Citizenship: What Money Can Buy

• In Event: 4366 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Citizenship and Migration

Abstract

Global wealth is increasingly concentrated within the hands of a small elite. While the North Atlantic continues to produce the most millionaire and billionaires, the past thirty years have seen a marked growth in nouveaux riches in low- to middle-income countries. If a privileged set, its members still possess citizenships that guarantee fewer rights and travel benefits than those of their counterparts in the West. This mix has propelled an expansion in citizenship by investment programs, which grant around 10,000 new passports annually to individuals who donate substantial funds to or invest heavily in the granting country. If minor in absolute terms, the phenomenon nonetheless raises several issues at the core of global inequality today. Drawing on over three years of fieldwork, this paper explores how elites from outside the global core pay to circumnavigate the borders that block the mobility of others. Capital, as is often observed, is far more mobile than people. The cases examined here illustrate a twist: individuals attached to capital can ride it to new destinations. Facilitating this mobility is an industry of service providers that convert economic capital into political resources for those who can afford it. The process both hinges on and feeds into a dual structure of inequality – one connecting inter-country differences in the packages citizenship offers to intra-country differences in wealth accumulation.

Author

• Kristin Surak, SOAS, University of London