In this chapter, I unpack the rationalization for instrumental citizenship by distinguishing between Greek and Roman ways of approaching the concept. Explaining the rise of investment migration around the world is best handled using the Roman ideal, focusing on the status of citizenship as a creature of legal individualism, rather than the participatory dimension of the Greek conception.

This chapter calls for a re-evaluation of the predominate academic approaches to citizenship by investment. It unpacks the problematic assumptions of three popular types of critiques of investment migration in the existing literature: the wrong distribution argument, the degradation of value argument, and the motivational corruption argument.

In this chapter, I highlight the problematic starting point of three key trends in the relevant literature on the sale of citizenship, demonstrating that it suffers from a ‘streetlight effect’ by inescapably privileging the claims made in the name of what theorists see as the pre-existing community, allowing such claims to trump all other concerns. The fact of the matter is, however, that when certain forms of inclusion are assessed, it is not only the interests of rich, Western societies which are at stake.