Description
With hardening border controls and sanctions regimes, advances by anti-immigration parties, and fragile economic growth across diverse geographies, the transnational mobility of high-net-worth individuals has gained greater prominence in literature spanning international political economy and migration studies. Schemes offering visas and citizenship through investment requirements represent attractive options for elites seeking to hedge against volatility at home. European Union access has proved particularly lucrative, and Brussels has led in pressing member states to alter or scrap these policies.
Via a comparative, qualitative content analysis supplemented by elite interviews and covering Malta and Cyprus, this paper asks how the legitimacy of investment migration policies is constructed in interactions between governments and domestic constituencies. Located on irregular migration routes, these two small states have both granted naturalisation and residency via investment to several thousand third-country nationals over the last decade but exhibited significantly divergent responses to EU pressure.
How are high-net worth arrivals and their societal value framed and related to other categories of third-country residents and wider national policy agendas? What transnational networks and ideological projects do these policies reflect and appeal to? Examining how the value of elite mobility is contested domestically provides granularity on the commodification and stratification of mobility rights, the regulation of wealth in the global economy, and the strategies employed by small states to navigate international relations.
