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.

Due diligence is absolutely key to stem possible problems with investment migration programs. Focusing on examples from Canada, Saint-Kitts and Nevis, and the European Union, this chapter offers a critical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of due diligence practices.

Over the past decade, interest in investment migration programs has grown substantially, yet empirical research has not followed it apace. This chapter offers an empirical overview of the field of investment migration, focusing on supply, demand, and the connective infrastructure of the market, as well as the demographic uptake and economic outcomes of several key programs. The analysis is based on five years of qualitative and quantitative research on the global market in investment migration. I first set out the defining features of CBI and RBI programs and distinguish them from neighboring – and often conflated – means for acquiring citizenship or residence. I then introduce the historical origins of the contemporary scene in investment migration globally and dissect the dynamics of the global market in investment migration, focusing on the structure supply, demand, and the connective tissue of service providers that make the market. The analysis also accounts for changes in both supply and demand over time. The third section addresses program outcomes. I highlight important methodological issues to consider when evaluating program outcomes, and I assess the uptake and economic results of key schemes. I conclude by discussing the most significant empirical development in the field in recent years: the rise to predominance of CBI and RBI programs in the Global South.

In this chapter, we provide a critical appraisal of the presumed correlation between investment migration and foreign direct investment. Could it be that investment migration is not as effective a form of FDI as has been presented to us? The devil is in the detail, as is always the case. However, it is clear, if we read between the lines in the official statements made about them, that many such programmes are not well designed to attract FDI – the British Tier 1 (Investor) visa could be an example.

Delving into the necessary and unsurprising instrumentalization of citizenship, this chapter looks at the role it plays in global inequalities. It shows how unsurprising the instrumental twist is and how investment migration is almost unavoidable. In this context, investment migration offers just one of many ways available to the losers of the birthright lottery to upgrade their initial status assignment.

In this chapter, I take the revocation of citizenship as the starting point of analysis. How much room is there for ex-post facto conditionality in citizenship allocation and, more broadly, in immigration law? Plentiful examples demonstrate a clear and worrisome shift in the direction of making potentially any migration status not acquired by blood conditional upon perceived good character and the lack of criminal indictments, opening a Pandora’s Box of further complexity for investment migration and its implications. If anyone can lose investment citizenship anywhere in the world as a result of a criminal case started by China, is it really citizenship we are talking about?

Taking an empirical approach, this chapter demonstrates how terribly complex it is to conceive of a ‘successful’ investment migration programme. I walk the reader through the menu of investment migration programme design options, exposing the difficulties related to pretty much all of the available choices to help us grasp the sheer complexity of the issue.

In this chapter, we examine the issue of competence to confer residence and citizenship based on a donation or investment in the light of international and European law as they stand today. We show that the national competence to do this is part of the sovereign nature of the modern state, which implies the ability to create a people and delimit the scope of the population granted a right to settle in the national territory, underpinned by rules behind such delimitation. We also explain why investment migration per se cannot be presented as unlawful and outlines the avenues for the eventual disciplining of its offshoots in areas unrelated to migration as such, thus connecting particularly well with Peter Spiro’s analysis of relevant international law.

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.

Countries are competing ever more fervently to attract the best and brightest, whether highly skilled migrant workers, students with potential, or athletes and others boasting exceptional talent. It should therefore come as little surprise that they should vie with each other to lure in the wealthy as well. This chapter introduces the key characteristics, debates, and stakes in citizenship by investment and residence by investment programs.