14 A. Shachar government is obliged to provide justificatory reasons concerning its selective admission and naturalisation policies. Need it justify itself to other member states? To the Commission of the European Union? To would-be entrants who might have had a shot at admission through standard migration streams (family, employment, and humanitarian) but who are priced out of the advantage given to those who can afford a ‘golden passport’? From a global perspective, cash-for-passport programmes clearly exacerbate pre-­ existing inequalities rather than alleviate them. Should the sedentary populations of the migrant millionaires’ countries of origin, which are typically less stable or poorer than the destination countries, get to weigh in as well? Or, if an expansive allaffected-interests principle is applied, perhaps anyone at all who may be unfairly and arbitrarily affected should have a voice in these decisions16. And what about migrants who are already settled in the country but ineligible to benefit from naturalisation schemes that require no knowledge or familiarity with the political structures, main civic institutions, history or language of the country, and who are subject instead to ever more demanding civic integration requirements? If civic integration is a required precondition to the bestowment of full membership by the state (as restrictive citizenship tests increasingly indicate), how can this demand only apply to some and not to others? After all, there is no rational connection between delivering a stack of cash or sending in a bank wire transfer and establishing the kind of participation and equal standing among fellow citizens that the political bonds of membership are meant to represent and foster. From this vantage point, the transaction in citizenship, even if carefully regulated and implemented by monopolistic governments or their authorised delegates, should be prohibited. Taken to its dystopian extreme, this approach may lead to a situation whereby the size of their wallets, and nothing else, distinguishes suitable from unsuitable candidates for initial entry and eventual citizenship. This kind of transaction, as lawyers and philosophers like to put it, is value-­ degrading: the trading in citizenship ‘taints,’ ‘degrades’ or outrightly ‘corrupts’ (in the moral sense) its value as a good. We might in the same vein say that these cash-for-citizenship programmes detrimentally affect the ‘character of the goods themselves and the norms that should govern them’17. As critics of commodification have been at pains to clarify in other contexts18, 16 17 18 Goodin, R. (2007), ‘Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (1): 40-68. Sandel, M. J. (2013), What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 113. Cohen, I. G. (2003), ‘The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing: Reframing the Commodification Debate’, Harvard Law Review 117 (689): 689-710.