Citizenship for Those who Invest into the Future of the State is Not Wrong…
23
to pay this amount reveals that the law is in fact too restrictive and does not
provide other reasonable ways to become citizen.
Naturalisation in Malta is possible after five years of residence, but it
includes discretionary conditions, the severity of which can vary across
time. In other European countries specific conditions and varying periods
of residence are required. The greater the severity, the greater the price for
passports. Investor citizenship programmes should be used to create a fruitful community, not to maximise price.
To conclude, I do not believe that investor citizenship programmes in
themselves are unfair. On the contrary, they can reveal, via a financial argument, how hard the naturalisation process is. All European countries are
concerned with this issue: too restrictive laws prevent motivated people to
give their contribution to the host country and they divide humanity into rich
and poor, rather than into different united groups. Exactly as the Roman
Empire did.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium
or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the
source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes
were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to
the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license
and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.