Selling Passports for Development in the Age of Climate Change: Local manifestations of colonial continuities.

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 24. Structures of citizenship

Abstract

Citizenship by Investment (CBI) allows foreign nationals to pay x number of dollars for all the benefits of citizenship without the duties and obligations. In the last 15 years, the Commonwealth of Dominica, an island state in the Caribbean, has come to rely heavily on its CBI program -- or what critical scholars call a commodified citizenship program -- for influxes of cash to bolster post-hurricane aid as opposed to its original intent to support economic diversification through changes in the agricultural sector, small-scale manufacturing, or export-oriented industry. Within the context of increasing numbers and intensity of hurricanes and tropical cyclones in the region, this paper seeks to provide a pathway for a more historically grounded, ecological, and socio-political understanding of citizenship commodification programs, specifically, CBI. I assert that the move to commodified citizenship was not intended to become a permanent or structural fix for economic diversity, although it now accepted as an established element of Caribbean SIDS economies today. And yet, properly understood, CBI is part of a longer colonial history that speaks to disposability and a tradition of offshoring of wealth amongst the elites. It is extractive, parasitic, and those who benefit are the wealthy who can take advantage of this system, the firms profiting from the developing countries pressured to “develop” and diversify their economies by any means necessary by global institutions like IMF and World Bank, and the small cadre of local elite who themselves are a product of longer projects of coloniality.

Author

• Marilyn Grell-Brisk, Pitzer College