Dangerous Liaisons: Money and Citizenship 11 critical scrutiny, especially since governments that use these programmes often do so in the name of advancing their country’s national interest while paradoxically setting up dangerous connections between money and access to citizenship, possibly to the detriment of the basic egalitarian and participatory thrust of political membership as we currently know it. These developments raise core ethical and legal questions. Why are states putting citizenship up for sale? And what precisely is wrong with easy-pass naturalisation along the lines of the cash-for-passport programmes? Is it the queue jumping? The attaching of a price tag to citizenship? The erosion of something foundational about political membership itself? Or, perhaps, all of the above? Surely, zealous free-marketeers will enthusiastically defend such programmes as freeing us from the shackles of culture, nation and tradition and moving citizenship forward to a new and more competitive global age of transactional contracting in which, as Nobel Prize laureate Gary Becker once put it, a price mechanism substitutes for the complicated criteria that now determine legal entry7. As much as Becker would like to deny it, though, these programmes have something of a ‘whiff of scandal’ not only due to frequent accusations of money laundering and fraud8, but also because of something deeper and more profound. Citizenship as we know it (at least since Aristotle) is comprised of political relations; as such, it is expected to both reflect and generate a notion of participation, co-governance, and a degree of solidarity among those included within the body politic. It is difficult to imagine how these values could be preserved under circumstances in which insiders and outsiders are distinguished merely by the ability to pay a certain price. The objection here is to the notion that everything, including political membership, is ‘commensurable’ and reducible to a dollar value. This is what makes cash-for-passport exchanges, even if they account for only a limited stream or quota of entrants per year, deeply problematic and objectionable. The sale and barter of citizenship, even if initially reserved only for a small stream of recipients, nevertheless sends a loud and unmistakable message in both law and social ethics about whom the contemporary market-friendly state gives priority to in the immigration and naturalisation line and whom it covets most as a future citizen. This expressive conduct and the new grammar of market-infused valuation it entails tell us ­something 7 8 Becker, G. (1992), ‘An Open Door for Immigrants – the Auction’, Wall Street Journal, October 14 1992, A1. ‘Selling Citizenship: Papers Please’, The Economist, September 28 2013, available at https://www.economist.com/news/ international/21586843-hard-up-countries-flog-passports-papers-please.