Smelling like a market: investment migration, cunning states, and the coloniality of citizenship in the Caribbean

The administrative decolonization of Asia, Africa and parts of the Caribbean in the decades following World War II has given rise to a range of disconnected and unequal citizenships in discrete polities. While the citizenships of former colonial powers guaranteed access to higher incomes, security, infrastructure, and welfare systems, as well as a high degree of international mobility, citizenships of newly independent states scored much lower on all these counts. As the rights accruing from citizenships of wealthy states increasingly became a scarce good on a global capitalist market with highly unequal negotiating positions, an emergent industry self-designating as “citizenship by investment” (CBI) resorted to the commodification of scarce citizenship rights. The paper focuses on how the five former British colonies in the Caribbean that currently have CBI programs – Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts, and St. Lucia – have turned their former colonial citizenships into bargaining currency in an unequal global distribution of goods and rights. At stake are some of the most coveted among them: mobility rights, needed to legally migrate in pursuit of better economic opportunities.