Rentier migration: Attracting privileged migrants through real estate schemes in Mauritius

Abstract Since the financial crisis of the late 2000s, ‘investment migration’ schemes (golden passports and visas) have multiplied, offering access to citizenship or residence to migrants deemed ‘desirable’, in exchange for financial investments in host countries. Academic research focusing on these new privileged migratory regimes has, however, criticized their effectiveness in attracting people and capital. In this article, the author examines the case of Mauritius to revisit the question of the relationship between golden visas and migration. He focuses on an overlooked aspect of these programmes: real estate. Property, and more broadly what he calls ‘territorial infrastructure’ appears to be one of the major instruments of these investment migration policies. How are real estate and urban development used as instruments of migration policies? What kind of ‘desirable migrants’ do Residence by Property (RBP) schemes produce? The author uses an ethnographic method to study not only the actors involved in the implementation of RBP schemes, but also the profile of the beneficiaries of these programs. He argues that these schemes produce a unique migration model: ‘rentier migration’. This term reflects both the fact that the beneficiaries live mainly on capital income that can be managed remotely and that these programmes contribute to reorienting vast swathes of the host societies and economies around property income. Broadly, this study contributes to debate over the role of migration promotion policies in the emergence of ‘immigration rentier states’ and ‘real estate states’.