The Golden Passport

The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the normalization of a once shadowy practice.

Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. It is no wonder that obtaining citizenship is seldom easy-unless you have unusual means. For millionaires and billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, a new passport is just a question of price.

More than a dozen countries, many of them small islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Pacific, sell citizenship to 50,000 people annually. Kristin Surak investigated the industry. Some “investor citizens” parlay their new passport into visa-free travel or use it as a stepping stone to residence in a third country like the United States. Other buyers seek an insurance policy against their home states. Almost none intend to live among their new compatriots, who have a complex relationship with these global elites.

A groundbreaking study of a contentious practice that has become popular among the nouveaux riches, The Golden Passport takes readers through the geopolitical hydraulics of a business that thrives on imbalances of power between big, globalized economies and tiny states desperate for investment. In between are the fascinating stories of buyers, brokers, and sellers, all poised to profit.

Author Biography

Kristin Surak is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice and writes for the London Review of Books, the Washington Post, and The Guardian.