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Commercializing Citizenship in Crisis EU: The Case of Immigrant Investor Programmes
Author(s) -
Parker Owen
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
jcms: journal of common market studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.54
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1468-5965
pISSN - 0021-9886
DOI - 10.1111/jcms.12462
Subject(s) - citizenship , commercialization , attractiveness , context (archaeology) , residence , political science , immigration , politics , european commission , investment (military) , political economy , european union , business , sociology , economics , law , economic policy , demographic economics , psychology , paleontology , psychoanalysis , biology
Immigrant investor programmes (IIPs) – aimed at attracting investment in return for residency or citizenship for wealthy foreigners – have proliferated in EU Member States in recent years. Such schemes constitute part of a much broader commercialization of citizenship, which has intensified during the crisis. They have been particularly controversial in the EU because they rely for their attractiveness in part on the reality of EU citizenship and the rights of mobility and residence that it entails. The European Commission, among others, has presented them as threat to national citizenship and yet the EU at once champions a ‘post‐national’ citizenship and is arguably culpable in the very commercialization of citizenship of which investor schemes are a stark manifestation. This paper unpacks the tensions in the theory and politics of investor migration in the recent EU context, arguing that they reveal what is termed a ‘quadrilemma’ at the heart of a multi‐level citizenship.