Introduction: Advancing Investment Migration Scholarship

Abstract

Over the past decades a growing number of countries have offered residence or citizenship in return for a payment or investment. While residence by investment programmes (RBI) have been common for many years in high-income countries, the recent development of citizenship by investment (CBI) programmes in both the European Union—particularly in Malta—and the wider world has attracted much debate and controversy. Investment migration is driven by the unequal nature of the world’s nationality quality and the speed of global economic development. This is the introduction of the introduction to Investment Migration in Europe and the World: Current Issues edited by the authors for Hart Publishing, Oxford. The book takes a multi-disciplinary approach to investment migration in order to better understand the phenomenon and to examine its legal, political, and conceptual implications. The book consists of four parts. The first part documents recent trends in investment migration and seeks to understand its implications for our understanding of the concept of citizenship. The second part provides a legal and normative assessment of investment migration, from the perspective of both EU and international law. The third part presents case studies of investment migration practices in countries from around the world, including from countries that have so far remained under-researched. The fourth part deals with the specific EU legal-political context and also engages with the case launched by the European Commission against Malta. The table of contents as well as the list of contributors is provided in the end of the document.