Captures well some of the inherent discrimination of citizenship –who is in and who is not. Completely divorced from some of the practicalities and political realities undermining some of this discrimination but nevertheless an interesting and challenging interview:
Accounts of the glories and dignity of citizenship are everywhere, yet it is the arbitrariness, violence, and servility attending the concept that we must focus on when we interrogate it, argues Dimitry Kochenov, an expert on citizenship, nationality, and immigration law, in his book “Citizenship.”
1) One of the more popular politicians in our country often talks of “pull-effects” on immigration, claiming that allowing “too many” migrants or making the path to asylum or citizenship too easy increases the number of immigrants and refugees coming to our country. Is there any evidence for this? Additionally, and more controversially maybe: I hang with often radical people who are often very into open borders (or more precisely, claiming that borders shouldn’t exist). What’s your view on that?
Dimitry Kochenov: Having no borders is not really as radical as it might seem: We have this in the majority of modern democracies today (unlike the states in the past) — and even at the level of larger entities, offering free movement, which includes settlement and work rights to citizens of several countries at once. The EU or the GCC are great examples. Citizenship is thus not always about creating the borders — it can also be about, precisely, removing them. And on this count being an Icelander with dozens of countries welcoming you to stay is much better than holding a passport of Madagascar, opening zero doors for settlement and work outside of the country. Given that no borders works for the Icelanders and it is perfectly fine, to claim that it is outrageous and radical for the citizens of Madagascar seems somewhat unfair.
And concerning “too many” and “too few” immigrants, the world is too diverse to make easy generalizations — the “immigrant,” just like a “citizen,” is the creature of the law: if naturalizing is easy, immigrants are never in the majority. If naturalizing is virtually impossible, like in the Gulf, then everyone is suddenly an immigrant. This is exactly the totalitarian nature of citizenship at play: The persons themselves have zero say in the matter, while public authorities claim people right from the moment of birth (or later) and these claims cannot usually be refused.
2) Would you be able to summarize your suggested improvements or replacements for citizenship? Example: One of the advantages of citizenship is the fact that you can get a passport, which is a way for your home country to vouch for you. Absent citizenship, what mechanism would you propose to control travel across borders?
D.K.: This is a wonderful question, which takes the current shape of the world for granted: Borders are taken for granted, passports are taken for granted, just as the hostility to someone, who is not “from here.” This world, the world of nation-states, is quite new and will obviously not last forever. One of my main problems with citizenship, as I try to explain in the book, is that the idea of citizenship goes radically against all the core ideals our current notion of freedom, liberty and deserving are building upon. That this is the case had great reasons in the past. Citizenship as an absolute abstraction from the individual features of the bearer had to emerge when the core struggle was the struggle against caste systems in society: The vote of a baron had to count the same way as the vote of a peasant. The contemporary world, however, is radically different. The legal fiction — the absolute abstraction — which is citizenship has a difficult time when discrepancies between different citizenships in terms of the rights one can enjoy on the basis of these statuses are huge, while the status of citizenship as such is distributed purely at random. Consequently, from an instrument to guarantee and promote equality, citizenship emerged as the key tool of suppressing the idea of giving reasons to underpin the distribution of the most important rights. The question of “how can the world be without citizenship?” is thus a question, in essence, about how to stop distributing privilege at random, while using randomized distribution in order to impose glass ceilings and be legally allowed as well as morally safe to say “she is not a citizen, she has no rights, reasons do not matter.”
To come to the bottom of the question, the Schengen zone offers an excellent example of “mechanisms to travel across borders” — the borders are sometimes marked and crossed by speed train lines and wonderful highways.
From an instrument to guarantee and promote equality, citizenship emerged as the key tool of suppressing the idea of giving reasons to underpin the distribution of the most important rights.
3) Do you think the non-EU part of Eastern Europe will ever have a visa-free regime with the EU (I mean Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, etc.) in the same terms as there is within the EU right now?
D.K.: Borders, suspicions, and hatreds are policy choices. It is important to realize, however, that borders exist at different levels: These can be the boundaries for simple travel for a short-term stay (on this count Ukraine is already part, together with Moldova and Georgia of the larger European space); boundaries for settlement and work (on this count Ukraine is out, but Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway still are in); and the boundaries of citizenship, when the nationals of some countries would be excluded from the beginning. Take a national of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus or South Ossetia, for instance. Such people are legally claimed by the entities too questionable to be palatable for the majority of the European nations, so they cannot even naturalize in the EU, should they meet all the conditions of the country of residence, with such documents.
To move closer to your question: Russia is currently the most atypical country in the world from the point of view of tourist and business visa policy, since it lets all the nationals of the poorer and less developed nations in visa-free, locking its doors behind a visa wall for Europeans and Americans. All the other countries are the exact opposite, offering visa-free travel to the citizens of richer and higher-developed nations. Picking friends is a matter of taste though, even if taste is peculiar. In the long term it would be illogical to keep the European continent cut by visa walls. The world, however, is frequently illogical.
4) What’s your take on abusive spouses that don’t let you leave, that is, states that make it extraordinarily difficult for people to renounce their citizenship?
D.K.: Not all the states refusing their citizens the right to renounce could correctly be compared to abusive spouses, it seems to me. The inability to renounce can definitely be an asset, a weapon against a different kind of abuse, when states of naturalization require the renunciation of previously held citizenships, thereby legally mandating a sacrifice of rights, which is difficult to justify. Both the inability to renounce and the obligation to renounce thus can be problematic. The core of the matter, of course, is whether the citizen herself can decide.
In the contemporary understanding of freedom and liberty, we expect to be able to make this kind of decision as we see fit. Yet, citizenship logic is quite different from the logic of liberty and freedom — since citizenship is a legal status attributed in the absolute majority of cases immediately following someone’s birth without any consent or ability to disagree with this attribution. A foreigner born to tourists passing through the U.S. is an American, however “incidental,” grandson of a Greek whose father has never visited Greece is of course Greek (and unable to renounce). The totalitarian logic of citizenship thus constantly clashes with our idea of freedom — and this is a constantly recurrent story, ultimately undermining citizenship’s justifications and annihilating its moral appeal.
5) Given that citizenship and ethnicity are often connected in the context of European nation-states, just look at Eastern Europe, should we be giving out citizenships to immigrants after a number of years compared to just some type of “long term residency”? What would be the advantages (if any) and disadvantages of that and how do you think the far right would react to such a move? Would such a move even matter in the EU?
D.K.: Citizenship and ethnicity is a difficult connection, since it breeds intolerance. In terms of equal human worth ethnicity is an irrelevant feature. Citizenship, as a status of legal recognition of full belonging to an authority cannot be made dependent on the color of someone’s eyes, or pigmentation of the skin. Nor only Eastern Europe, also many other countries and places not infrequently come with racist undertones in their citizenship policy. After all, citizenship has traditionally been a truly racist concept, since the Western empires dominating the world would not guarantee non-discrimination on this ground, often explicitly enforcing “whites only” policy. Their former colonies learned the lesson well — in Liberia one still needs to be a “Negro,” if I am not mistaken, to enjoy the status of citizenship. The official explanation, from the extreme right in Poland to the racist Liberian constitution, is always the same: social cohesion, culture and the like. Human culture is much richer, however, then policing the dispensation of liabilities based on the pigmentation of someone’s skin, and the developments of the second half of the 20th century allow us to trace a huge evolution on this count. The U.S., France, the Netherlands — formerly deeply racist countries as far as their citizenship policy was concerned, now play a totally different tune.
There is another side of this coin, which is not necessarily positive: Racist citizenship policy — that a Chinese or an Indian could not naturalize in the U.S.; that a woman marrying a colonial “native” in the Netherlands would lose her birthright Dutch citizenship, etc. gave way, with decolonization, to an essentially racist gradation of citizenship rights and liabilities around the world. Now that the former colonial subjects who used to have second-rate statuses in the Empires enjoy their own states, the citizenships those states distribute are often — in the majority of cases — steeply inferior in terms of the rights they bring to the citizenships of the former colonial masters. In other words, although individual citizenship outside of some African states are, by law, not any more racist, the world of rights and liabilities related to the different citizenship statuses in the world remains quite a racist place.
This latest study by Statistics Canada on the naturalization rate is both humbling and gratifying.
Humbling in its methodological rigour and thoroughness, compared to my more rudimentary analysis.
Gratifying, in that it confirms my earlier sounding the alarm that the recent naturalization rate has been declining, for lower income, lower educated and less official language fluent immigrants.
The paper also strengthens the case for IRCC to adopt a meaningful performance standard for the citizenship program, one based upon the naturalization rate for those immigrants who have been in Canada between five and nine years (previous census period) rather than the current meaningless performance measure related to all immigrants, whether recent or many years ago.
Conclusion excerpted below:
This paper uses census data from 1991 to 2016 to examine changes in the citizenship rate among recent immigrants who meet the residency requirement to become citizens. The results show that the citizenship rate among recent immigrants peaked in 1996 and declined considerably since then. This decline primarily occurred after 2006. Furthermore, the decline in the citizenship rate varied across socio-demographic characteristics, and the timing of the decline varied across immigrant groups as well.
Immigrants with lower family incomes experienced a much larger decline in citizenship rates than did those with higher family incomes. The decline among lower income immigrant families largely occurred between 2006 and 2011. The citizenship rate also declined much more among immigrants with poorer official language skills than it did among immigrants whose mother tongue was English or French. The citizenship rate among immigrants with poorer official language skills has been declining since 2001 and was observed over all intercensal periods. Education was also a factor, with citizenship rates declining much more among immigrants with lower than higher levels of educational attainment. This was primary observed between 2011 and 2016.
When all three of these factors—family income, knowledge of official languages, and educational attainment—are combined, the citizenship rate was more or less constant between 1996 and 2016 for the most advantaged group of recent immigrants (i.e., with a high income, university education, and English or French as a mother tongue). In contrast, it declined significantly among the more disadvantaged group (i.e., with a low income, high school or less education and mother tongue not English or French).
There was also significant variation in the extent to which citizenship rates declined among immigrants from different source regions. Most striking was the large decline in citizenship take-up among immigrants from East Asia—mainly China. Indeed, by 2016 the citizenship rate among recent Chinese immigrants more closely resembled the rate among immigrants from developed rather than from developing countries.
Fewer newcomers from disadvantaged groups became Canadian citizens during a 10-year period that coincided with the previous Conservative government’s changes to the citizenship program, new Statistics Canada research shows.
The decrease was part an overall trend in declining citizenship rates among those who have been in Canada less than 10 years, despite the fact the actual citizenship rate in Canada is among the highest in the Western world, Statistics Canada said in the study released Wednesday.
The researchers found that between 1991 and 2016, the citizenship rate in Canada – the percentage of immigrants who become citizens – rose about five percentage points, but the increase was largely driven by people who had been in Canada for over a decade.
But beginning in 1996 and until 2016, the citizenship rate for those who’d been in the country for less than 10 years began to fall.
Using adjusted income measurements, Statistics Canada found that for those with incomes below $10,000, the drop was 23.5 percentage points, compared to just three percentage points for those with incomes over $100,000.
In the same decade, the citizenship rate fell 22.5 percentage points among people with less than a high school education, compared with 13.8 percentage points among those with university degrees.
In the case of both income levels and education, the gaps widened between 2011 and 2016.
Between 2011 and 2015, the Conservative government of the day overhauled the citizenship program, hiking citizenship fees from $100 to $630 and implementing stricter language, residency and knowledge requirements.
The Statistics Canada research does not provide specific reasons for the decline in citizenship rates.
“Multiple policy changes were made throughout the 2006 to 2016 period,” Laurence Beaudoin-Corriveau, an agency spokesperson, said in an email. “It is difficult to pinpoint the effect of a particular policy change with the census data, which are collected every five years.”
The Conservatives defended the decision to raise citizenship fees – they had not increased since 1995 – by arguing that the fee didn’t come close to covering the cost of actually processing the applications. They had foreseen that the rise could impact applications, noting at the time it might mean people wait longer in order to save the money required.
In their platform during the recent federal election, the Liberals took the opposite approach, promising to eliminate the fee beginning next year.
“The process of granting citizenship is a government service, not something that should be paid for with a user fee,” the platform said.
The Liberals pegged the cost of removing the fee at $391 million over four years.
In 2017, they also eased other citizenship requirements, including residency obligations and the age range for being required to pass language and knowledge tests.
According to the latest numbers from Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada, 176,473 people became Canadian citizens in 2018, up from 106,373 the year before.
Another good and thoughtful column by Sheema Khan.
One point of interest is her call for the long-promised revision of the citizenship study guide to include everyday examples of what gender equality means, not the criminal ones cited in the current guide.
As the government did not manage to get its revision published during its first mandate, it should consider this suggestion if not already included in the revision:
Galloping from one controversial social policy to another, the government of Quebec recently unveiled its “Values Test” for prospective immigrants. Derided by some, the test requires newcomers to the province to be aware of a few “key” values. French is the official language of la belle province. Polygamy is illegal, whereas marriage between two individuals is not. Men and women are equal before the law. There’s nothing wrong in letting immigrants know what to expect about their future society. However, in view of Bill 21, one can’t help but be cynical about the Coalition Avenir Québec’s attempt to narrowly define who is – and who isn’t – vraiQuébécois.
Quebec’s stance on gender equality is laughable in view of Bill 21 – hijab-clad Muslim women are barred from teaching in public schools, whereas Muslim men are not. Jewish men who sport a kippa or yarmulke cannot serve as prosecutors or clerks in a provincial court, while Jewish women face no such restrictions. The courts will decide if the notwithstanding clause overrides the violation of gender equality (as enshrined in section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms).
Nevertheless, we should emphasize gender equality to those arriving from countries where women are accorded fewer resources and rights than men. According to the 2016 census, three of the top 10 countries of birth of recent immigrants were Pakistan, Iran and Syria – all of which finished in the bottom five (of 145 countries) of the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Gender Gap Index.
The culture shock can be great. I still remember my cousin’s surprise when he could not access his mother’s bank account as a matter of right, as he used to do in Saudi Arabia. Or one Middle Eastern relative who was dismayed that his wife was automatically a co-owner of the marital home. Or one husband’s disbelief that he would have to split marital assets 50-50 in the case of divorce. These are hard-won rights for women that should never be compromised. Immigrant men have complied and adapted to the new reality. And that’s a good thing.
While current guidelines from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada reiterate the equality of women and men before the law, they might want to add a line or two referring to everyday examples – such as financial independence and property rights of women. Instead, these guidelines leap to examples of criminal behaviour, stating: “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour killings,’ female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence.”
Such dramatic pronouncements, however, don’t help immigrants learn about the positive aspects of gender equality. And they lull Canadians into a sense of complacency that women in Canada are doing just fine. Not so fast.
In her compelling memoirs, Truth Be Told, Beverley McLachlin chronicles her own efforts to combat sexism within the legal profession but points to the broader fight for women’s equality throughout Canadian society. A fight that is by no means close to over.
According to the 2018 Gender Gap Index, Canada ranks 16th in the world (out of 149 countries) for its equitable distribution of resources between men and women. While we are tied for first in the field of education, we are 21st in political empowerment, 27th in economic participation and 104th in health/survival. The relatively high placements in politics and economics, however, mask absolute inequities.
For example, in 2018, Statistics Canada reported that Canadian women earned 87 cents for every $1 earned by men. A 2018 Angus Reid study indicated that women are more likely than men to experience poverty. Women in Canada live at greater risk than men of domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, and sex trafficking. Even with the #MeToo movement, women still underreport sexual assault and harassment. Women and girls are often subject to online hate and sexualized abuse. While women make up roughly half the population, they are underrepresented in political and professional leadership positions. As MacLean’s Anne Kingston rightly observed, sexism permeated the 2019 election, culminating in a vicious, sexist slur painted on Catherine McKenna’s campaign office.
“Working toward gender equality is not only still relevant. It is urgent,” observes the Canadian Women’s Foundation. It’s a message we should all take to heart. The fight for gender equality begins here.
Draped in the Lebanese flag, 22-year-old Dana is bursting with pride at taking part in Lebanon’s “revolution” — even if her home country refuses to give her nationality.
Standing among other demonstrators in the capital, she explains she was born in Beirut to a Lebanese mother and has spent all her life in the country.But like thousands of others in Lebanon, her father is a foreigner and, with Lebanese women unable to pass down their nationality, she has been deprived of citizenship.
“My parents divorced before I was even born. I grew up with my mother,” Dana told AFP.
“I see myself as Lebanese, but they don’t want to recognize my identity,” she added.
The politicians who do not want to change the century-old law, she says, are “patriarchal” and “racist.”
The right to citizenship is one of many long-standing demands to have found new life in the mass protests sweeping Lebanon since October 17.
The unprecedented show of cross-sectarian anger in the street brought down the government last month — but many other of the demonstrators’ demands remain unmet.
Outside the seat of government, 17-year-old Omar said he’d only ever been to Syria once, but was consistently suffering the consequences of his father’s nationality.
Each year, he has to make his way to General Security headquarters to renew his residency permit — like all other non-Lebanese.
“They treat us like foreigners. It’s humiliating,” he said, holding the Lebanese red-green-and-white flag.
Last year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) strongly denounced the law, noting that Lebanon lags far behind some other countries in the region on the issue.
Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen all provide equal citizenship rights to the children of both women and men, while Iraq and Mauritania confer nationality to those born in the country, according to HRW.
At a Beirut protest, Samer stood in a small crowd, raising his fist and chanting against political leaders he sees as inept and corrupt, the majority of whom have been in power since the end of the country’s 15-year civil war in 1990.
“But we need it (citizenship) to work, to sign up our children at school and receive social security,” said the 33-year-old, whose father is Palestinian and who is himself the father of three.
Despite activists campaigning to amend the 1925 nationality law, Lebanese authorities have been reluctant to do so.
In this small multiconfessional country of around 4.5 million, the political system relies on a fragile balance of power between communities.
Authorities fear that changing the law would open the door — especially through marriages of convenience — to the naturalization of some of the majority-Sunni 1.5 million Syrians and around 174,000 Palestinians living in the country, according to official estimates.
Last year, then foreign minister Gibran Bassil suggested amending the law to allow for Lebanese mothers to pass on their nationality — but only if the father was neither Palestinian nor Syrian.
“It’s racism,” said Randa Kabbani, coordinator of the “My Nationality, My Dignity” campaign demanding citizenship for children of Lebanese women.
Of the 10,000 impacted households identified by the campaign, some 60 percent are Syrian, 10 percent Egyptian, and just seven percent Palestinian, Kabbani said. Others are Jordanian, Iraqi, American or hold European nationalities, she added.
Around 80 percent are Muslim and 20 percent Christian.
Samer said those pushing for reform are not demanding the naturalization of all Palestinians living in Lebanon, “but only those born to a Lebanese mother. It’s a natural right.”
Kabbani said she was delighted the issue had gained new momentum in the ongoing protests.
“Before the movement, women were almost ashamed to speak up about it. But today they’re clamouring loud and clear,” she said.
On Sunday, hundreds of protesters took part in a march organized by “My Nationality, My Dignity” in the capital.
Volunteers with the campaign have erected a tent in the square by the office of the now deposed cabinet to discuss the issue.
When she is not protesting, Dana — the university student — helps spread the word among other protesters so they too can join in her fight.
But the young student says she is under no illusions.
Whether or not a new cabinet includes independent experts as demanded, the key to her finally obtaining her Lebanese citizenship will boil down to political will.
“The day decent leaders take power, the legal amendment will fly through,” she said.
More fulsome article and information than posted previously. Not to improve service but to pay for ICE. Clear intent to reduce immigration and citizenship uptake:
The Trump administration on Friday proposed hiking a range of fees assessed on those pursuing legal immigration and citizenship, as well as for the first time charging those fleeing persecution for seeking protection in the United States.
The rule, which will be published on Thursday and will have a monthlong comment period, would increase citizenship fees more than 60 percent, to $1,170 from $725, for most applicants. For some, the increase would reach 83 percent. The government would also begin charging asylum seekers $50 for applications and $490 for work permits, a move that would make the United States one of four countries to charge people for asylum.
It would also increase renewal fees for hundreds of thousands of participants of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA. That group, known as “Dreamers,”would need to pay $765, rather than $495, for a renewal request. The fee hike comes days before the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on the validity of President Trump’s justification to terminate DACA.
“Once again, this administration is attempting to use every tool at its disposal to restrict legal immigration and even U.S. citizenship,” said Doug Rand, a founder of Boundless Immigration, a technology company in Seattle that helps immigrants obtain green cards and citizenship. “It’s an unprecedented weaponization of government fees.”
Yet another deliberate barrier to citizenship. Hard to see how the processing costs could be that high (over twice Canada’s, which, of course, the re-elected Liberal government has promised to eliminate):
The Trump administration is considering raising the cost of U.S. citizenship applications, according to a Department of Homeland Security rule filed on Friday.
The fee for the U.S. citizenship application would increase to $1,170 – from $640, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
A number of other cost increases were proposed, as well as the addition of a $50 fee for asylum applications.
According to the document, a biennial fee review determined that current fees “do not recover the full costs of providing adjudication and naturalization services” at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Without an increase in funding, the government predicts the agency would experience an average annual shortfall of $1.2 billion.
The Department of Homeland Security has proposed adjusting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration fees “by a weighted average increase of 21 percent,” in addition to adding fees for some benefit requests. U.S. immigration services is primarily funded by fees charged to applicants and petitioners.
Written comments must be submitted within 30 days from the date the rule is published in the federal register, which will be on Thursday.
The last time the fee schedule was adjusted was at the end of 2016.
Welcome move but one just highlights yet again the potential for abuse and fraud:
Cyprus said on Wednesday that it had started a process to strip 26 individuals of citizenship they received under a secretive passports-for-investment scheme, admitting it had flaws.
The Mediterranean island has been rattled by disclosures of its investments scheme since Reuters reported last month a list of Cambodian beneficiaries, including its police chief and finance minister.
“The council of ministers today affirmed the will of the government for strict adherence to the terms and conditions of the Cyprus investment programme,” the Cypriot interior minister, Constantinos Petrides, told reporters after a four-hour cabinet meeting.
Petrides did not disclose nationalities or identities of those affected, but said it “also concerned those” whose names were mentioned in media reports.
Cypriot sources said the group included nine Russians, eight Cambodians, five Chinese nationals, two Kenyans, one Malaysian and one Iranian.
They involved nine investment projects, whereby groups of foreign investors in partnership can benefit from the scheme.
Cyprus has had a citizenship for investment plan in place since 2013, under which a minimum 2 million-euro ($2.2 million) investment can buy a passport and visa-free travel throughout the European Union.
Advertising the scheme is now banned, but at least one law office used to distribute pamphlets resembling passports to visitors at the island’s main airport.
Authorities said the programme had gone through several transformations, and was overhauled in February 2019 with five different due-diligence layers, compared with one in 2013.
In the five years from the beginning of the citizenship scheme to 2018, the Cypriot government approved 1,864 citizenship applications. Including family members, the number was more than 3,200, and is close to 4,000 today.
“If there were nine investment cases, concerning 26 people, among 4,000 applications, it is logical that some would be problematic when controls weren’t strict,” Petrides said. “There were mistakes – it was a mistake not to have criteria, for instance, for high-risk persons.”
The Reuters investigation showed that influential police, business and political associates of Cambodia’s long-time ruler, the prime minister Hun Sen, had overseas assets worth tens of millions of dollars.
Hun has previously denied opposition allegations that members of his inner circle had other passports and lived the high life overseas. Some 70 percent of Cambodians live on $3 a day, according to the Asian Development Bank.
Petrides, whose ministry signs off on passport applications, said the individuals concerned had the right to appeal.
At least a quarter of those who have applied for Spanish nationality under the country’s law of return for descendants of Sephardic Jews are not Jewish, according to the local media.
Of the 153,767 applicants, 52,823 are from four Latin American countries — Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Ecuador — the La Razon newspaper reported Sunday. Their combined Jewish population is smaller than 10,000, according to the World Jewish Congress.
That means that nearly 43,000 applicants, or 27 percent of the total who applied before the closing of the deadline for applications in October, are not Jewish based on the relatively liberal definition of who is a Jew applied by the World Jewish Congress.
Only 4,313 applicants, or 2.8 percent, are Israelis and more than one-fifth, or 33,653, come from Mexico, which has the highest number of applicants. Colombia was next at 28,314. The United States had 5,461 applicants and Turkey had 1,994.
Only 31,222 applications had been approved by Oct. 1 and the rest are still pending. September had the most applicants, no fewer than 71,789, since the opening of the window in January 2018.
Spain passed its law of return for descendants of Sephardic Jews in 2015 shortly after Portugal.
Thousands of applicants have asked to be naturalized in Portugal, where the law is open ended.
In both countries, the government described the law as an act of atonement for the persecution and mass expulsion of Jews during the Inquisition that began in the 15th century. Many Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity.
Yet another study highlighting the potential for abuse and an overly modest approach to regulate the practice:
An economic study into citizenship-for-sale schemes within the European Union has called for more cooperation between nation states and the main EU institutions.
The sale of national citizenship under such “golden passport” schemes comes with the benefit of EU citizenship, and is available to anyone prepared to pay the price.
If Member States are fully sovereign in their decisions on whether and how to award national citizenship, the study said, and if national citizenship comes with the added benefit of EU citizenship, then a market for golden passports for wealthy investors from outside the EU may emerge in which at least some nation states overuse their privilege of selling citizenship.
The studyPassports for Sale: The Political Economy of Conflict and Cooperation in a Meta-Club by Kai A. Konrad and Ray Rees, focused on the political economy of citizenship-for-sale.
They approached the problem by looking at the European Union as a “club of nations” or meta-club – where each single country identified as a club of its own. In such a group, each single nation reserves the right to govern the admission of new individual members into its own club, but new members automatically benefit from the EU wide meta-club.
Member States have the sovereign right to decide whether or not to grant citizenship to anyone they choose. However, Malta, Cyprus and Bulgaria make “special use of this freedom” by offering “golden passport” programmes that enable wealthy investors from outside the EU to acquire European Union citizenship without discussion or oversight from other Member States.
Malta is also on the OECD short-list of countries whose residence or citizenship-by-investment schemes serve the “the purpose of income tax sheltering”.
The scheme has been mired in controversy from the beginning. Last week, PN MEP David Casa wrote to European Justice Commissioner Vera Jourová calling for the programme’s suspension after a fifth Maltese citizen who had acquired a golden passport was charged with criminal offences.
Earlier this year, the European Commission warned Member States to tighten security checks on wealthy investors applying for the cash-for-passport schemes, saying such applicants have opened the EU to risks of money laundering, corruption and organised crime.
The study pointed out that these schemes “raise political economy issues of conflict and cooperation at the European level, and have given rise to discussions and controversies between the central EU government level in Brussels and the individual Member States”.
The authors deliberately avoided addressing the ethical issue of golden passport programmes. Instead, they focused on the externalities that emerge inside a union where individual members sell their own membership, together with entry into the larger union.
“One important aspect of this is the extent to which new citizens move out of the countries that initially admitted them and into other countries that have had no say in the admission process, but may bear at least some of the cost”.
Explicit agreement over quotas on the number of passport sales each individual country may offer could help mitigate these concerns.
This is the last of the weekly analyses. The complete set can be found at: Ethnic Media Coverage.
I will be working on a summary report over the next few weeks regarding the close to 2,500 articles monitored 20 July to 3 November, building upon my pre-writ analysis in Policy Options, How does ethnic media campaign coverage differ?.
Multicultural Meanderings 