Theoretical Aspects of Citizenship and Residence Sales

It is crucial to embed investment migration within citizenship theory. One can look at it as a dangerous deviation from some golden rule, or as a symptom of the changing function of citizenship as a vehicle of exclusion. Assessing both perspectives, this paper suggests that the rise of investment migration fits neatly within the general context of the transformation of citizenship over the last decades, marked by its thinning and, simultaneously, opening up to the contestation in the neat correspondence between the formal status and rights formally associated with it. In the context of growing inter-country inequality and disparities between citizenships evolving in parallel with the status’ thinning, investment migration is facilitated by the increasing toleration of the cumulation of nationalities. Together these factors enable 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. Particularly democracy-related arguments, which are mainstream in the context of the theorizing the ‘instrument and object of closure’ 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 as the abuse of the notion of the preservation of the democratic community for the perpetual exclusion of others on the grounds which are not morally justifiable due to the essential randomness of the inclusion choices.