Citizenship may soon arrive on a monthly plan

A competitiveness unit advising a small European state has produced an internal sketch in which residency rights are offered as tiered subscriptions rather than as a single legal status. Under the model, an entry tier would grant digital administrative access, a middle tier would add physical residency, and an upper tier would add the right to vote in local elections, subject to a minimum term.

The paper insists this would not be the sale of citizenship, which remains legally and morally distinct, and then spends four pages describing something that behaves in almost every practical respect like the sale of citizenship. The distinction rests on the word revocable, which appears in the document more often than the word home.

The commercial logic is straightforward. Small states already compete for mobile residents, and competition without pricing is simply competition conducted badly. The unit's argument is that the current system already sorts people by money, through investment thresholds and legal fees, but does so opaquely, and that publishing a price list would at least be honest.

“A tier is not a value judgement about a person,” a spokesperson for the unit would say. “It is a value judgement about a bundle of administrative services. We accept that the person is attached to the bundle. That is a limitation of the current implementation.”

The awkward clause concerns lapsing. Under the sketch, a subscriber who stopped paying would revert to the entry tier rather than being removed, which sounds humane until one reads the schedule of what the entry tier includes. Healthcare appears at the middle tier. So does the right to be counted in the local population figures that determine how much healthcare is funded.

Sociologists consulted for the paper would raise the point that identity is not usually improved by a renewal date. A person who belongs somewhere on a rolling basis behaves differently from a person who simply belongs, and the difference tends to show up not in surveys but in whether anyone volunteers for anything.

The sketch is unpublished, unapproved and, its authors say, intended to stimulate discussion of migration policy rather than to design one. It will fail at that in the usual way, by being the clearest document anybody has written on the subject, and therefore the one that gets circulated.