Commercialising Citizenship in Crisis EU: The case of Immigrant Investor Programmes

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 commercialisation of citizenship, which has intensified during the crisis. They have been particularly controversial in the EU context because they rely for their attractiveness in large 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 commercialisation 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.