The sale of passports and visas to non-citizens—once considered a “shady” black market business—has flourished into a full-fledged global industry. Citizenship-by-investment (CBI) and residency-by-investment (RBI), commonly referred to as “Golden Passport” and “Golden Visa” programs respectively, create accelerated legal pathways for third country nationals to attain passports or visas in exchange for foreign investment. Today, selling passports and visas is not only legally sanctioned, but actively promoted by over 100 countries across the globe, with the Gulf region emerging as a critical hub for this market over the last decade. Why are people who may be relatively economically privileged but legally precarious increasingly turning to these programs to help solve their citizenship and residency status? What does this market for passports and visas reveal about emerging patterns of labor, migration, and belonging in the Gulf and globally?
Presented by the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research.
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Noora Lori is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies. Her research broadly focuses on citizenship, migration, and statelessness. She is interested in temporal strategies of migration enforcement and has written about citizenship regimes and naturalization policies, temporary migration schemes, and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective. Regionally, her work examines the shifting population movements accompanying state formation in the Persian Gulf, expanding the study of Middle East politics to include historic and new connections with East Africa and the Indian subcontinent.
