Are private citizenship markets self-defeating?

Abstract

Some authors have advocated the creation of private citizenship markets, whereby individual citizens would be allowed to sell their citizenship to foreigners. There seems to be an inherent contradiction in this proposal. On the one hand, the right to sell citizenship presupposes the state’s right to exclude foreigners from citizenship, which, in turn, is grounded in citizens’ right to collective self-determination. On the other hand, private citizenship markets, by allowing each citizen to unilaterally decide on the admission of new members, would sidestep the democratic process by which members of the political community define who the collective is. This violates citizens’ right to collective self-determination, and therefore undermines the state’s right to exclude. This article aims to rescue private citizenship markets from the ‘self-defeating’ objection. In short, it argues that private citizenship markets do not necessarily violate citizens’ right to collective self-determination because they do not privatize the state’s right to exclude, but only its right to include. As long as the selling of citizenship by individual members of society is legally sanctioned by the state, it does not violate citizens’ right to collective self-determination, and therefore does not undermine the state’s right to exclude, any more than family reunification does. If anything, the objection shows that the right to exclude is not absolute, not that the privatization of the right to include undermines it. The argument has important implications for other cases of unilateral inclusion, especially sham marriages.

Keywords: immigration; selling citizenship; private citizenship markets; right to include; right to exclude; self-determination.