In this chapter, I explore of the question of why the wealthy migrate internationally. To do so, I showcase data underpinning trends which indicated that migration is actually part of investment migration and link it to broader trends in international migration.

Starting in the Middle Ages, this chapter demonstrates that investment migration is hardly new. It looks at the micropolitics of citizenship acquisition through monetary grants in a rage of cases across Europe. Indeed, it was the most popular lawful way to acquire the citizenship of mediaeval cities outside of marriage.

This chapter explores the strongest legal and ethical arguments in favor of, as well as against, facilitating the purchase-and-sale of golden visas and golden passports. In part one, I put forward three major arguments in defense of citizenship-for-sale transactions: taming nationality; endorsing a “commodify everything” approach; and increasing government revenue. Part two advances three lines of critique against selling membership to those with massive billfolds, without requiring them to establish any tangible connection to the new home country. Part three turns from the normative to the positive, examining which justifications and rationales have resonated best with policymakers tasked with reviewing and potentially taming, or altogether revoking, such programs: security and identity fraud; tax evasion; and a preference for real and effective links (or what I have elsewhere called “jus nexi”) over the hollow form-over-substance grant of citizenship facilitated by these programs.

A substantial industry has pushed forward the market for multiple citizenships. Drawing on extensive empirical research, this chapter investigates investment migration programs in practice by analyzing their constitution and evolution within a global market. This chapter identifies the underlying dynamics of supply and demand, rethinking the literature on citizenship in three areas: inter-country differences in citizenship’s benefits, privileged access for elites, and the decisive influence of third-party actors on citizenship policy. Within this theoretical landscape, the empirical analysis unpacks how these programs emerged within a broader field constituted by immigrant investor visas and discretionary economic citizenship. It reveals how this field conditioned the development and spread of formal programs, and the roles of geopolitical inequalities, industry actors, and extraterritorial rights in this change. The conclusion shows how incorporating jus pecuniae into our understanding of citizenship revises conventional assumptions in two domains: inequality and third-party actors.

The Maltese 2014 citizenship by investment program (CIP) was considered by both politicians and scholars equivalent to ‘selling’ the core status of the European Union (EU), and therefore was received with strong criticism: ‘Programs corrupt democracy’, ‘they undermine citizenship’, and ‘CIPs increase global inequality’ are some of the critiques that the several articles published on the topic have raised. However, despite the attention obtained in the academia, no method has been suggested yet to assess the legitimacy of this kind of programs that currently exist all over the world. The purpose of this chapter is to fill this gap by suggesting some methods to assess the legitimacy of CIPs. The starting point will be a distinction between the common meanings of the term ‘legitimacy’. The aim is to set the scene for a more in-depth debate as well as to prove that actors participating in the current discussion may be running the risk of talking past each other. This chapter presents a way to reduce this risk by arguing for applying the methods assessing legitimacy as tantamount to lawfulness.