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"The Golden Passport is the first on-the-ground investigation of "investor citizenship." Some 50,000 people annually pay cash for citizenship in various microstates desperate for investment. Kristin Surak uncovers the surprising motivations of the buyers, the effects on seller-state locals, and the geopolitical dynamics driving the industry"--

The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the normalization of a once shadowy practice.Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely easy. But for those with the means-billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, but also countless unknown multimillionaires-it's just a question of price.More than a dozen countries, many of them small islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Pacific, sell citizenship to 50,000 people annually. Through six years of fieldwork on four continents, Kristin Surak discovered how the initially dubious sale of passports has transformed into a full-blown citizenship industry that thrives on global inequalities. Some "investor citizens" hope to parlay their new passport into visa-free travel-or use it as a stepping stone to residence in countries like the United States. Other buyers take out a new citizenship as an insurance policy or to escape state control at home. Almost none, though, intend to move to their selected country and live among their new compatriots, whose relationship with these global elites is complex.A groundbreaking study of a contentious practice that has become popular among the nouveaux riches, The Golden Passport takes readers from the details of the application process to the geopolitical hydraulics of the citizenship industry. It's a business that thrives on uncertainty and imbalances of power between big, globalized economies and tiny states desperate for investment. In between are the fascinating stories of buyers, brokers, and sellers, all ready to profit from the citizenship trade

Preparing tea : spaces, objects, performances -- Creating tea : the national transformation of a cultural practice -- Selling tea : an anatomy of the iemoto system -- Enacting tea : doing and demonstrating Japaneseness -- Beyond the tea room : toward a praxeology of nationness and nationalism

How is a sovereign prerogative brought to market? We know much about how states shape markets and vice versa, but less about the dynamics when states not only set market rules, but are also the sole producer of the good. This article takes up the case of citizenship by investment - "golden passport"programs that offer citizenship in recognition of an investment in a country - to unpack the challenges that appear when states commodify sovereign prerogatives. In these cases, the state holds multiple roles that generate conflicts of interest and a concern for credibility. To address these concerns, states may adopt two strategies: institute a division of labor in issuing the product, and outsource elements of supervision to third-party actors. Empirically, the analysis shows how migration service providers retooled murky discretionary grants of citizenship in peripheral countries into formal citizenship by investment schemes. The conclusion addresses how these strategies apply in markets for other sovereign prerogatives, particularly government debt, and discusses the implications for citizenship and neoliberalism.

Das Phänomen der temporären Migranten als billigere und leichter auszubeutende Arbeitskräfte, gegen das Max Weber am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts Sturm lief, erlebte nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg unter dem Siegel einer allbekannten, bürokratischen Beschönigungsformel seine Verwandlung: Statt "Nomadenzüge" heißt es seither "Gastarbeiter". Das Wort selbst war ursprünglich ein Euphemismus der Nationalsozialisten für das bis dahin übliche Wort der "Fremdarbeiter". Das Wanderungsphänomen, das es bezeichnet, war und ist aber viel weiter verbreitet. Mehr als 50 Länder betreiben heute Programme temporärer Arbeitsmigration, und überall schwingen die Bedenken, die Max Weber zum Ausdruck brachte, noch heute mit. Alle diese Einzelfälle, die als "Gastarbeiterprogramme" zusammengefasst werden können, sind staatlich organisierte Maßnahmen zur Einfuhr ausländischer Arbeiter, welche befristet und zum Zweck des Arbeitens einreisen dürfen, aber nur eingeschränkte oder gar keine Möglichkeiten haben, ihren rechtlichen Status zu verändern. Obwohl Gastarbeiteranwerbungen sehr weit verbreitet sind, wurden sie in der Forschung bisher kaum vergleichend untersucht. Es gibt zwar zahlreiche Arbeiten zu den einzelnen Programmen, wobei kleinere Studien überwiegen. Aber wie sich diese Migrationen im Verlauf des 20. Jahrhunderts und in den verschiedenen Regionen der Welt entwickelt haben, muss nach Meinung der Autorin erst noch herausgearbeitet werden. (ICI2)

Just over a century ago, a young Max Weber assumed his first professorship in Freiburg with a highly politicized inaugural lecture in which he invited the audience to follow him to the eastern marches of the Reich. There he described the Junkers' turn to Polish seasonal labourers--people with 'inferior physical and intellectual standards of living' brought in to work the sugar-beet fields. These 'troops of nomads recruited by agents in Russia, who cross the frontier in tens of thousands in spring and leave again in autumn', appeared desirable, 'because by employing them one can save on workers' dwellings, on poor rates, on social obligations, and further because their precarious situation as foreigners puts them in the hands of the landowners.' Yet these 'unviable colonies of starving Slavs' were propping up an outmoded, labour-intensive system of production, and represented essentially a 'side-effect of the death throes of the old Prussian Junkerdom'. The neophyte went on to rally the audience with the call that 'the German race should be protected in the east of the country, and the state's economic policies ought to rise to the challenge of defending it.'. Adapted from the source document.

Early versions of this paper were presented at the Migration Industry Workshop, organized by the Danish Institute for International Studies and the University of California Los Angeles, April 13-15, 2011, and at the Migration Working Group at the European University Institute, San Domenico, Italy, February 23, 2011. The author would like to thank the workshop and working group participants for their incisive feedback. ; Among the crescendo of calls for "systemic" approaches to the study of international migration, a small body of literature has emerged around what might be termed the migration industry, or the matrix of border-spanning businesses – labor recruitment, money-lending, transportation, remittance, documentation, and communication services that provide a vital infrastructure for going from here to there. Most work on the migration industry has viewed the state as an adjunct to the object of inquiry – while it may provide a supportive framework or inadvertently encourage the industry's growth, the state has not yet been theorized as an active partner in its development. However, the East Asian democracies illustrate a range of configurations the state may assume as a partner in the development of migration industries in low skilled labor and marriage recruitment schemes: Taiwan evincing a stronger mix of neoliberal marketization, Japan holding to developmental state guidance, and South Korea oscillating between the two. These cases illustrate how the state may harness market competition to devolve sovereign control over labor migration flows to sub-state actors who, driven by the possibility of financial gain, carry out traditional state capacities. The state thus becomes an invested player in the migration industries channeling low-skilled flows, profiting both by saving resources that might otherwise be drained by migration policy enforcement, and as a fee-collector from licenses of entry into the game.