‘Our citizenship is being prostituted’: The everyday geographies of economic citizenship regimes

Abstract

There is much interest in economic citizenship schemes, yet little attention has been paid to the quotidian impacts of such schemes on local communities, environments and notions of citizenship. This paper responds to this lacuna by reviewing the existing literature on economic citizenship and considering what an ‘everyday geographical’ lens would add to existing theorisations. ‘Everyday geographies’ are integral to thinking about how economic citizenship regimes shape local economies, societies and environs, providing insights into the ways in which the lives of ‘ordinary citizens’ intersect with flows of capital, the growth of an (im)mobile super-rich and shifts in migration management.

Keywords

economic citizenship migration everyday citizenship super-rich small states Caribbean

I Introduction

Economic citizenship regimes – including Citizenship by Investment (CBI) schemes (also referred to as ‘Golden Passports’ and ‘Immigrant Investor Programmes’) – have existed for decades as part of a variegated landscape of preferential citizenship policies. State and investor interest in these schemes grew in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis and has accelerated due to the Covid-19 pandemic as wealthy individuals seek security at a time of global unpredictability, and vulnerable nation-states look for pathways towards greater economic resilience. In simple terms, these programmes attract high-worth individuals who, in return for financial investment, benefit from preferential tax arrangements, rights to residence, an exit strategy, and enhanced global mobility – often provided without the same obligations demanded of ‘ordinary’ citizens (Adim, 2017; Balta and Altan-Olcay, 2016; Carvalho, 2014; Christians, 2017; Cooley and Sharman, 2017; Cooley et al., 2018; Harpaz and Mateos, 2018; Mavelli, 2018; Van Fossen, 2007; Xu et al., 2015).

The proliferation of CBI schemes highlights a number of juxtapositions for the everyday geographies of citizenship and belonging. These schemes are encountered within a context of increasingly nationalistic political rhetoric and nativist narrations of national identity (Hammett and Jackson, 2021) that often emphasise historical, ethnic, linguistic and other markers of citizenship in exclusionary ways. The introduction of CBI schemes to facilitate selective mobility for high net-worth individuals thus is juxtaposed against states’ enactments of increasingly hostile immigration policies, surveillance techniques and enforcement practices (Blachnicka-Ciacek et al., 2021; Ehrkamp, 2017, 2019; Mountz, 2011). Differentiated levels of personal mobility result, with the prime beneficiaries being those with (the means to acquire) passports with high mobility values. The simultaneous growth in numbers of super-rich and ultra-high-net-worth individuals intersects with these dynamics – for these individuals, CBI schemes offer a (literal) passport to (continued) success, prosperity and mobility.

The growing body of work on privileged migration has explored, amongst others, lifestyle migration from Global North to South (Benson, 2013; Scuzzarello, 2020), the global political economy of expatriates (Cranston, 2017; Kunz, 2020) and highly skilled professionals (Fechter and Walsh, 2010; Jöns et al., 2015). These literature demonstrate how privileged migration is articulated through ongoing (post)colonialities, the racialised and gendered hierarchies of such mobilities, the privileging and remaking of whiteness and the reproduction of global inequalities (Fechter, 2010; Kothari, 2006). Within this broader field, attention to investment migration has been dominated by the fields of international relations, law and political sciences, where work has been premised on normative conceptualisations of citizenship as rights and duties, focussing on the development of economic citizenship policies, the macro-economic impacts of schemes, and the implications of such schemes for supranational citizenship arrangements – often focused on the European Union (Džankić, 2012; Parker, 2017; Xu et al., 2015).

Whilst the study of citizenship is inherently interdisciplinary, geographical attention has helped to move conceptualisations of citizenship beyond rights, duties and obligations, to conceive of citizenship ‘as a set of processual, performative and everyday relations between spaces, objects, citizens and non-citizens’ (Lewis, 2004:3). In particular, attention has been drawn to the importance of exploring the quotidian, informal and mundane to understand the everyday lived nature of citizenship (Askins, 2016). Despite this, there has been little interest in the quotidian impacts of economic citizenship schemes on local communities, environments and economies or on how they shape ordinary citizens’ engagements with notions of citizenship and belonging (Ramtohul, 2016). The lack of popular and political discussion on CBI schemes in Western Europe (with the exception of investigative journalism into the murder of the Maltese anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and ‘golden passports’) chimes with Joppke’s (2019:866) observation that, ‘These schemes and their beneficiaries are practically “invisible to the existing citizenry”’. However, as Ley (1995, 2010) notes the presence of investor and business immigrants can be vividly apparent – as seen in the building of, and (racialised) responses to, ‘monster houses’ by business immigrants from East Asia in Vancouver (Ley, 1995; Ley and Murphy, 2001; on the broader question of the simultaneous presence and absence of the (super)rich on urban and rural spaces see (Atkinson, 2016; Atkinson et al., 2017; Hay and Muller, 2013; Pow, 2011).

In many contexts, however, the outcomes of these schemes are having an impact on the quotidian lives of ordinary citizens. In small island states in particular, CBI schemes are no longer ‘invisible’ but are having profound effects upon local society, environments, housing markets, landscapes and identity. Bringing a geographical perspective to bear on economic citizenship regimes through the lens of everyday geographies of citizenship, allows for the articulation of the relational, embodied and quotidian nature of economic citizenship regimes, encouraging a much deeper, nuanced understandings of such schemes, extending conceptualisations of economic citizenship and the reach and application of theories of everyday citizenship.

Using theoretical approaches drawn from the literature on the geographies of everyday citizenship and publicly available material from concerned individuals of passport selling countries, this paper challenges the erasure of the ordinary citizen from the discourses around Citizenship by Investment and develops a future research agenda that places the ordinary citizen at the centre of our understanding of such schemes – allowing us to consider the ways in which CBI schemes impact, in myriad ways, identity, mobility, access and political acts and challenges. In so doing, we do not conceive of the already existing or ‘ordinary’ citizen as a-political or non-engaged (Neveu, 2015) nor as average or routine but aim to recognise and think though ‘the ways in which citizenship is simultaneously constituted through encounters with law and everyday life’ (Staeheli et al., 2012:630). Neither do we understand the citizenry as homogenous: responses to and experiences of the everyday outcomes of CBI schemes will be inherently informed by intersectional positionalities encompassing class, gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability, race and other identities. It is this complex mosaic of encounters and responses which, we argue, remains unexplored and overlooked.

The paper begins with three short vignettes articulating some of the concerns of ‘ordinary’ citizens about CBI schemes. These vignettes detail concerns about (im)mobility, job insecurity, belonging, access to public space, environmental destruction and the meaning of citizenship – this is the stuff of the everyday. A review of the development of CBI schemes follows, demonstrating the lack of engagement with the everyday geographies of such regimes, contrasting with the vignettes presented in the first section. It is this contrast that the paper is interested in and the second half of the paper addresses this erasure, by using everyday geographies as an analytical lens for thinking about investor citizenship. This helps develop a research agenda centred around the ways in which CBI schemes may shape citizenship across three key domains: status, practices and feelings (Osler and Starkey, 2005). The paper concludes that an approach founded on everyday geographies foregrounds the lived realities of these schemes for ordinary citizens and is integral to a wider understanding of the impact of such schemes on local economic, social, political, cultural and environmental conditions, providing insights into the ways in which the lives of ordinary citizens intersect with global flows of capital, the growth of an (im)mobile super-rich and shifts in migration governance.

1 Citizenship by investment: Whither the everyday?

This section revolves around three vignettes drawn from the opinion pages of two newspapers from the Caribbean tri-island state of Grenada – Now Grenada and The New Today. Following earlier controversies, Grenada re-developed its CBI programme and passed the ‘Grenada Citizenship by Investment, 2013’ Act in August 2013. Highly rated amongst similar schemes for its relative affordability and simple application process, investors pay into either the national transformation fund or into an approved real estate project in return for securing Grenadian citizenship and passport. In 2018, the Government of Granada issued 851 passports to CBI investors in return for investments totalling EC$147 million (US$54 million) (Government of Grenada, 2020), reflecting a continued upward trend in applications, approvals and investment each year since 2014 (Investment Immigration Insider, undated). Written by members of civil society and the public, the following short commentaries provide moments of insight into community concerns about the country’s CBI programme and the impacts of this scheme on everyday lives.

“The economic citizenship programme has brought our country and the region into disrepute given the disproportionate number of crooks and conmen that the programme has attracted and made travel more difficult and expensive for the ordinary citizen, for example, the imposition of visa requirements to Canada now required of citizens of Grenada and Antigua and Barbuda and the warnings received from other countries to which we have travelled hassle-free… What does OUR citizenship and passport mean to each of us citizens whose ‘nable [navel] string bury here?’ Will we allow our government and its marketing agents to continue to DESECRATE our citizenship and passport? STAND UP FOR GRENADA! GRENADA DESERVES BETTER!!” (Sandra. C.A. Ferguson, 16 August 2017, Now Grenada)

As Sandra Ferguson, the author of this first vignette highlights, the impacts of economic citizenship schemes on ordinary citizens can be multiple. Not only does she highlight the changing mobility value of the Grenadian passport, but also the potential damage done to the values, perceptions and meanings associated with the passport itself. The tarnishing of the passport by association with the Grenadian CBI scheme, as Ferguson articulates, has potentially very real effects for ‘ordinary’ Grenadian citizens who find their ability to travel overseas – including for work – either restricted or more bureaucratic and costly.

The implications extend beyond changes to personal mobility, to the feelings and emotions associated with citizenship. In her commentary Ferguson (2017) also quotes Ralph Gonsalves, the Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines:

‘So a passport is something of great value to our citizens. It facilitates them going places to get jobs, and when they line up before the immigration, people know that this is a passport which is not sold. You carry it with dignity and pride’.

By juxtaposing the disrepute associated with economic citizenship schemes to the feelings of dignity and pride articulated by Ralph Gonsalves, Ferguson not only challenges the reader to think about what citizenship means to them, but also what it should mean, and how this meaning may change as the lived realities of economic citizenship schemes become apparent in daily life. The potential implications for CBI schemes to profoundly affect a sense of belonging – or feeling of citizenship – is further explored in our next vignette, Valerie Thompson’s commentary:

“Grenadians, we must follow what is happening with the CBI program…Has anyone realised that Grenada is being prostituted on the international market? Grenada is being sold out and we are going cheap, cheap, cheap! Our citizenship is being prostituted and if any of these new citizens come here, we are then raped of our patrimony… We are being screwed especially by those whom we hired and they have failed miserably. We must restore the tarnished reputation of our country. What used to be our pride and joy, ‘Grenada – Isle of Spice’ is now a Pure Pimp’s Paradise!” (Valerie Thompson, 2021, 8 May 2021, The New Today)

Invoking powerful language of Grenadian citizenship as being ‘prostituted’, ‘raped’ and ‘tarnished’, Thompson’s intervention highlights the potential for the emergence of a popular, exclusionary citizenship turn in response to the inequities and threats – real and/or perceived – posed by CBI. Mobilising her argument Thompson invokes the differing origins of citizenship as status – between hereditary citizenship (jus sanguinis), juxtaposed against the jus pecuniae of the CBI programme. These differences, Thompson suggests, are a cause of tension between genuine Grenadians and the ‘pimps’ (investors) whose practices (as investor citizens) are bringing the island into disrepute. The call for greater popular awareness of and opposition to the CBI program is a call for a change in practices of citizenship – for ordinary citizens to adopt more activist forms of citizenship and a more politicised disposition. The language used in making such arguments potentially reifies discourses, emotions and practices of citizenship that are founded on nativist paradigms and a particular vision of who does (and does not) belong. Crucially, it is then not only CBI schemes themselves that are reshaping meanings of citizenship, but the responses to such schemes.

The potential for such responses is heightened in situations where CBI-funded real estate development and land or property acquisition exclude – physically, viscerally, emotionally and symbolically – ordinary citizens from natural and built environments, as articulated in our final vignette by Friends of the Earth-Grenada. In their commentary the group reference a proposed tourism development at Levera wetlands,¹ which is to be funded through Grenada’s CBI scheme. They articulate how the unpredictable and uneven nature of Citizenship by Investment as a funding stream is shaping the development to date:

“Why are huge swathes of land being cleared for this project when it is clear that the CBI programme has not yet found all the money required for its construction? This is obvious since the call for investors is continuing…” (Friends of the Earth-Grenada, 2020, 13 September 2020, Now Grenada)

This points to concerns about a lack of planning associated with CBI-related developments, and questions over the final outcome of any such developments. The article continues:

“In defence of the proposed project [associated with the Levera Wetlands], Minister Moses hinted at the creation of 1,000 jobs in the local communities to service rooms and to keep guests happy, which would avoid the long journeys into St George for work and the culminating economic drain for those employees. Of course, employment is always a major issue in rural communities in Grenada but are we sure that those communities are willing to sacrifice this valuable ecosystem for the possibility of low paid work which might ultimately not be forthcoming if the demise of the previous proposed developments is anything to go by?” (Friends of the Earth-Grenada, 14th September 2020, Now Grenada)

Here, Friends of the Earth-Grenada articulate their concerns relating to the enclosure of previously public natural landscapes by private developers in return for the promise of future employment opportunities. They also suggest that there is an uncertainty associated with such promises and referring to the ‘demise of the previous proposed developments’ that the destruction of such natural landscapes related to CBI schemes does not necessarily guarantee the anticipated (and promised) outcomes. This hints at diverging priorities between citizens and the state and a growing sense of exclusion amongst ordinary citizens (in this instance, from natural landscapes, but elsewhere linked to affordable housing and other resources). These feelings of exclusion and disenfranchisement threaten an erosion of the reciprocal relations of citizenship between state and citizens (see Hammett, 2008). Should already-existing communities come to feel marginalised from (citizenship) rights or feel that these rights are being provided to others who are freed from concomitant obligations, this may result in growing hostility towards both those perceived as benefiting and the political institutions providing these benefits. Layered on to this, ordinary citizens may increasingly question and/or reject the behaviours, practices and dispositions of ‘good’ citizens by withdrawing from expected actions of citizenship, mobilising to (re)claim rights or challenge the (preferential) providing of rights to others via acts of citizenship, or engaging in more hidden, everyday moments of resistance and dissent (Griffiths, 2021; Hammett, 2008; Isin, 2008; Lemanski, 2020; Scott, 2008).

For the authors of these commentaries, CBI schemes have potentially far-reaching impacts on the everyday lives of ‘ordinary’ citizens and have profound potential to change ordinary citizens’ everyday encounters with citizenship, not only as status but also as emotions, as practices, as (im)mobility, as habitus, and as identity (Isin, 2008; Osler and Starkey, 2005). These dynamics are crucial to contemporary citizenship practices and tensions, not least should tensions fester between those seen as bringing the passport into disrepute (CBI investors) and ‘us citizens’ who are identified as those whose ‘nable [navel] string bury here’. This articulates the need for a more critical (perhaps activist) research engagement with the impacts of CBI schemes on ordinary citizens and their everyday lives – be this in relation to exclusions from global mobility regimes, from previously public spaces and landscapes, or in altering the sense of belonging and meanings of citizenship. This paper makes a case for developing a research agenda on economic citizenship that centres the lived experiences of ordinary citizens, a perspective greatly neglected by literature produced to date. The paper will continue by providing a review of this literature, before moving on to develop a research agenda for the everyday geographies of investor citizenship.

2 ‘Citizenship lite’: Theorising economic citizenship regimes

Since the 1980s, the institution of citizenship has undergone significant conceptual and operational changes due to declining demands for exclusive allegiance to a state and growing awareness of multiple scales of citizenship (Džankić, 2018; Harpaz and Mateos, 2018; Parker, 2017). However, while we witness the de-nationalising of citizenship in some contexts (for instance, through membership of supranational bodies), we are also seeing the re-nationalising of citizenship through citizenship tests and a return to nativist politics in many countries (Joppke, 2018). Uneven migration and citizenship regimes have thus emerged, with citizenship studies scholarship engaged with this exclusionary turn by focussing on visas as pre-emptive mobility governance (Mau et al., 2015), the clandestine practices of migrants’ lives (Howes and Hammett, 2016), ‘insurgent’ citizenship practices among migrants (Barbero, 2012; Isin, 2009), and detention regimes (Loyd et al., 2016; Mountz et al., 2013).

Juxtaposed to these increasingly exclusionary citizenship regimes, many states are adopting an instrumental approach to citizenship as an entity to be commodified. Such endeavours, which include CBI schemes, are understood as strategic responses to the processes of globalisation of the individual and their mobile capital (Cooley and Sharman, 2017) and as manifestations of the intrusion of the market into the political sphere (Grell-Brisk, 2018; Mavelli, 2018; Shachar, 2018a). The resultant creation of jus pecuniae not only raises ethical questions about whether citizenship is something that can and should be monetised (Azzopardi, 2018; Grell-Brisk, 2018; Mavelli, 2018; Shachar, 2018a) but poses new challenges to geographical understandings of citizenship.

Selective immigration schemes have long been used by entrepreneurial states to attract high net-worth individuals, justified as providing vital contributions to national economic development and diversification (Brøndsted Sejersen, 2008; Mavelli, 2018; Parker, 2017). The potential of such schemes was apparent in Canada’s expansion of its Business Immigration Programme in the 1980s and 1990s as a part of national population policy efforts to address declining population growth rates (Ley and Hibbert, 2001) and to attract (particularly East Asian) investors to stimulate national economic growth (Ley, 2003). The impacts of globalisation – including reductions in travel costs and increased ease of (personal and financial) mobility – were understood as creating a ‘space of flows’ that facilitated the emergence of a new transnational class (Ley, 2004). This transnational class, defined by hypermobility, strategic citizenship choices, and access to transnational capital were dubbed as homo economicus – a class of deterritorialised people operating in a ‘borderless world’ (Ley, 2003, 2004; Ley and Waters, 2004; Ong, 1999). However, unlike the policies discussed below, the investors in these programmes were required to relocate both their families and commercial activities (Ley, 2003). These processes resulted in specific forms of grounding and territorialisation on local scales, including the emergence of enclave economies and real estate price booms (Ley and Tutchener, 2001), as well as the phenomena of ‘astronaut families’ and ‘satellite kids’ (Ley, 2004).

Positioned as important mechanisms for supporting national development and economic growth, evidence from Canada and other contexts suggests that the realisation of expected benefits (for states and individuals) from such schemes is far from guaranteed (Ley, 2003; Ley and Water, 2004). Despite such evidence, a surge in immigrant investor programmes in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis was part of a series of economic strategies that (often small) states utilise to sustain themselves (Azzopardi, 2018; Cooley et al., 2018; Džankic, 2018; Gamlen et al., 2019; Shachar and Hirschl, 2014; Tanasoca, 2016; Triadafilopoulos, 2013). The rise of such schemes is also connected to an increase in ultra-wealthy citizens in countries that have traditionally been considered outside of the ‘global core’, where particular sets of circumstances have created combinations of substantial wealth with global immobility (Christians, 2017; Surak, 2016). Thus, high proportions of citizenship investors originate in countries beset by political uncertainty and limited global passport mobility (Surak, 2016, 2021). Responding to these pressures, the demand for economic citizenship schemes from (ultra)high net-worth individuals is driven by the possibilities of enhanced present and future mobility, increased economic opportunities, including business and tax incentives, as well as providing insurance against geopolitical insecurities (Surak, 2021, 2022).

Critics argue however that CBI schemes are contributing to a move away from ‘the traditional framing of citizenship as an immutable sacred emblem of national identity and territorial rootedness’ (Harpaz and Mateos, 2018:2) and the rise of strategic approaches to thin citizenship(s) which reduce the importance of collective identity, shared beliefs and equal obligations and risks (Adim, 2017; Bauböck, 2019; Harpaz and Mateos, 2018; Joppke, 2018; Pogonyi, 2018). This instrumentalisation occurs as investors gain the status of citizen through a financial transaction, freed from requirements for meeting residency, language and other conditionalities. Consequently, critics argue, an investor has no vested interest in the long-term health of the state or the body politic: they are not dependent upon the state for social service, for care in their old age or the provision of education to their children. The investor remains footloose, benefitting from the enhanced mobility afforded by their new passport and enjoying the economic benefits of preferential tax arrangements but without the long-term (emotional) connection and dependence upon the state. These arrangements lead to inauthentic citizenship and a hollowing out of both the concept and civic aspects of citizenship (Bauböck, 2009; Shachar, 2018a, 2018b; Shachar and Hirschl, 2014; Spiro, 2014, 2018). For Bauböck (2019), these conditions produce what he terms ‘citizenship lite’, a citizenship no longer intertwined with rights, duties, identity or the need for political engagement. Underpinning these concerns are fundamental questions relating to the meanings, conceptualisations and experiences of citizenship and – ultimately – the extent to which selling passports and citizenship alters both social dynamics and the feelings and practices of belonging (Shachar and Hirschl, 2014).

This instrumentalisation of citizenship also reflects shifts in migration governance, with states placing emphasis on strategically managing selective migration schemes for national gain (Adamson and Tsourapas, 2020; Faist, 2008; Surak, 2022). While such practices have a long history, the rapid expansion of economic citizenship schemes reflects a broader governance shift towards managing, harnessing and leveraging population mobility, leading Adamson and Tsourapas (2020) to propose the idea of the neoliberal migration state. This, they argue, captures the ways in which states commodify migration (typically emigration) and monetise migration flows at the expense of the rights more normally associated with citizenship.

Historical precedence for the contemporary neoliberal migration state approach can be seen in various contexts. In colonial- and apartheid-era South Africa, influx control legislation, bilateral and regional agreements, and separate development policies which treated Africans as temporary sojourners rather than citizens were used to supply temporary and circulatory migrant labour to the mining industry (Seidman, 1999; Wilson, 1972). These policies were designed to promote national economic growth and suppress wages, while denying migrant labourers the rights and status of citizens and externalising the reproductive costs of the labour force. In West Germany, the guest worker or gastarbeiter immigration system which operated from the 1950s to the early 1970s provided foreign workers with residence and work permits but without any recourse to citizenship (Bhagwati et al., 1984). Though the use of geographical, temporal and other restrictions applied to these permits, the West German state facilitated private-sector recruitment of labour abroad (at a time of near full-employment) to support national economic growth without longer-term welfare and other commitments that would be anticipated were these workers provided with the status (and rights) of citizens.

This emphasis on managing migratory flows articulates the extra-territoriality of the nation-state, demonstrating both the desire of the state to exert influence outside of territorial borders and the impacts that this extra-territoriality has on the (material) environment of the homeland (Ashutosh, 2020; Dickinson, 2017; Gamlen, 2019; Ho and McConnell, 2019; McGregor, 2014). More recent economic citizenship schemes provide the state with additional ways to harness the economic potential offered by investor citizens whose lives are played out predominantly outside of its territorial borders to shape its development through financial investments into a national development fund or other site of transformation. This newer form of neoliberal migration management sits alongside earlier practices to articulate another logic of exchange in which the possibility of enhanced mobility (of the person and their economic assets) is exchanged in return for capital investment irrespective of the territorial location of the individual.

Economic citizenship regimes thereby contribute to the creation of a hierarchy of citizenships based upon relative value and mobility, exacerbating socio-economic inequalities at national and global scales as individuals advance their life chances by securing a ‘stronger’ citizenship (Bauböck, 2019; Boatcă and Roth, 2016; Brøndsted Sejersen, 2008; Castles, 2007; Harpaz, 2018; Harpaz and Mateos, 2018; Shachar, 2018a; Spiro, 2018). Whilst it can be argued that economic citizenship can be operationalised as a way of circumventing the genealogical hierarchies of citizenship, CBI schemes are part of the commodification and instrumentalisation of citizenship that further exacerbates inequalities within a wider environment of globally restrictive and hostile immigration governance (Bauböck, 2019; Boatcă and Roth 2016; Surak, 2021, 2022). These processes reproduce citizenship as an arena in which wealth can be both an enabler and barrier to citizenship (Shachar, 2021), further entrenching global inequalities and disconnecting citizenship from the social aspects more normatively intertwined with citizenship. The emergent concern is that these developments undermine the fundamental practices associated with citizens-as-stakeholders and the underpinning solidarity of the body politic. CBI schemes not only challenge accepted meanings of citizenship and reproduce global hierarchies of citizenship, they are also driven by these self-same inequalities and growth in the ultra-wealthy.

Recent attention to the entwining of state and market forces to selectively open up citizenship to (ultra)wealthy investors has acknowledged these practices as continuations of historical evolutions of citizenship but has been restricted to abstract discussion of the potential of CBI schemes to taint the idea of citizenship (Brøndsted Sejersen, 2008; Shachar, 2018; Shachar and Hirschl, 2014). Whilst the advent of CBI schemes may shift our understanding of the migration-development nexus, and citizenship as part of that linkage, there has been little analysis of the actual development impact of CBI schemes on participating countries, on their wider societies and ‘ordinary’ citizens. We now offer a research agenda for examining CBI schemes and the everyday geographies of citizenship to address this lacuna.

II The everyday geographies of economic citizenship regimes

Whilst literature on economic citizenship regimes has been dominated by a focus on citizenship as rights and duties, the vignettes presented earlier in this paper articulate more quotidian concerns about such schemes. Recent scholarship has developed citizenship theory beyond rights and duties, emphasising the emotional aspects of citizenship (Jackson, 2016) as well as the varied practices through which (non)citizens claim both rights and the right to claim rights (Isin, 2012; Nagel and Staeheli, 2016). These understandings recognise citizenship as agentic and interactive, accepting that citizenship exists at multiple scales beyond the nation-state, often linked to cosmopolitanism and notions of ‘global’ and ‘flexible’ citizenship (Appiah, 2010; Ong, 1999). These trends have challenged traditional understandings of national cohesion and identity, leading to greater diversity of post-exclusive forms of dual citizenship which have contributed to the diversification of societies, multiple and fluid membership rights and citizenship constellations, as well as backlashes against these (Boatcă and Roth, 2016; Brøndsted Sejersen, 2008; Castles, 2007; Harpaz and Mateos, 2018; Joppke, 2018; Knott, 2018).

This section engages with these approaches to develop a research agenda that attends to the everyday geographies of economic citizenship. Geographers have contributed considerably to expanding debates around understandings of citizenship, with feminist geographies in particular articulating lived and everyday citizenships, emphasising the importance of thinking about citizenship experientially, as something that is enacted in real life contexts through myriad social practices (Ho, 2009). This foregrounds thinking about the ways in which peoples’ social, cultural and material circumstances may affect their experiences, and ‘how people negotiate rights, responsibilities, identities and belonging through relations with others’ (Kallio et al., 2020:1). Such thinking not only connects citizenship to everyday life and draws attention to how the political intersects with informal and domestic spaces, but also recognises not only that migration does not represent a rupture from a previous life but encompasses a broader set of temporal, emotional and material dynamics and connections (Ehrkamp, 2020). This body of work recognises everyday life as a key arena for understanding wider political and social contestations (Buttimer, 1976; Lukács, 1923; Lefebvre, 2008; Katz, 2004) as well as offering vital opportunities to explore knowledge and power (Bennett, 2011; Hume, 2004; Pink, 2004; Ronneburger, 2008). Thus, in the context of Latin American refugees and migrants to the US, Torres (2018) argues that the everyday restrictive practices of migration control embody and entrench structural exclusionary dynamics in delimiting (the rights of) citizenship. More widely, scholars have noted the importance of understanding the everyday dynamics of (precarious) citizenship in relation to a sense of (non)belonging, the adapting of everyday behaviours and strategic (in)visibilities and (in)audibilities to negotiate spaces and feelings of belonging (Ehrkamp and Nagel, 2014; Erdal et al., 2018; Howes and Hammett, 2016; Huizinga and Von Hoven, 2018). In so doing, it is possible to explore the ‘the fuzziness of belonging and its intersections with the rigidity of citizenship as legal status’ (Erdal et al., 2018:706) and consider how differing migration regimes and encounters can influence the everyday geographies of citizenship for both migrants and already-existing citizens. In engaging with this literature we identify three key areas of importance: status, practices and feelings (Osler and Starkey, 2005), to which we will now turn.

1 Citizenship as status

We start by considering the status of being a citizen, with attention often directed to the legal definition of belonging and associated relationship between the individual and the state. This relationship is assumed to be reciprocal: the citizen completing the expected actions of citizenship – paying taxes and contributing to the economy, undertaking required military or jury service, etc. (Isin, 2008) – in return for which the state provides guarantees of security, justice, education, and other services (Osler and Starkey, 2005).

The status of citizenship is not, however, static – it is an ongoing site of struggle and contestation over the realisation and extension of civil, political and social rights, as well as the boundary making processes of who does/not belong (Osler and Starkey, 2005). Citizenship as status can thus be unsettled and reshaped by the introduction of new forms and legalities of citizenship: from the potential to strip individuals of citizenship (Fargues, 2017) to the processes through which citizenship can be acquired. These dynamics point us towards a relational approach to the geographies of citizenship, which focuses increased attention on deterritorialised mobilities and the potential for these to reshape social and institutional worlds (Spinney et al., 2015; Urry, 2000). In the first two vignettes presented the authors question their relationships with the state and the role of CBI schemes in altering their perceptions of and levels of trust in the state. This leads to questions of how cross-border flows and ‘long-distance’ citizenships shape citizenship formation for both investors and ordinary citizens living within the territorial borders of the nation-state. Put more simply, how do economic citizenship schemes challenge existing thinking on citizenship as status?

Extensive debates have already begun to explore investor citizenship schemes as forms of strategic, instrumental or thin citizenship (e.g. Joppke, 2018), speaking to questions relating to the changing dynamics in the assumed reciprocal relationship between state and citizen. To date, however, there has been limited empirical engagement with the everyday manifestations of these changing dynamics and the impact of these for governments, investors or ordinary citizens. How might investor citizenship schemes change the relationship between the state and ordinary citizens? How do such schemes influence the ability of, prioritisation of and ways in which the state provides and guarantees rights and services to citizens? In what ways are such schemes influencing ordinary citizens’ engagements with and relations to the state? And more widely, how are such schemes affecting the status of a countries’ citizenship in terms of the global hierarchy of citizenships and practical manifestations of this in terms of international mobility regimes?

Inherently, these processes reflect Staeheli et al.’s (2016) concerns with the relevance of the geographies of citizenship formation outside of the nation-state and the entanglements between proximate and distant sites of citizenship. This relationality is not solely about presence but also absence – in particular of investor citizens – and the complexities and ambiguities of different groups of citizens being financially, physically, psychologically, emotionally present and/or absent in both the short- and long-term for understandings of citizenship as status.

2 The actions, practices, sites and relations of citizenship

Work on everyday citizenship accentuates the quotidian as a space through which citizenship is practiced, negotiated and formed through the intersection of formal and informal processes and uneven opportunities experienced in everyday life (Butcher, 2021; Staeheli et al., 2012; Sultana, 2020; Yuval-Davies et al., 2019; see also Citizenship Studies, 2021 special issue 26:6). For Staeheli et al. (2012) daily life is infused with citizenship – even if many of us are not aware of it – as the notion of citizenship sustains the social norms and regulations that govern our daily lives. It shapes our engagement with the law, our (im)mobility, our access to the welfare state, our employment opportunities, and our relations with the wider polity. Fear of the disciplining nature of citizenship shapes the daily lives and mundane practices of non-citizens, for example, in framing the ability or willingness to take part in dissent or access water, public infrastructure or healthcare (Darling, 2011; Lemanski, 2020; Staeheli et al., 2012; Sultana, 2020; Walters, 2004). This focus on everyday life then encourages thinking on the differentiated nature of citizenship for members of the body politic, beyond the application of a particular legal status, with the ‘practices of citizenship – the daily repetitions that are part and parcel of the relationships that construct and disrupt citizenship’ crucial for conceptualising citizenship (Staeheli, 2011:399; see also Askins, 2016; Leitner and Ehrkamp, 2006; Staeheli and Nagel, 2006).

This focus on everyday practices illuminates citizenship in multiple sites, places and scales – citizenship may be encountered, for example, through the education system or through engagement with public infrastructure such as housing or electricity provision (Osler and Starkey, 2005; Lemanski, 2020; Staeheli, 2011, 2012) often differentiating the ‘citizen’ from the ‘non-citizen’ (Darling, 2011; Staeheli, 2011; Yuval-Davies et al., 2019). For Staeheli (2011) the school represents an important site of citizenship formation (see also Osler and Starkey, 2005), an arena in which societal norms and values are reproduced and citizens are (unevenly) made. But more than this, it is an arena in which aspirational ideals of the state and nation are not only rendered visible in their promotion via the curriculum but are renegotiated and contested as they come into contact with everyday experiences, knowledges and values from outwith the classroom (Hammett and Staeheli, 2013). These moments of tension and reworking highlight not only how the dispositions of citizenship are contingent and dynamic but comprise a complex and varied landscape of citizenship practices and behaviours which reflect not only state-sanctioned ideals of (good) citizenship but everyday encounters with the non/partial/realisation of different forms of rights, expectations and obligations (see also Lemanski, 2020; Saguin, 2020).

An emphasis on the everyday practices of citizenship offers opportunities to consider how such sites and practices represent the expression of political subjectivities, spaces for transformation and contestation of dominant expectations and conceptions of citizenship. This then challenges the nature of what constitutes a site of citizenship, with Isin (2009:371) commenting ‘acts through which claims are articulated and claimants are produced create new sites of contestation, belonging, identification and struggle. These sites are different from traditional sites of citizenship contestation such as voting, social security and military obligation…’ This is highly relevant for thinking about the everyday nature of CBI schemes and leads us to ask how economic citizenship regimes might produce new, and non-traditional, sites of struggle over citizenship? Such possibilities are evident in the contestations surrounding CBI-funded hotel and real estate development, and the impacts on employment, public spaces and natural landscapes, as articulated in the vignette concerning the Levera wetlands. Geographical attention to (economic) citizenship regimes then has the potential to ask questions about the production of new (everyday) sites, spatialities and scales of belonging (and non-belonging) through which citizenship is practiced (Chouinard, 2009; Dickinson et al., 2008; Isin, 2009; Lemanski, 2020; Spinney et al., 2015; Staeheli, 2011; Staeheli et al., 2016).

Questions also emerge about how economic citizenship regimes (re)shape the practices of existing citizens. Such practices and encounters – as noted in the vignettes earlier in the paper – ask us to think about the wider spatialities of citizenship formation as not only occurring across and beyond the national borders arising from circulations of capital and people between proximate and distant sites (Staeheli, 2012), but how these encounters may fundamentally change the spatial and emotional practices of citizenship at an everyday scale. As we saw in the vignettes, CBI schemes have the potential to (re)shape the mobility of existing citizens, their employment opportunities and practices and their access to (previously) public spaces and landscapes. Questions are also raised as to how and to what extent economic citizenship regimes reshape relations between differentiated citizens within the body politic and how these relations influence individuals and the body politic more widely. Given the importance of living and engaging with others within a (national) community to everyday understandings of the status and practices of citizenship (Osler and Starkey, 2005; Staeheli et al., 2012), it is crucial to understand how economic citizenship schemes produce differing subject positions and identities within the body politic. Once this is established, it is vital to consider how these subject positions are negotiated and contested through daily life and ask questions about how these positionalities and interactions are redefining the body politic as a whole.

3 Feelings and emotions

A significant development in the move away from citizenship as an entity of the state is the inclusion of emotional and affective aspects. Geographers have been key in articulating the importance of attending to the emotional logics of citizenship, with Ho (2009:1) contending that citizenship is ‘constituted and contested through emotions’. This has included understanding citizenship through affective connections to place, the emotional economies of migration and belonging and the emotional connections between groups with differentiated citizenship status, with the affective nature of citizenship covering both feelings related to citizenship status and those that are part of the lived realities of citizenship (Howes and Hammett, 2016). Ho (2009) reflects on the intersections between the geographies of emotions and theories of citizenship, articulating the concept of ‘emotional citizenship’ to explore the emotional subjectivities of citizenship experiences and how emotions are inflected in senses of belonging, connecting emotions to socio-political structures and wider political actions (Askins, 2016; Ehrkamp and Leitner 2006; Ehrkamp, 2006; Leitner and Ehrkamp, 2006). Emotional investments are understood as key to belonging, so whilst the same rights and duties may be bestowed on all citizens by the state, feelings of belonging may reflect racialised and classed inequalities within the body politic, with these feelings shaping the quotidian experiences of being a citizen (Ehrkamp, 2006; Howes and Hammett, 2016; Jackson, 2016).

Ho (2009) divides emotional citizenship into firstly, the emotional representations associated with citizenship, for example, the discourses individuals use to make sense of citizenship – home, belonging, membership – contending that it is through these representations citizenship is given emotional agency, and secondly, the emotional subjectivities which emerge in response to citizenship governance – how people experience the world and negotiate the power dynamics of citizenship. There is also concern for the emotional components of relations between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’ communities and the transference of emotions between social groups (Ho, 2009:23; also Jackson, 2016; Leitner and Ehrkamp, 2006), demonstrating that emotions are shaped by relational social positioning and modes of citizenship are embedded in political and cultural spheres (Ahmed, 2004; Ho, 2009). This concern with emotions and in/security also extends to how migration may be felt by ‘non-migrant citizens’ often through discourses of fear and threat (Askins, 2016; Ehrkamp, 2006; Huizinga and Von Hoven, 2018). There are also significant emotional dynamics associated with changes in citizenship status, both conscious and unconscious, articulating feelings of (in)security, being cared for and belonging (Frosh, 2001; Ho, 2009; Jackson, 2016:819; Wood, 2013). Whilst perhaps most obvious are feelings of security on attaining citizenship status, citizenship struggles are perhaps inherently painful (Jackson, 2016), with the ‘Windrush scandal’ illustrating how unexpected and unjust changes to citizenship status produces anger, resentment, disbelief and (unexpected) feelings of not belonging (Gentleman, 2019; Hewitt, 2020; Wardle and Obermuller, 2020).

As witnessed in the vignettes that opened this paper, a research agenda that attends to the emotions associated with economic citizenship schemes – for example, how they shape feelings of belonging and in/security, how economic citizenship regimes may shape emotional connections to the state, the emotional relations between ‘ordinary’ and ‘investor’ citizens, and the emotional logics of citizenship governance – appears crucial to a wider understanding of the impact of such schemes.

III Conclusion

Interest in economic citizenship regimes in academic debate, policy circles and the media has increased in recent years. Debates about such schemes have spoken of the ways in which the commodification of citizenship alters fundamental normative notions of citizenship, divorcing it from rights, duties and responsibilities. The instrumentalisation and marketisation of this intangible asset corrupts the idea of citizenship and produces new hierarchies and inequalities of citizenship. These debates have left little room for thinking about the impacts of such schemes for ‘ordinary citizens’ of passport selling countries, and how such schemes and their impacts are shaped by ordinary citizens themselves who may look to challenge and dissent against the implementation of such schemes. Speaking to these concerns, this paper has attempted to develop a research agenda that foregrounds the everyday impacts of such schemes on ‘ordinary citizens’.

The paper opened with three vignettes drawn from the commentary pages of two Grenadian newspapers. These excerpts highlight the multiple concerns and encounters ‘ordinary citizens’ may have (and are already having) with economic citizenship schemes, and how they feel economic citizenship schemes are shaping their daily lives, communities and locales. These three vignettes provided a springboard for developing a research agenda based on the theoretical approaches drawn from everyday geographies, in essence asking what would exploring economic citizenship regimes through the lens of ‘everyday geographies’ add to existing theorisations? Geographical scholarship has helped to develop the idea of everyday citizenship, articulating in particular the importance of relational and emotional understandings and the varied sites, geographies and spatialities of citizenship struggles, with this everyday lens encouraging us to attend to spaces of (non)contact and encounter which may generate, construct and nurture shifting social relations (Askins, 2016:516). This seems crucial in the context of economic citizenship regimes yet work to date has focused on the ways in which such schemes may shape legalistic and theoretical approaches to citizenship, with the role and experience of the individual and the everyday impacts of economic citizenship schemes on the realities of existing citizens remaining overlooked (Knott, 2018; Pogonyi, 2018). In engaging with the literature on the everyday geographies of citizenship we develop a research agenda that attends to the ways in which economic citizenship may shape three key aspects of ‘everyday citizenship’: firstly, citizenship as status, secondly the acts, practices, sites and relations of citizenship and finally citizenship as feelings and emotions.

In developing this research agenda a raft of questions become foregrounded, encompassing both the driving forces for and outcomes of economic citizenship programmes. Greater clarity and understanding is needed about the multiple driving forces behind citizenship programmes, and how these programmes are connected with wider development policy and planning. There needs to be a critical exploration of the impacts of preferential citizenship regimes on local economic, social, political, cultural and environmental conditions and the lives of ordinary citizens. Moving beyond existing, abstract theoretical discussions of the ways in which such schemes influence understandings of citizenship and nationhood, it is vital to understand how ordinary citizens encounter these schemes and the ways in which these experiences do (not) change their feelings, practice and habitus of citizenship. Allied to this, work is needed to address how economic citizenship schemes and their impacts are being evaluated, resisted and subverted by local populations. Moreover, the focus on ordinary citizens in such contexts is an ethical imperative: foregrounding the voices of those not normally heard when thinking about selective citizenship schemes and widening the geographies of our understanding of Citizenship by Investment to articulate the spatially expansive way they operate by prioritising the voices of ordinary citizens of passport selling countries. Focussing on how economic citizenship schemes are felt and experienced by ordinary citizens would provide unprecedented detail about the local impacts of global and globalised economic citizenship regimes, and more widely about the ways in which the lives of ordinary citizens are being played out in the context of global flows of capital, the rise of the (im)mobile super-rich and shifting migration governance.

The imperative for such understandings has, if anything, been escalated by the economic and social impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic which has had tremendous impacts on the economies of many small island states whose economies are heavily reliant upon specific sectors such as tourism. As such states seek to recover from the impacts of Covid-19, it is likely that economic citizenship schemes will continue to play a vital role in efforts to diversify foreign direct investment and economic development and growth. Consequently, the impacts upon ordinary citizens can also be expected to intensify, reinforcing the importance of exploring and conceptualising economic citizenship schemes through the lived realities of ordinary citizens.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper is inspired by all the civil society activists, journalists and members of the public around the world who are documenting and debating the impacts of economic citizenship regimes. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive and insightful comments on this article, which has both improved the paper and developed our thinking on the topic.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sarah Peck

Notes

Author biographies

Sarah is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the department of Geography at Northumbria University. Her work explores civic space, migration and global development through collaborative research methods. Her main areas of research interest are firstly, everyday activism, solidarity and civic space; secondly, critical geographies of migration, development, race and belonging; and finally, the philosophy and culture of aid and development.

Daniel Hammett is a senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Sheffield and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg. His research explores the geographies of citizenship in everyday life, with particular focus on everyday encounters with - and reworkings of - techniques of governmentality and narrations of nationhood.

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