Dr François Sarah African Leadership College Beau Plan, Pamplemousses
When Kristin Surak and I sat down to conversation at a café in the grounds of a sugar estate in the North, I was envisaging a quick interview, with a few questions about the nature and development of Kristin’s research, from a purely academic standpoint. Instead, I came out of almost three hours of engagement with new and profound insights into a subject that is and will remain crucial in the economic life of Mauritius: citizenship/residency-by-investment.
Dr Kristin Surak is an associate professor of sociology at the London School of Economics whose research embraces topics like international migration, nationalism, and elite mobility. Her latest book, entitled “The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires” (Harvard University Press) seeks to give a comprehensive account of the economic, social, and political dynamics of the global “Golden Passport” market, with implications about the evolving understanding and practices of citizenship and nationality in the context of globalisation. It is not within the purview of this article to give a full review of this dense and rich book. Rather, I would like to give an account of the research of Dr Surak, which includes the subject-matter of the book, while trying to articulate questions in relation to the Mauritian case.
Nation-building
Dr Surak’s early research was focused on the notion of “nation-work” – the complex historical and cultural processes and practices that go into nation-building – in the context of East Asian countries, particularly, Japan. She was interested in the interplay between nation, or the people, and the state in the expression “nation-state”. To investigate this, she chose a rather unexpected subject: the tea ceremony in Japan. “When I was looking at the Japanese tea ceremony, I was really focused on the nation: how do you build a nation and a national identity, how do you enact that, how does it become a lived reality for people?” For this purpose, Kristin went to live in Japan where she gained first-hand experience of one such practice constitutive of the Japanese nation-building: the Japanese tea-ceremony, which became the focus of her study on East Asian nation-work.
Nation-work and nation-building, however, do not take place in a vacuum, in the collectively imagined confines of closed national identities. How are shifting economic and demographic realities accommodated in the nation-building process? Kristin became interested in the inclusion/exclusion dynamics in low-paid temporary migrant work programmes, still in the East Asian region, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. “You go to a country where you work for a number of years, but you have a hard time becoming a citizen, because of a number of barriers. I was interested in how you can be included and yet excluded.” In the case of Japan, for example, the migrant workers applying for naturalisation would have to go through both formal legal processes and cultural processes in order to be fully included in Japanese society. It is at the level of the cultural processes that many people are excluded. People need to demonstrate proficiency both in the language and in the social norms of the country. In this respect, low-paid migrant workers may have contributed many years to the economy of the country but yet may ultimately fail to obtain citizenship because they did not fulfil all the legal and non-legal stipulations required for full inclusion in the national community of the host countries. Those low-paid workers would, therefore, be partially included during the time of their employment, for the needs of the economy, before being fundamentally excluded at the end because they could not accrue the mandatory number of years and the informally required stock of cultural knowledge.
Since 2014, the Republic of Malta has initiated a number of programmes designed to facilitate the obtainment of Maltese residency and citizenship for investors who decide to make substantial investments (real estate, government bonds, contribution to social funds, etc.) in Malta. Initially, the conditions were largely liberal until the schemes came under scrutiny of the EU, who recommended the introduction of stricter parameters.
For Kristin, this was the opposite of the low-paid migrant programmes she was studying in the East Asian context. In Malta, the possibility of inclusion in the national community was offered up-front under the conditions of substantial investments. “Rather than workers going to a country, contributing but never being able to become citizens, in this case, it is wealthy people who buy citizenship and residency in countries they’ve never been to”. The Maltese “Golden Passport” case together with some other European and Caribbean countries, where she conducted fieldwork for the book, were eye-openers. There, a very different dynamic from that of the low-paid migrant work programmes was at work, with a relatively easy availability of citizenship and/or residency against significant investment. Effectively, the citizenship/residency of certain countries were up for sale for the global rich.
Indeed, she found out that the issue was global: there was a global market and industry for attracting and welcoming investor-citizens/residents, complete with roadshows, summits, and conferences that needed to be intellectually apprehended and analysed. Surak participated in a number of those events and became convinced that the issue was not merely one of “cash-for-passports” as the media would report: “There was a lot more complexity to it and it became an interesting place from where one could understand globalisation, and the inequalities of globalisation, whether of wealth but also, inequalities among polities and states in terms of power.” To go back to the Japanese example of the tea-ceremony: here was a ritual which symbolised the participation in, and eventually, the membership of, a nation. Whereas, in the case of Golden Visas, what is sought after is not – if at all – membership of a nation, so much as membership of the state. In looking for membership of the state, that is, of the normative legal community attached to a territory and to a people, the global affluent class, is looking for the legal, political, economic privileges and advantages, in terms of fiscality and transfer and asset recycling, which come with it. “Selling passports”, for some very small Caribbean states, often reliant on the uncertainties of tourism and foreign aid, became a way to gain more financial autonomy in the overwhelming atmosphere of globalisation, where on account of their size and the scarcity of their resources, they are at a natural disadvantage. It is not difficult to see why supranational entities, like the EU, or hegemonic powers, like the USA, would seek to control the market for investment citizenship/residency, especially as regards the small states within their periphery and their immediate zone of hegemonic control.
Citizen-by-investment
Dr Surak stresses that it is the global character of the legal citizenship rights and their significance both inside AND outside of the country that matters to the global investors. They want to be able to leverage and strategize by having, where possible, a portfolio of citizenships and residencies, which grants them ever great mobility (in terms of visa-free access) on the world stage. Central to the CBI market and to the demand are the extraterritorial rights conferred by citizenship. Again, the appeal of CBI is concerned with the legal possibilities of citizenship and not with the membership of the nation.
Interestingly, Surak points out that traditionally it is precisely countries – microstates – that were former British colonies with a sugar monoculture and common-law jurisdictions, being themselves relatively new as far as nation-building is concerned, that tended to offer citizen-by-investment. What does that say about Mauritius, in view of its history, the present state of its economy, and its projected development in the future? This is what Dr Surak came here to find out, through interviews with various stakeholders directly involved in the sector. It is clear that Mauritius is strongly positioning itself, for a variety of political and economic reasons, on the residency end of the market.
Ultimately, what positive projections for the future one might have, Dr Surak’s work has led me to rather melancholy reflections on the nature of citizenship in this globalised world: “If the value of your citizenship is about not what it gets you within your own country but outside of it, it means foreign countries control its value.” I cannot pretend that the market-driven disconnect between the legal and the cultural/social aspects of citizenship leaves me indifferent. And small countries such as ours have always been rather vulnerable to the demands of the market. Everything is a commodity, even the attributes of sovereignty and the legal structures attached to it, including citizenship.
What is fascinating to researchers is that Mauritius is, indeed, a sort of laboratory where one could observe both sets of phenomena at once: the low-paid migrant labour market from India, Madagascar and Bangladesh, as well as the influx of investment residencies. Both phenomena have an impact not merely on the economy of the island in terms of raw figures but also in social, cultural, and political terms. It is, perhaps, urgent that the public authorities set up an independent observatory to monitor and gauge the impact of these two different but ultimately connected sets of phenomena. It would enable us to have clear facts and figures that could form the basis of policy, coupled with the exercise of effective democratic vigilance.