Countries are competing ever more fervently to attract the best and brightest, whether highly skilled migrant workers, students with potential, or athletes and others boasting exceptional talent. It should therefore come as little surprise that they should vie with each other to lure in the wealthy as well. Indeed, the past thirty years have seen a rapid rise around the world in legislation that enables people to acquire citizenship or residence rights in exchange for a donation or an investment. This work is the draft introductory chapter of the collection entitled Citizenship and Residence Sales: Rethinking the Boundaries of Belonging, which the authors edited for Cambridge University Press. The aim of this text is to introduce the phenomenon of investment migration and position it vis-à-vis the key trends in the literature on this emerging field in order to provide solid ground for the twenty chapters by the leading scholars and practitioners from a handful of disciplines, which follow this introduction in the Cambridge collection. In the process the authors demonstrate that investment migration frequently has nothing to do with immigration or change of residence; that the phenomenon is rooted in the global rights and duties assignment today, where blood-based passport apartheid is the main principle behind the inequitable self-preservation of the global aristocracy of ‘super citizens’, as well as the nature of the notion of national sovereignty coupled with the nationalist streetlight effect of the huge share of the commentaries, inter alia. As is demonstrated in this chapter and throughout the book, investment migration teaches the authors a lot about the tensions at the core of citizenship and residence regulation in contemporary world. The volume the authors edited aims to establish a solid grounding for a serious conversation on the sale of citizenships and residence and its implications in the contemporary world.

Introduction of the book is available here.

About the Speaker:

Professor Dimitry Kochenov (LEGS ’02) leads the Rule of Law Workgroup at CEU Democracy Institute and teaches at the Department of Legal Studies. This year he has been awarded a EUR 1M grant from Stiftung Mercator to establish Clinical Rule of Law work in Budapest, which is his main on-going project. Prof. Kochenov’s research focuses on the principles of law in the global context, with a special emphasis on the Rule of Law, citizenship, and the enforcement of EU values. Outside of CEU Dimitry is Associate of the EU Programme at Princeton University in New Jersey and Visiting Professor at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome (Faculty of Law).