Citizenship by investment programmes: Express naturalisation for bulky wallets. An arbitrary de jure stratification?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/rdp.106.2019.26160Keywords:
Citizenship by investment programmes, checkbook citizens, élite mobility, stratificationAbstract
Traditionally, the study of the relation between stratification and migration has been focusing on features such as origin, ethnicity or gender, paying special attention to migrants at the bottom of the stratification. Recent studies (Shachar, 2011, 2016; Shachar & Hirschl, 2013) have shifted this lens by proving that there are worldwide ways to facilitate access to citizenship to applicants having exceptional talents —in sports, in academia or in industry—, most of them privileged by discretional decisions. Much less attention has caught the relation between stratification and programmes fast-tracking the route to citizenship in exchange for economic transactions. These are usually called citizenship by investment programmes (CIPs) and come in different forms. Yet all of them have in common the factor that economic capacity of the applicant is the key to access citizenship. By facilitating and speeding up the acquisition of citizenship on grounds of economic capacity, CIPs entail stratification in accessing citizenship that is established de jure or by law. This stratification in naturalisation requires further investigation and raises several questions: Is it fair to remove some requirements, such as civic and language tests, for checkbook citizens while keeping them for other naturalisation applicants? Should money be accepted as the main requirement to grant citizenship? Are these policies arbitrary? This paper has three objectives. First, to present the phenomenon of CIPs, focusing on programmes established by EU member states. Second, to compare the requirements applied to general applicants and to applicants following CIPs in order to prove that the programmes entail a de jure stratification in the access to citizenship. Third, to argue that these practices may be considered arbitrary.
Summary:
1. Introduction. 2. CIPs: a fast route to bulky wallets. 3. CIPs in the European Union (EU). (a) Bulgarian CIP. (b) Cypriot CIP. (c) Maltese CIP. 4. Is the stratification entailed by talented and checkbook citizens akin? 5. Last remarks
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