52 D. Kochenov It is wrong to pretend that any other principle than outright randomness is at the core of the assignment of citizenship statuses in today’s world. Once the inevitable randomness of exclusion is admitted – as Shachar did in her book on the birthright lottery1 – we need to ask what citizenship is actually about. II. Shachar is worried about any discrimination at the point of acquisition of citizenship. However, a strict non-discrimination approach would deprive citizenship of its main function, i.e. random exclusion of large parts of society. Crucially, both de facto and de jure aspects of exclusion must be taken into account, a point that Shachar ignores in her statement. The fact that many de jure citizens are de facto stateless, in the sense of not receiving protection by their state of origin or enjoying substantive rights to return there, is of crucial importance. Idealistic images of a citizenship of the past are based on misrepresentation of social facts, perpetuating an often repugnant status quo where plenty of people are failed by their states day after day. Thus real citizenship starts with the actual extension of rights and giving the voice to those who are already formally included: women, minorities, the poor and the weak: plentiful problems remain in this regard. Naturalisation is but a second step which serves three functions: providing citizenship status to long-term resident immigrants, respecting and recognising citizens’ family ties through special naturalisation rules for family members, and reinforcing the society with talent, money, inspiration and diversity – which translates into inviting the rich, the beautiful and the smart (sometimes these three categories overlap of course). No confusion between different groups of applicants should arise: to ask that all follow the same path is rarely helpful. Arguing for making the rules as strict as possible for all misses the different purposes of conferring nationality in the first place. Be it sports, science, money or family, it is up to the national democratic process to determine the criteria. Crucially, there is no ethical point to be made in arguing against money when loving a citizen, expensive education, or muscular power can also do the trick. Money is no less random a criterion and this is exactly what citizenship is about. Real discrimination would be to sell a partial rather than fully fledged citizenship, as Tonga does when selling its ‘Tongan Protected Person Passport’, which is not recognised by many other states and does not entail a right to enter and settle in Tonga. The attractiveness of such a second class citizenship is clearly limited. 1 Shachar, A. (2009), The Birthright Lottery. Citizenship and Global Inequality. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.