Global Fields and Migration Regimes: Citizenship by Investment

In the past decade, scholars of international migration have made remarkable strides in unpacking the complex infrastructures that channel cross-border mobility by investigating the operation of profit-oriented migration industries and the regulatory tussles of multilevel migration governance. However, little work has combined the insights of both to reveal how they interact to facilitate or inhibit the growth of particular migration regimes. This article integrates the two strands by reconceptualizing them as part of the same global field, which offers resources for exploring how the struggle for profit intersects with competitions over regulatory capital. It clarifies these dynamics through a case study of the sale of citizenship to wealthy individuals. Focusing first on the involvement of regulatory capital in the competition around economic capital, it shows how and with what outcomes countries and firms cooperate or compete in the system, leading to program resilience or risks. Then turning to the involvement of economic capital in competitions leveraging regulatory capital, it reveals how global powers can influence the citizenship policies of other countries and how third powers dominate in different ways, impacting program growth and profitability. The upshot offers greater traction for examining the limits of state sovereignty and reveals how migration regimes are produced within uneven global playing fields structured by fundamental doxa.