12 A. Shachar important about the volatile state of citizenship today and the direction in which we may be heading. Although economists will be quick to note that cash-for-passport programmes can create a hefty stream of revenue for governments, this is a hardly a strong enough justification to endorse them. The desire to enlarge their coffers may, as a matter of real-life experience, explain why some countries offer these programmes. From a normative perspective, however, such an exchange threatens to corrupt the good that is put on sale: what changes when we ‘sell’ citizenship is not just the price tag of membership, but its substantive content as well. As it plays a more and more important role in countries’ immigration and naturalisation policies and priorities, citizenship-­for-sale may also gradually reshape the greater class of those who are likely to enjoy political membership. Reliance on a price mechanism alone, to the exclusion of other important considerations, would not only prevent the vast majority of the world’s population from ever gaining a chance to access citizenship in well-off polities. Taken to its logical conclusion (as reductio) it might also lead, corrosively and over time, to a world where anyone included in the pool of members must pay up, or risk ‘falling helplessly to the wayside’9. Several scholars have taken up the task of imagining how our world might look were the market –rather than the state – to govern access to, and the acquisition of, political membership. As one study explains, ‘[i]f we take the basic incidents of citizenship to be protection of members and participation in modes of governance, the market for citizenship could form around offer of and demand for these services. Indeed, the offer of broader packages of citizenship services would be the basis for product differentiation’10. ‘Product differentiation,’ it should be noted, is a euphemism for providing lesser rights and services in exchange for lower fees11. Farewell, then, to the hard-earned ideal of inclusive citizenship as equal membership. In its absence, auction mechanisms and supply-and-demand rules may well replace our (however imperfect) procedures of exerting some degree of democratic governance and collective decision-making on what it means to belong to a political community, how to obtain a secure legal status of citizenship, and on what conditions. 9 10 11 Spiro, P. J. (2008), Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 134. Downes, D. M. & R. Janda (1998), ‘Virtual Citizenship’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society 13 (2): 27-61, at 55. Jordan, B. & F. Düvell (2003), Migration: The Boundaries of Equality and Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press.