Global Mobility Corridors for the Ultra-Rich. The Neoliberal Transformation…
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his contribution, with this revision citizenship aligns itself with other neoliberal and free market-inspired developments. However, such withdrawal
of the state and the advancement of the free market in the traditional sphere
of state sovereignty still need to be better explained rather than just
diagnosed.
In the case of citizenship-by-investment, we need to understand better
whether this was a supply or demand driven policy change, what stakeholder alliances lobbied for this policy, what channels they used, who set the
price tag (for an overview of varieties of citizenship- and residence-by-
investment programmes across the world see Barbulescu 2016), and what
arguments persuaded political elites to implement it. Neoliberalism does not
spread like the flavour of a bag of tea in a cup of water: it needs promoters
and legitimisation that will align support against other competing paradigms, especially in citizenship policies where there are strong path-
dependency dynamics. These are important questions because
citizenship-by-investment departs from citizenship traditions everywhere,
because such policy revisions are largely unpopular and may have a high
political cost and, not least, because they de-legitimise the very existence of
state bureaucracies administrating citizenship for the ultra-rich. With naturalisation becoming a transaction over-the-counter, the organisation that
implemented it partly loses its purpose.
So why is it important to understand how citizenship-by-investment has
come about? Because of its large impact on an essential political institution
and its success in carving out global mobility corridors through entangled
states.
One final note: As several states have already implemented citizenship-
by-investment schemes, states should quickly lose their naivety about investors as do-gooders. Those schemes that – unlike Malta’s – rely on investment
rather than direct payment should check that the capital is indeed invested.
The UK, one of the first states to introduce Investor Visa (with a price tag of
£ 1 million or a bank loan from an UK financial institution and personal