The Global Market For Investor Citizenship

This book presents a systematic study of the history, theory and policy of investor citizenship and residence programmes. It explores how states develop new rules of joining their community in response to globalisation and highlights the tension between citizenship policies aimed at migrant integration and those, such as the sale of passports, which create ‘long-distance citizens’. Individual chapters offer insights in the historical relationship between citizenship, money and property; discuss arguments that support and counter the practice of the sale of citizenship; and examine the interests and strategies of the different actors—states, companies, individuals—that constitute the ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ sides of the burgeoning citizenship industry. The book provides a global overview of the market for investor citizenship as well as a separate policy analysis of the sale of citizenship and residence in the European Union.

This book presents a systematic study of the history, theory and policy of investor citizenship and residence programmes. It explores how states develop new rules of joining their community in response to globalisation and highlights the tension between citizenship policies aimed at migrant integration and those, such as the sale of passports, which create 'long-distance citizens'. Individual chapters offer insights in the historical relationship between citizenship, money and property; discuss arguments that support and counter the practice of the sale of citizenship; and examine the interests and strategies of the different actors-states, companies, individuals-that constitute the 'supply' and 'demand' sides of the burgeoning citizenship industry. The book provides a global overview of the market for investor citizenship as well as a separate policy analysis of the sale of citizenship and residence in the European Union. Jelena Džankić is Coordinator of the Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT) at the European University Institute, Italy. She researches citizenship in Europe and beyond, Europeanisation, and politics of identity.

The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the normalization of a once shadowy practice. Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely easy. But for those with the means—billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, but also countless unknown multimillionaires—it’s just a question of price. More than a dozen countries, many of them small islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Pacific, sell citizenship to 50,000 people annually. Through six years of fieldwork on four continents, Kristin Surak discovered how the initially dubious sale of passports has transformed into a full-blown citizenship industry that thrives on global inequalities. Some “investor citizens” hope to parlay their new passport into visa-free travel—or use it as a stepping stone to residence in countries like the United States. Other buyers take out a new citizenship as an insurance policy or to escape state control at home. Almost none, though, intend to move to their selected country and live among their new compatriots, whose relationship with these global elites is complex. A groundbreaking study of a contentious practice that has become popular among the nouveaux riches, The Golden Passport takes readers from the details of the application process to the geopolitical hydraulics of the citizenship industry. It’s a business that thrives on uncertainty and imbalances of power between big, globalized economies and tiny states desperate for investment. In between are the fascinating stories of buyers, brokers, and sellers, all ready to profit from the citizenship trade.

The cosmopolites are literally "citizens of the world," from the Greek word kosmos, meaning "world," and polites, or "citizen." Garry Davis, aka World Citizen No. 1, and creator of the World Passport, was a former Broadway actor and World War II bomber pilot who renounced his American citizenship in 1948 as a form of protest against nationalism, sovereign borders, and war. Today there are cosmopolites of all stripes, rich or poor, intentional or unwitting, from 1-percenters who own five passports thanks to tax-havens to theBidoon, the stateless people of countries like the United Arab Emirates. Journalist Atossa Abrahamian, herself a cosmopolite, travels around the globe to meet the people who have come to embody an increasingly fluid, borderless world. Along the way you are introduced to a colorful cast of characters, including passport-burning atheist hackers, the new Knights of Malta, California libertarian "seasteaders," who are residents of floating city-states,Bidoons, who have been forced to be citizens of the island nation Comoros, entrepreneurs in the business of buying and selling passports, cosmopolites who live on a luxury cruise ship calledThe World, and shady businessmen with ties to Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.

This Encyclopedia presents a comprehensive collection of entries addressing the normative claims and definitions of the critical concepts, principles, and approaches that make up the field of citizenship studies.

Contrary to predictions that it would become increasingly redundant in a globalizing world, citizenship is back with a vengeance. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together leading experts in law, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and geography to provide a multidisciplinary, comparative discussion of different dimensions of citizenship: as legal status and political membership; as rights and obligations; as identity and belonging; as civic virtues and practices of engagement; and as a discourse of political and social equality or responsibility for a common good. The contributors engage with some of the oldest normative and substantive quandaries in the literature, dilemmas that have renewed salience in today's political climate. As well as setting an agenda for future theoretical and empirical explorations, this Handbook explores the state of citizenship today in an accessible and engaging manner that will appeal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Chapters highlight variations in citizenship regimes practiced in different countries, from immigrant states to 'non-western' contexts, from settler societies to newly independent states, attentive to both migrants and those who never cross an international border. Topics include the 'selling' of citizenship, multilevel citizenship, in-between statuses, citizenship laws, post-colonial citizenship, the impact of technological change on citizenship, and other cutting-edge issues. This Handbook is the major reference work for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective. Written by the most knowledgeable senior and emerging scholars in their fields, this comprehensive volume offers state-of-the-art analyses of the main challenges and prospects of citizenship in today's world of increased migration and globalization. Special emphasis is put on the question of whether inclusive and egalitarian citizenship can provide political legitimacy in a turbulent world of exploding social inequality and resurgent populism.

"Examining an important, rising trend in today's global system, Citizenship 2.0 does us a fine service in exploring the origins and consequences of the dual citizenship phenomenon."--Alejandro Portes, Princeton University.sity.

Citizenship and residence by investment is a fast-growing global phenomenon. As of 2022, more than a third of all countries in the world offered paths to membership in exchange for a donation or investment into their economies. Yet we know little about how these programmes operate and debates in academia and the wider public are often misinformed by sensationalist cases. This book offers a multidisciplinary exploration of both citizenship and residence by investment on a global scale. Bringing together the expertise of leading legal scholars, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians, it provides an informative and empirically grounded assessment of the origins, operation, key causes, and the legal bases of the investment migration programmes. By so doing, the volume demystifies citizenship and residence by investment and takes a critical postcolonial global perspective, addressing key issues in belonging, exclusion, and inequality that define the world today.