40 R. Bauböck social class from becoming, once again, a formal marker of inequality of citizenship rights and status. One could object that, once they are citizens, the votes of foreign investors will not formally count for more than everyone else’s. But it seems quite naïve to think that a club that starts to sell its membership at a price that only the ultra-rich can afford will keep treating its poorer members as equals. Barbulescu makes an interesting point that ‘citizenship-by-investment largely contradicts the very recent efforts of states to re-substantiate citizenship through tests and integration requirements.’ It seems indeed inconsistent to waive integration conditions for investors while at the same time insisting that citizenship can only be granted to foreign immigrants as a reward for their individual integration efforts. Yet from a democratic perspective both of these policies represent the same worrying trend: they link access to citizenship once again to social class. While income tests for naturalisation have an explicit class bias, knowledge tests have an implicit one, since education and the capacity to learn for tests is strongly related to social class. But isn’t the way citizenship is obtained anyhow morally arbitrary? Why should those who have citizen parents or who have been born in the state’s territory have a stronger moral claim to citizenship than foreigners who are ready to pay or invest? Why should even long-term residence count, if those who can naturalise on that basis have been pre-selected by immigration controls that do not offer the same chances to the rest of the world’s population? These may be relevant questions from a global justice perspective. From an internal democratic perspective, they are wrongly asked. Long-term residence is what makes immigrants’ relation to the political community equal to that of native citizens in the relevant sense and is therefore not at all an arbitrary criterion for access to citizenship as membership in a particular polity. The same can be said for ius soli and ius sanguinis. Instead of giving citizens specific privileges based on a claim to land or to parental inheritance, these birthright rules make them equal amongst each other by referring to the circumstances of birth that they share in common, be it birth in a territory or to citizen parents. Moreover, by providing individuals with citizenship at birth and for life, states protect them in a much stronger way than clubs who select their members based on present members’ interests in their contributions or in choosing new ones who are like themselves. Selecting future citizens on grounds of either investment or income and knowledge tests departs fundamentally from the egalitarian thrust that underlies rules of birthright citizenship as well as residence-based naturalisation.