Imagine lazing on a beach on an island in the South Pacific — the temperature is always 80 degrees, the water always perfect, a mimosa in one hand and a pair of sunglasses in the other. Life has never been better on the paradise of the Nauruan shores. This isn’t real. What won’t be noticeable from your position on the beach is Nauru’s rapidly sinking coastline, inhospitable interior, and that President Adeang has begun selling Nauruan citizenship to fund evacuation efforts for now-underwater villages.
Selling a country’s citizenship — or more formally, offering golden visas — is a global practice, irrespective of economic status, geographic location, or political ideology. Mostly, it is used to stimulate the local economy and attract wealthy investors from overseas. In Nauru, though, President Andeang is offering them in an act of desperation to solve the problems caused by wealthy colonial powers, both in the past and today.
Golden Visas: Who, What, and Why?
Golden visas across the globe are a great way to gain residency and/or citizenship for those who can pay for it. Usually requiring either an up-front payment or a net real estate investment of a few hundred thousand dollars, most are implemented simply to stimulate the economy through an additional influx of cash. Most programs fall into one of two camps: residency or citizenship. For programs requiring a residency period before becoming eligible for citizenship, immigrants integrate into the local culture, language, and economy, effectively becoming part of the country beyond simple paperwork. The United Arab Emirates, for example, offers residency after an investment of $545,000. The resident can eventually become a citizen if they have “provided exceptional services to the country.” One of the most attractive features of these programs for wealthy migrants is the opportunity to receive a far stronger passport — Nauru, for example, ranks 55th in passport strength. Golden visas from European Union states are especially valuable, as they guarantee EU-wide travel, as well as being generally strong passports.
Terrorism, Anti-Immigration Movements, and the Housing Market
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the politics surrounding golden visas, though. Issuing these visas can be a strain on local economies and drive up prices for locals, though. Spain recently shuttered its golden visa program after it found that wealthy immigrants drove up local housing prices to the extreme. A study found that Spain had issued 14,576 visas linked to real estate investments greater than €500,000. According to the New York Times, the high prices they are willing to pay force locals “out of a market that had already been highly inflated by the rise of Airbnb and the draw of Wall Street investors.”
Some programs are plagued with security concerns that extend far beyond their borders. Ireland, for example, was pressured to shut down its program after concerns that Russian officials used their visas to launder money through Irish real estate holdings. National security is a concern not only for the country itself but also for every other state to which it has visa-free access. The EU halted visa-free travel from Vanuatu after its program was exposed for giving visas to applicants on the Interpol watch list.
Criticism of these programs has been amplified in the last few years as nationalistic and anti-immigration movements have concurrently gained clout around the world. For the most part, states that have taken steps to restrict their typical routes of immigration have not made similar restrictions to their golden visa programs. Anti-immigration movements are conspicuously silent towards golden visa programs in a way that they are not towards immigration methods that do not require recipients to prove wealth. It’s an inherently contradictory aspect of anti-immigration and nationalistic movements. These movements emphasize the sanctity of their respective country — and therefore citizenship — in a way that implies a kind of existence above and beyond price and markets. It directly contradicts the practice of selling its citizenship — a practice that, no matter the set value, inherently cheapens it by assigning a price by which a movement is willing to bypass the deification of its nation.
Australian Bishop Philip Huggins made a similar point in contrasting Australia’s $3.1 million golden visa with its practice of locking and torturing asylum seekers in a prison on Nauru. He called it a “threat” to Australia’s “national character.”
In order to circumvent this contradiction, golden visa holders are distanced from other types of immigrants in surrounding issue rhetoric. They are not usually called “immigrants,” but rather “investors.”
Nauru’s Golden Visa
Nauru’s golden visa does not require residency. One does not ever need to even visit Nauru to gain citizenship — simply give approximately $130,000 and receive a Nauruan passport in the mail with access to 89 countries visa-free. As water levels continue to rise faster in Nauru than anywhere else in the world, many towns are already underwater. The golden visa program was created as a last-ditch revenue stream to evacuate the island’s population from the sinking shore to the infertile interior.
Nauru faces two problems concurrently: rising sea levels and an interior decimated by strip mining. British colonizing forces mined the interior of Nauru for decades, leaving 80% of the island uninhabitable in their conquest for phosphates necessary for fertilizer production. Most of the island’s inhabitants were forced to the coastline as mining operations expanded, leaving 90% of the entire population extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels.
The golden visa program is the latest in a long line of doomed fundraising ventures. A program in the 2010s, which implemented a similar visa program, was forcibly shut down when the government accidentally admitted an al-Qaeda operative. Until just recently, Nauru ran the aforementioned prison for asylum seekers looking to gain entry into Australia. This was also forcibly closed when it became public knowledge that the guards actively tortured prisoners in order to force them to choose to return to their home country or commit suicide.
Though golden visa programs are widespread, they’re not usually created out of a sense of necessity. Attracting wealthy immigrants stimulates the economy and provides the government with a small cash bonus. Nauru, on the other hand, is selling its citizenship because it will be underwater in the next century, and it’s been stripped of every valuable resource by the same powerful states responsible for sinking it. As Nauru slowly floods, every fundraising venture surely fails, and world leaders can’t even acknowledge that the sea levels are rising in the first place, much less put any semblance of effort into fixing the problems they and their predecessors caused.
Compromising the sanctity of their citizenship and national pride is a necessity. Offering citizenship for money feels more like exploitation than an exercise in economic stimulation.
Featured Image: Bloomberg
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