most investment migrants – should they actually decide to migrate – are what many states would consider desirable citizens: they are wealthy and are ready to reach out across borders to invest and bring with them the other forms of capital that they have accumulated. In the context of the European Union, this fact is particularly clear.Footnote 69 The Union offers a supranational citizenship status to all the nationals of its Member States, which is directly derived from such nationalities.Footnote 70 The Union citizenship is marked by two core rights, including a right to swap states within the Union without any obstacles and a right not to be discriminated against based on the particular member state citizenship one can hold.Footnote 71 As EU law stands today,Footnote 72 investment citizens are the ideal Europeans:Footnote 73 they are ready to go and they are rich enough not to be a burden on any social security and assistanceFootnote 74 – the key elements of the EU citizenship’s puzzle constantly put to the fore by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ).Footnote 75
Notably, much of the contemporary citizenship literature in political science and law remains deeply nationalist – in Linda Bosniak’s able characterizationFootnote 76 – which puts it at odds with the wider world of citizenship’s evolution and functioning: to limit the analysis of citizenship to a single country amounts to closing one’s eyes to the majority of citizenship’s essential features and core functions, which involve dividing humanity through both the status and legal borders that citizenship creates.Footnote 77 Citizenship – even when it appears to be about inclusion – is always also about exclusion.Footnote 78 Investment migration sits uneasily alongside the nationalism of the citizenship field: international investors with global lives are rarely dazzled by the empty nationalist rhetoric on which citizenship’s purported glories rest.
A selective understanding of belonging, alongside the attractive but empirically moot idea that citizenship is connected to political participation,Footnote 79 hangs as the backcloth to debates about investment migration and political membership.Footnote 80 Often this is reduced to voting. Saint Kitts, unusually, excludes its investor citizens from the franchise. Other countries in the Caribbean with citizenship by investment programmes maintain physical presence requirements for electoral participation. To cast a vote, one must be resident within a given district for several months prior to an election – a stipulation that disqualifies not only the almost exclusively non-resident investor citizens, but the substantial diaspora populations as well. For citizen investors in states like Jordan, Egypt and arguably Turkey, the question of political participation through civic life is moot: citizenship in those places, as in the majority of other countries in the world, has nothing to do with ‘democracy’.Footnote 81 A cynic might note that to influence politics anywhere – democracy or not – money and not formal membership is key, as John Mueller, among others, has amply demonstrated.Footnote 82 Democracy-related arguments, which are mainstream in the context of the theorizing the ‘instrument and object of closure’,Footnote 83 particularly lose their appeal not so much as a result of the incommensurability of the numbers of investment citizens with the shifts in democratic outcomes, but from the abuse of the notion that the preservation of the democratic community rests on the exclusion of others based on grounds that are morally unjustifiable due to the essential randomness of the inclusion in the first place.Footnote 84 As Dimitry Kochenov shows later in this volume ‘ius nexi’ is nothing more than a cynical whitewashing of racist exclusion under a false flag of defending communal sense and democracy:Footnote 85 the borders of the ‘West’ are sealed for the coloured former colonials, who will never come legally to be our neighbours and establish ‘real links’ with the ‘society’.Footnote 86 An appeal to ‘ius nexi’ is shorthand for stating that those who are not Swiss are not welcome.
Recognising this requires us to revisit the connections between investment migration and inequality, a key concern of debates on investment migration. Are these not cases of the rich simply buying their way in? Yet the answers are also not straightforward. All immigration systems select migrants, allowing some to access the state while denying entry to others. In the OECD, skills and family ties – effectively human and social capital – are currently favoured points for selection. Yet accruing such valuable currency, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has observed, rarely lies far from their more powerful sibling: economic capital.Footnote 87 The poorest of the poor rarely move. It is those with some means in the first place who are able to afford to cross borders or who are able to acquire the education that transforms them into sought-after highly skilled workers (or reduce them to ‘brain loss’ doctors from places failing to offer the means to realize their potential, like Nigeria, and instead end up wiping tables in places like Miami). Across the board, the cost of migration renders it inaccessible to those who are the worst off globally – the population of greatest concern in cases of brute inequality.
Above all, however, any argument about access to the status of citizenship in breach of ‘equality’ ignores the crucial starting point of citizenship distribution in the first place, namely blood – a simple aristocratic principle, unequal by default.Footnote 88 The tragedy is thus not that a Sri Lankan can acquire a European citizenship by investment, but that Europeans see the blood transmission of privilege as just and ‘equal’, ignoring – or allowing to drown in the Mediterranean or to be kidnapped by EU-funded Libyan thugs with the support of the EU’s FRONTEX agency – those who by default have been stamped as outsiders by blood (which goes hand-in-hand with skin colour), but who nonetheless attempt to challenge the system to improve their prospects.Footnote 89 Yet any Argentinian or Chilean who can find an Italian ancestor anywhere down their family line can readily obtain a treasured burgundy passport of the supranational Union – and many thousands do, without ever setting foot in The Boot.Footnote 90 Indeed, some countries, such as Hungary, naturalise more individuals through distant ancestral connections, swiftly and without any residence requirements, than they do people through ‘immigration’ channels, who have moved to the country and resided there for several years.Footnote 91 The empirical diversity of predominant naturalisation modes – whether spousal, ancestral, immigration, or other – raises questions concerning the ideological stakes that underlie the common presumption that an immigrant-into-citizen path is the baseline against which other forms of naturalisation should be compared. In this context, the conversation about equality in the context of citizenship cannot be severed from the fundamental exclusions it enforces (naturalisation would not be a point of discussion otherwiseFootnote 92), overlaid upon obstinate inequalities.Footnote 93 Is boasting the right ancestral pedigree – as opposed to money – a more just way of distributing the most important rights?Footnote 94
As far as the economic potential of investment migration is concerned, the practice is close to producing money out of thin air – a trick that sovereignty is usually good at. Countries with programmes leverage the discrepancies in the quality of citizenships and residence entitlements distributed by birth for their own gain. Indeed, the relative economic benefit afforded by investor citizenship, if carefully managed, can be great – especially for small states.Footnote 95 With limited resources, micro-states in particular have few options to achieve economic independence from regional hegemons or supranational organisations.Footnote 96 Antigua has even used the expected profits from its citizenship by investment programme to challenge the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on loan conditions that stipulated a reduction in wages, a condition that would have dealt a sharp blow to the country. Saint Kitts has used the proceeds to shore up its position against external creditors, reducing its debt-to-GDP ratio from 140 per cent in 2011 to 66 per cent in 2016,Footnote 97 garnering praise from the IMF for prudent programme management.Footnote 98 The Fund has also identified Malta’s citizenship by investment programme as one of the four main contributors to economic growth and a key driver behind the government’s first budget surplus since the 1980s.Footnote 99 Such financial benefits must also be taken into consideration if investment migration is to be evaluated in the round.Footnote 100 To the extent that concerns of equality should inform naturalisation policy choices, the issue is more multifaceted than typically recognised.
The empirical developments and theoretical implications surrounding the sale of citizenship and residence require meticulous scholarly treatment to clearly assess their causes, substance and implications. It is unquestionable that the current trend raises countless issues, from the abuse of ius doni to deal with stateless populations (evinced in deals between the United Arab Emirates and the Comoros Islands),Footnote 101 to the trade in de facto substandard citizenships (seen in the Kingdom of Tonga),Footnote 102 and questions concerning the costs and benefits both for the countries concerned (does the United Kingdom really benefit from its investment residence scheme?),Footnote 103 as well as the possibilities for misuse of such programmes.Footnote 104 It is clear that investment migration can boost the economies of small states.Footnote 105 It is equally clear that, just like any other act of migration or naturalisation, it can become a vehicle for corruption as well as a facilitator of the movement of criminals.Footnote 106
By looking at these and related issues, this volume aims to establish a solid grounding for a serious conversation on the sale of citizenships and residence and its implications in the contemporary world.
Structure of the Volume
The twenty chapters that follow provide a solid multidisciplinary introduction to the key topics on investment residence and citizenship in three overlapping and interlinked parts.
(a) Part One: Mapping Investment Migration Law and Practice
The first part, ‘Mapping Investment Migration Law and Practice,’ introduces the core elements of the phenomenon: What is investment migration? What is its scale and geographic localization? What is its place in the global context of citizenship and residence regulation? What legal frameworks sustain it at the different levels of government? In answering these queries, it lays out the main terrain at hand, and it addresses the implications for the status quo in our understanding of citizenship, residence, naturalisation and belonging. The resulting groundwork allows the two parts which follow to explore the key particularities of the marketization of residence and citizenship.
The investigation proceeds from Kristin Surak’s chapter, which lays out the empirical landscape by supplying a quantitative and qualitative analysis of basic facts and trends in the global market of investment migration. Her data-driven contribution analyses supply, demand and the sinews of the market, and also clarifies the core terminology applied throughout the volume to establish a solid background to investment migration that all the subsequent chapters build upon. Following this is Dimity Kochenov’s treatment of the reasons behind investment migration, which introduces the concept of the ‘victims of citizenship’ – namely those whose citizenships bring them down – and places investment migration in the broader context of contemporary citizenship’s inequitable essence.
Luuk van der Baaren unpacks the legality of investment migration, scrutinising the interface of state sovereignty and international law. He approaches the subject matter of this volume through the prism of the core challenges that the sale of citizenship and residence pose, including the risk of fraud and the new demands on due diligence and the implications of citizenship and residence by investment for international tax planning, as well as issues around the extradition and denaturalisation of investment citizens in the light of international and European law. Peter Spiro picks up the story where van der Baaren leaves it, delving in detail into the rules of international law in their evolution and dynamic understanding, focusing on the principle of volitional naturalisation. He takes the mass acquisition of the Comorian nationality by the Middle Eastern Bidoon as an example of a factual constellation, which could potentially be unlawful under international law, ending with a call for ‘disciplining’ investment citizenship. A detailed presentation of the rules of international and European law applicable to investment migration is followed in the chapter by Petra Weingerl and Matjaž Tratnik, which explains the problems behind the usual misconstruction of Nottebohm’s ‘genuine links’Footnote 107 – especially in the light of contemporary EU lawFootnote 108 – and offers in its place the promising concept of ‘relevant links’.
The first part concludes with a meticulous study of the issue of competence to confer residence and citizenship based on a donation or investment in the light of international and European law as they stand today. As Daniel Sarmiento and Martijn van den Brink show, the national competence to do this is part of the sovereign nature of the modern state, which implies the ability to create a people and delimit the scope of the population granted a right to settle in the national territory, underpinned by rules behind such delimitation. In full accord with the rest of the first part, the chapter explains why investment migration per se cannot be presented as unlawful, and outlines the avenues for the eventual disciplining of its offshoots in areas unrelated to migration as such, thus connecting particularly well with Peter Spiro’s analysis of relevant international law.
Taken as a whole, Part One achieves three things. First, it reveals that investment migration is a growing phenomenon intimately connected to the distribution of inequalities and rights in the world today; second, it shows that investment migration is an exercise of state sovereignty, which is completely lawful at both international and European levels; third, it demonstrates how international law and European law offer sufficient room for manœuvre for the management of the problematic aspects of international taxation and criminal law enforcement, should these arise in an investment migration context.
(b) Part Two: Explanations and Contextualisations
Part Two, entitled ‘Explanations and Contextualisations’, builds on the groundwork of the first part to suggest possible reasons for the emergence and growth of the practice of investment migration. This task is accomplished by supplying a broad interdisciplinary contextualization of the phenomenon, drawing on history, sociology, law, politics and to a lesser extent, the economics of investment migration.
Starting in the Middle Ages, the chapter by Maarten Prak demonstrates that investment migration is hardly new. Indeed, it was the most popular lawful way to acquire the citizenship of medieval cities outside of marriage. Having learnt from history, this part proceeds to provide a political science take on the phenomenon through a tour d’horizon by John Torpey which integrates investment migration – and especially citizenship for sale – in the classical political science literature on citizenship. Christian Joppke’s chapter continues in the same vein by unpacking the rationalization for instrumental citizenship by distinguishing between Greek and Roman ways of approaching the concept. Explaining the rise of investment migration around the world is best handled using the Roman ideal, focusing on the status of citizenship as a creature of legal individualism, rather than the participatory dimension of the Greek conception. Thus, this volume is best viewed as addressing a thinning Roman – that is status-based – approach to citizenship. Manuela Boatcă uses her chapter to contextualize the stories that Joppke and Torpey tell by adding a race and colonialism component: citizenship has been used as a powerful tool to undermine the colonised and erect an essentially race-based firewall between white Europeans, who are citizens, and colonials who are given lesser status. Investment migration is inseparable from citizenship’s past as a colonial tool of racial domination and subjugation. The story of citizenship’s necessary and unsurprising instrumentalisation is further developed by Yossi Harpaz in his chapter. He looks at the role played by citizenship in global inequalities to show how unsurprising the instrumental twist is and how investment migration is almost unavoidable. In this context, investment migration offers just one of many ways available to the losers of the birthright lottery – many of whom are the colonials Boatcă discussed – to get what Harpaz terms a ‘compensatory citizenship’, thereby upgrading their initial status assignment.
The two chapters that follow approach the reality of investment migration from a slightly different vantage point, as they scrutinise prior literature on this topic. Suryapratim Roy highlights the problematic starting point of three key trends in the relevant literature, demonstrating that it suffers from a ‘streetlight effect’ by inescapably privileging the claims made in the name of what theorists see as the pre-existing community, allowing such claims to trump all other concerns. The fact of the matter is, however, that when certain forms of inclusion are assessed, it is not only the interests of rich, Western societies which are at stake. On the contrary, considering the plight of those who do not appear to ‘belong’ is key to moving beyond further victimization of the losers of the birthright lottery. Lior Erez’s ensuing treatment of the subject compliments this approach by dismissing three popular types of critiques of investment migration in the existing literature: the wrong distribution argument, the degradation of value argument and the motivational corruption argument. The second part is closed by Andrés Solimano’s exploration of the question of why the wealthy migrate internationally, which showcases some data underpinning trends which indicated that migration is actually part of investment migration.
The literature that Roy and Erez address fails to explain the phenomenon of investment migration, let alone engage its empirical complexities as set out in Part One. Add to this what part two brought to the table, namely the phenomenon’s historical location and the links connecting investment migration with broader transformations of citizenship worldwide, and the contextualization of investment migration emerges as a less straightforward story than some of the scholars named above have suggested. Rather, it is a by-product of citizenship’s thinning, instrumentalisation and waning ‘glory’ – the necessary attributes of a racist inequality-generating tool.
(c) Part Three: Case Studies and Implications
In ‘Case Studies and Implications’, the third part of this book, the explanations and contextualisations situate concrete studies of the most significant areas that investment migration not only affects, but is also co-shaped through feedback effects. In probing these issues, Part Three covers a wide terrain, including the definition of policy success in this field, cases of investment citizenship deprivation and the deportations of investor migrants, as well as instances of corruption and the role of due diligence. Breaking down the state, it also addresses subnational processes and how investment migration intertwines with shared and ‘island’ sovereignty.
Madeleine Sumption’s chapter, which opens the Third Part, is of crucial significance for the whole book, as it demonstrates how terribly complex it is to conceive of a ‘successful’ investment migration programme. Connecting with Surak’s chapter in many ways, Sumption walks through the menu of investment migration programme design options, exposing the difficulties related to pretty much all of the available choices to help us grasp the sheer complexity of the issue. This complexity comes back in all the case studies, which are the core focus of this part. Daniel Christopher Twomey takes the revocation of citizenship as the starting point of his analysis. How much room is there for ex post facto conditionality in citizenship allocation and, more broadly, in immigration law? Plentiful examples listed by the author demonstrate a clear and worrisome shift in the direction of making potentially any migration status not acquired by blood conditional upon perceived good character and the lack of criminal indictments, opening a Pandora’s Box of further complexity for investment migration and its implications. If anyone can lose investment citizenship anywhere in the world as a result of a criminal case started by China, is it really citizenship we are talking about? And what does it say about the contemporary state of global citizenship law as part of international migration law, as Sir Richard Plender theorized long ago?Footnote 109 Can it be that whether a person’s citizenship is ‘real’ actually depends on race and background as well as, as the European Court of Justice seems to suggest,Footnote 110 also the lack of any competing citizenships?Footnote 111 Justin Lindeboom and Sophie Meunier contribute to the complexity of the story by providing a critical appraisal of the presumed correlation between investment migration and foreign direct investment. Could it be that investment migration is not as effective a form of FDI as has been presented to us? The devil is in the detail, as is always the case, so Sumption could be right in pointing to the importance of scrutinising particular investment migration programme designs. It is clear, if we read between the lines in the official statements made about them, that many such programmes are not well designed to attract FDI – the British Tier 1 (Investor) visa could be an example.Footnote 112 Indeed, an investment migration programme can even actually be designed to promote the enrichment only of a circle of close associates of those in power, as was the case in otherwise ‘anti-migration’ state of Hungary, as the chapter by Boldizsár Nagy reveals. Failing at the opposite end of the scale is also possible: generating FDI is of little help if investment migration, as practiced in a given jurisdiction, promotes international impunity by distributing citizenships to questionable individuals or aiding money laundering. To fight this, due diligence is absolutely key, as Mark Corrado and Kim Marsh demonstrate in their chapter, focusing on examples from Canada, Saint-Kitts and Nevis, and the European Union. The closing chapter of the book contextualises the very starting premise of the majority of scholarly approaches to investment migration: the sovereignty of the state. By showcasing the gradation of this concept as exercised in practice, Godfrey Baldacchino and Elena Basheska deploy the notion of ‘island sovereignty’ to demonstrate that investment migration can be a tool to turn the fiction of sovereignty into reality.
***
Taken together, the three parts of this book supply a pioneering amalgam, one that lays out the actual stakes in play and the operation of citizenship and residence by investment, moving beyond the knee-jerk reactions, so commonly encountered in the work of those with privileged memberships, which seeks immediately to condemn rather than understand the phenomenon – a tendency described by Suryapratim Roy and by Lior Erez in detail.Footnote 113 A more poignant take on investment migration emerges when we attempt to engage with its deep causes, drilling down to the essential aspects of the institution of citizenship as such, including racism, sexism, coloniality and random exclusion, along with its actual operation in practice. We thus concur with Peter Spiro’s view that investment migration is a phenomenon that requires serious attention precisely because of how indicative or far-reaching its implications may be for the meaning and function of citizenship in contemporary societies.Footnote 114
