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Joseph Comer (University of Bern / UL / CUNY Graduate Center) Passports as Plan Bs: Virtuous investment and righteous mobility in investor migration discourse
Citizenship-by-investment (CBI) is a process whereby sovereign states sell citizenship to wealthy clients in return for direct deposits or real estate purchases, often derided as ‘cash for passports’ (or ‘golden visas’ within regard to associated residency schemes). Regardless of legal and political debates about the merits or consequences of ‘investment migration’, the proliferation and profitability of the 12+ current schemes (with more in planning) demonstrates the well-established ‘instrumental turn’ of contemporary citizenship (Joppke 2019): an ongoing late-capitalist ‘flexibilization’ allowing institutions and individuals to orient to the affordances and everyday practices of citizenship in novel, enterprising ways.
Building on prior sociolinguistic work outlining how processes of being and becoming a citizen are constrained by power, political economy and discursive mediation (e.g. Khan 2019; Milani et al. 2021), this presentation provides a multimodal critical discourse analysis of investment migration marketing. I employ the concept of enregisterment to discuss how circulating ‘semiotic registers’ produce commodities and authorise political change (Agha 2011; Gal 2019). In simpler terms, I ask: how are passports sold to the world’s elites?
Examining how four dominant CBI brokerage firms (and states) legitimise their services, market products, and distinguish destinations and clients, I sketch out two metasemiotic and ideological accomplishments. The first establishes passports as a mediatised commodity – transforming a fundamentally ‘personal’ (often ‘priceless’) thing into an asset class – through logics of competitiveness, indexing, risk, and security. The second frames an aspirational, elite clientele with a cosmopolitan persona (Chouliaraki 2013): as fellow ‘global citizens’ whose interest in their family’s success and wellbeing is matched with hopes for the world’s future.
The value of offshore ‘passport portfolios’ and ‘Plan B’ citizenships thus intertwines with more transcendent ideals: at-times paradoxical rhetorics of altruism, sovereignty, freedom, aspiration, and privilege. Ultimately, I argue that the circulation and dissolution of these rhetorics is less about being ‘at home in the world’, than enregistering Plan B passports as the mark of a virtuous elite. Thus, ‘global citizenship’ is itself a product sold by CBI marketing: a register delivering metasemiotic legitimacy to those who aspire to stand astride the globe, and who can afford to exceed its limits.
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Bio note:
Joseph Comer (joseph.comer@unibe.ch) completed his PhD in English Linguistics (Language and Communication) at the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 2019. He is now an associated researcher with the Centre for the Study of Language and Society, University of Bern, and undertaking an SNSF Postdoc.Mobility fellowship co-hosted by the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and the University of Limerick, Ireland.
His first book, Discourses of Global Queer Mobility and the Mediatization of Equality, was released by Routledge in September 2021.