This final chapter contextualises the very starting premise of the majority of scholarly approaches to investment migration: the sovereignty of the state. In it, we showcase the gradation of sovereignty as exercised in practice. To do so, we deploy the notion of ‘island sovereignty’ to demonstrate that investment migration can be a tool to turn the fiction of sovereignty into reality.

Chapter 3 gathers a variety of restrictive trends in the acquisition and loss of citizenship under the umbrella of “earned citizenship”, which is not a “right”, as in the liberal past, but “privilege”. “More difficult to get” and “easier to lose” are complementary sides of the same neoliberal-cum-nationalist logic of making citizenship more exclusive and conditional on the immigrant`s individual behavior and desert. Being neoliberal and nationalist in tandem, earned citizenship is the clearest expression of a neoliberal nationalism. Earned citizenship`s third element, to be “less in value”, seems to contradict the fact that a rich society`s “citizenship premium” (Milanovic 2016) has never been bigger than today. However, the same citizenship that re-nationalizing states have claimed to strengthen by making it more selective, has become internally devalued through its infiltration by immigration law and a neoliberal welfare-to-workfare devolution.