Can Citizenship Be a Commodity?

Whereas many students of economics attribute little value to the issue of identity, it is a fact that professional political scientists and other people think that it is an important factor in political organization. The evidence for this is seen in the tendency for most decisions in public affairs to find interpretation from the standpoint of identity at macro or micro-levels. In a word, identity is real for most people and no wonder countries are organized in an exclusive sense with citizens recognized and the others labelled as foreigners.

There is a small degree of migration across countries with people prepared to take risks and uproot their families in pursuit of employment or security in other parts of the world. So what one sees is a real demand through legal and illegal means for entry into safer and more open countries with prosperous firms that may provide employment.

Mathew Yglesias of Slate Magazine writes about the Island of St Kitts and Nevis which offers citizenship for sale at the sum of US$ 250,000 per person. The article goes on to state that this steep price has not failed to attract takers and further that this market-based approach may serve the United States much better as an element of immigration policy. Needless to state, I am totally in agreement because if the demand for a product is high, then the real value could be captured by using a market mechanism both to ensure its distribution and also to make price act as the rationing mechanism. As Yglesias states, there is scope for tweaking the mechanism to ensure that there is diversity but that does not take away the validity of using the market to ensure that immigrants pay for the right of residency or settlement. To my mind, it matters not if other countries adopt the same policy because the market will ensure that each country's residency charge is adjusted according to the demand for settlement. Over time, that price would correlate highly with democracy and openness and would point to what conditions people prefer to live under.