Smelling like a Market: Investment Migration, Cunning States, and the Coloniality of Citizenship in the Caribbean

• In Event: Mobility Regimes in the World-System

Abstract

The administrative decolonization of Asia, Africa and parts of the Caribbean in the decades following World War II has given rise to a range of disconnected and unequal citizenships in discrete polities. While the citizenships of former colonial powers guaranteed access to higher incomes, security, infrastructure, and welfare systems, as well as a high degree of international mobility, citizenships of newly independent states scored much lower on all these counts. As the rights accruing from citizenships of wealthy states increasingly became a scarce good on a global capitalist market with highly unequal negotiating positions, an emergent industry self-designating as “citizenship by investment” (CBI) resorted to the commodification of scarce citizenship rights. By turning an often inheritable status otherwise ascribed at birth into a commodity for sale on a global market, the CBI industry targets wealthy investors from peripheral countries in search for economic opportunities and global mobility. The industry now comprises dozens of consolidators who compile passport rankings and facilitate the acquisition of desirable passports from states that have launched CBI programs, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. The paper expands the concept of migration industry by focusing on how the five former British colonies in the Caribbean that currently have CBI programs – Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts, and St. Lucia – have turned their former colonial citizenships into bargaining currency in an unequal worldwide distribution of goods and rights, among which mobility rights necessary to legally migrate to better economic prospects rank very high.

Author

• Manuela Boatca, Freiburg University