Unequal Access: Wealth as Barrier and Accelerator to Citizenship

Despite governments around the world strengthening physical, symbolic, and material boundaries to restrict access to their territories and complicate naturalization, high net worth individuals often do not experience these barriers, as capital often serves as a “golden passport to citizenship.” Scholar Ayelet Shachar’s article “Unequal access: wealth as barrier and accelerator to citizenship”, combines insights from the history of citizenship with contemporary legal analysis to explore the role of wealth as both an accelerator and a barrier to citizenship. Shachar notes how sorting strategies of restrictive closure and selective openness which depend on “varieties of affluence” (including income, wealth, equity, credit, etc.) influence individuals’ possibilities for entry, settlement, and naturalization. Shachar conceptually links this wealth-based admission strategy to older, exclusionary systems in which individuals had to own property (land, resources, or in relation to their ‘dependents’ like women, slaves, and children) to qualify for citizenship. Shachar points out the political and social struggles that it took to undo such ancient models and replace them with systems of political membership prioritizing equality above all else, thus, asking if we will continue to deny citizenship to individuals who cannot afford it. (Erika Hernandez for The Immigrant Learning Center’s Public Education Institute)