Book review | The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires | K. Surak

Surak's "The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires" is a good, up-to-date overview on the Citizenship by Investment (CBI) industry. I have read it and shared my takeaways here.

The annual turnover of this industry exceeded $4 billion worldwide in 2019. However, CBI programmes have existed since the 1980s - and they were rather "murky", to use the author's words.

Through CBI programmes, affluent individuals could invest financial resources in a country and be rewarded with that country's citizenship and passport. Security implications are evident - are these individuals (and their source of funds) vetted? Who is vetting them? Can the government of the country issuing the citizenship be impartial? Truly an issue of trust at its core (and here I am reminded of my BSc dissertation on institutional trust in the market).

So, to facilitate trust and thus scale up business, the Caribbean microstate of St Kitts developed a pioneering strategy, embedding 1) separation of interests, and 2) oversight into the CBI industry. It became the standard for CBI countries to surround themselves with a network of private actors, each responsible for a different step of the CBI application process. Agents collect the applicant's documents, notaries authenticate them, due diligence firms perform background checks to prevent identify fraud and money laundering.

Here, we step into geopolitical territory. The majority of CBI due diligence firms happen to be Western. This is because the key asset of contemporary CBI programmes is easier business mobility towards Western countries; notably, visa-free access to Europe's Schengen Area and the E-2 investor route into the USA - mobility privileges taken for granted by many in the Global North. These privileges add value to a citizenship but, at the same time, they are also the main cause of its vulnerability: the granting of that citizenship is legitimate only as long as it is legitimate in the eyes of the powerholders. For example, Canada revoking visa-free access to Caribbean citizens in 2017 was a sobering reminder of who has the whip hand. As a result, CBI countries are often concerned with securing and maintaining good relationships with powerholders to protect the value of the citizenship they offer.

As a sociologist, Surak goes a step further in investigating investors' motivations to apply for CBI programmes. In addition to smoothing business travel to Western countries, an interesting range of pull factors arose from her research, including:

• Naturalising their children for easier travel to international schools abroad
• Naturalising their children to circumnavigate international schools' nationality quotas within their home country
• Facilitating and gaining access to advanced wealth structuring abroad
• Gaining the right to solve disputes through international arbitration rather than national courts
• Obtaining foreign investment incentives and protections in their home country
• Travelling abroad on a more "peaceful" passport and reducing the risk of kidnapping or arbitrary arrest
• Breaking away from their home country's unfavourable tax system
• Breaking free from sanctions imposed on their home country and its nationals
• Laying a stepping stone to enter a Western country and eventually gain full residency or citizenship more easily
• Mitigating discrimination by ethnicity
• Preventatively arranging a "Plan B" due to instability and unpredictability in their home country

To conclude, as Surak writes, "in an unequal world, the desire for these advantages is unlikely to fade", making CBI a very topical subject. A fascinating body of research awaits you in this book and I can't help but recommend it.