Immigrant Investor Programmes in the European Union: A Typology

Since the onset of the economic crisis in 2009, a number of EU Member States have adopted legislation that enables them to naturalise third country nationals on grounds of a pecuniary contribution in the form of direct investment or real estate purchase. Legal mechanisms through which this facilitated naturalisation is implemented range from those in which states use the investment to exercise full discretion on grounds of national interests; to those in which naturalisation is possible through specific programmes enabling a direct exchange between citizenship and money; to those in which the investment is used to alleviate some (but not all) ordinary naturalisation conditions. One or more of these mechanisms exist in each EU Member State, and their recent proliferation points to the iterative links between national and EU citizenships. Hence, this Paper argues that despite the fact that the regulation of national membership is still an exclusive competence of the Member States, the interrelationship between the 28 citizenship regimes through the rights associated with EU citizenship has significantly contributed to the increase in legal provisions that result in the direct acquisition of citizenship or residence rights (thus indirect acquisition of citizenship) on grounds of investment since 2009. To support this claim, the Paper first discerns the relationship between national citizenship and the supranational (EU) citizenship highlighting the opportunities that the latter provides for developing investor citizenship programmes. It follows by mapping and empirically classifying the different investor and residence programmes in the 28 Member States of the EU on grounds of the degree of state’s discretion, and by exploring why countries regulate access to membership on grounds of wealth in different ways. The conclusion to the Paper clears the grounds for further normative inquiries in this type of naturalisation by discussing broader implications of investment-based citizenship programmes in the EU.