Citizenship with a Price Tag?

The spread of the global economic crisis enticed many countries to consider attracting investors to become their citizens. The mushrooming of investor programs, which permit rich individuals to gain residence in the underlying countries and eventually access their citizenship, has become a mechanism of securing an infusion of capital into the struggling economies. The lecture will first look at the relationship between the notion of citizenship and the different types of preferential naturalization of investors: naturalization through residence, discretionary naturalization, and detailed investor citizenship programs. In order to examine whether the economic utility of the investment to the state can suffice to override some or all other criteria for naturalization, we will explore legal and normative dimensions of the notion of “genuine ties” questioning whether preferential treatment of investors can be justified in the context of merit-based naturalization. In the second part of the lecture, the focus will be on classifying investment-based citizenship and residence programs in all the 28 European Union (EU) Member States, and on discussing the implications of investor citizenship and residence programs on the notion of EU citizenship. Starting from a brief theoretical examination of membership in national and supranational polities, we will then compare how different countries regulate access to membership on grounds of wealth.