This chapter explores the relationship between tax havens, the commodification of citizenship, and ‘the home’, as produced through specific fiscal categories (of domicile, residency, and abode), and negotiated by globally mobile individuals and national revenue authorities. The twenty-first century has seen a rapid growth in citizenship-by-investment programmes, but their history tracks back a century before that. Countries like the Bahamas, Monaco, and Switzerland have offered tax incentives for residence since the late nineteenth century, with wealthy individuals and families gravitating to these locales throughout the twentieth century (Farquet Reference Farquet2012; Huerlimann Reference Huerlimann, Buggeln, Daunton and Nützenadel2017; Kälin Reference Kälin2002; Norr Reference Norr1964). The official commodification of citizenship only started in 1984 (Brinker & Dalson Reference Brinker and Dalson2008: 23), when St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean became the first country to sell its nationality (Dzankic Reference Dzankic2012: 9). Since then, other countries, including Cyprus and Malta in the European Union (EU), have begun selling citizenship with specific criteria and competitive pricing. Citizenship has become a commodity. Citizenship by investment confers specific tax advantages for participants, particularly when offered by tax havens and offshore finance centres (OFCs). Where citizenship by investment is offered by non-tax havens, states can instead provide bespoke fiscal incentives for participants in these schemes. Purchasers of a second passport benefit from the low or no tax regimes that their ‘new’ countries offer, where only a purchaser benefits from fiscal concessions, not a prospective one.

For investors who are prepared to go abroad and participate in Residence by Investment (RBI) and Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programmes, all they need to do, in many cases, is buy a second home. In the countries that allow it, this will immediately provide them with citizenship or residence. Homes are available for those willing and able to pay for them, homes complete with new residencies, new citizenships, and new passports provided by nations that levy few taxes. As Margaret Rodman (Reference Rodman2001: 2) has observed, ‘[T]he notion of houses far from home can link many places in a life, on the one hand, and many lives to a place, on the other.’ For elites, expatriates, and globally mobile professionals, house and home are constantly being renegotiated, as ‘distance, exile, travel and rootedness’ converge and diverge (Rodman Reference Rodman2001: 2).

This chapter focuses on the tensions, contradictions, and agreements between fiscal authorities and High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) as they invoke specific categories – abode, domicile, and residence – to reify territory in a globalised mobile world. Negotiations over tax produce new definitions of a home, demonstrating that this intimate anthropological category is bound up in specific global financial and fiscal structures.

Mobile Taxpayers: Abode, Domicile, and the Home

This section examines the relationships between residency and taxation, focusing on concepts of abode, domicile, and the home as they are reconfigured through migration and mobility. Taxation is based on residency, where taxpayers live. Nation-states, subnational governments, and local authorities tax residents living in specified territories. Taxpayers pay tax in geographical areas that are controlled by states that have the legitimate (though sometimes contested and negated) means to enforce collection. However, people move, residency changes, both domestically and internationally. This mobility has increased with globalisation. ‘In 2015, 244 million people’, some 3.3 per cent of the total global population at the time, lived ‘outside their country of origin’ (United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) 2024). Population movement is particularly obvious in the world’s cities, the main destinations of migrants and key sources of taxable income. In 2015, some 39 per cent of the population in Auckland, New Zealand were foreign born, while in Sydney it was 39 per cent, Singapore 38 per cent, London 37 per cent, Frankfurt 27 per cent, and Paris 25 per cent (International Organization for Migration (IOM) 2015: 7).

Global migration and mobility affect the relationship between taxation and residency. Only Eritrea and the United States officially tax on the basis of citizenship (Christians Reference Christians2017: 65). All other countries that have income tax, levy it on the basis of residence. Citizens in the majority of countries can stop paying tax, or pay it at reduced rates, after they become non-resident and are recognised by tax authorities as such; and taxpayers may keep their citizenship if their residency changes.

Determining residency is based on a series of tests. The first tax residency test is the 183-day rule, which most countries maintain. Persons are considered resident in a country if they spend 183 days or more in it in any given fiscal year. The 183-day rule is combined with related tests and criteria, which cluster around notions of home and the availability of a physical residence. As a result of globalisation, however, an increasing number of people are spending more than 183 days outside of their countries of residency and/or citizenship, many in mobile professions, occupations, and sectors. Consequently, tax authorities have increasingly applied other tests in addition to the 183-day rule. These include having a permanent place of abode, domicile, or physical residence available (such as a house or dwelling), ‘family and social ties’, economic connections (for example, bank accounts), and other ‘personal property’ (New Zealand Inland Revenue Department (NZ IRD) 2019: 5). In New Zealand, these connections extend to membership in ‘clubs, associations or organizations’, ‘credit cards’, ‘superannuation schemes’, cars, ‘clothing, furniture and other property and possessions kept’ in the country (NZ IRD 2019: 5). All of the attributes associated with making a home and establishing connections to place can be invoked by a fiscal authority to reject non-residency applications under 183-day provisions, together with the tax advantages it confers. In the eyes of the state, possessions, affiliations, and memberships make homes just as much as houses and land.

In defining home as a crucial criterion for residency and thus tax liability, public revenue authorities have invoked and extended two related key concepts: abode and domicile. The treatment of these categories varies in subtle and nuanced ways between jurisdictions. In New Zealand, the availability of a ‘permanent place of abode’ can be used to determine tax residency, even if a person has been away from the country for more than 183 days. The tax administration in New Zealand makes minimal reference to domicile, if any.

By contrast, the tax administration in neighbouring Australia treats abode and domicile as separate but related and derivative categories of residency. In addition to an abode test, paying tax in Australia is also subject to a domicile test. Tax liabilities do not differ between these categories, but they can change classifications of residency. A taxpayer is either a resident or a non-resident, and only in these cases are different rates of tax applied (a resident is subject to taxation on all worldwide income, while a non-resident is required to pay tax only on Australian sourced income if any is earned). In the Australian tax administration, ‘domicile is the place that is’ first ‘considered by law to be your permanent home’ and is secondly, ‘usually something more than a residence’ (Australian Taxation Office (ATO) 2023a). Abode is subordinate to domicile, which in turn is distinct from residency. The ATO advises, ‘You may have no fixed place of abode but under the law you will always have a domicile. You can have only one place of domicile at any time, whereas you may be resident in 2 or more places’ (ATO 2023a). In this advisory, the ATO appears to separate out residency from domicile. However, in the ATO’s online advisory asking ‘[W]hen does this test apply?’ it conflates domicile and residency by referring to the ‘domicile test of residency.’ This relationship between domicile and residency, viewed as both distinct and coterminous, continues to be evident in Australian meanings given to ‘permanent place of abode’. In this definition, ‘permanent’ is given prominence with the qualification that it ‘does not have the meaning of everlasting or forever, but is used in the sense of being contrasted to temporary or transitory’ (ATO 2023a). It then not only defines abode as one’s ‘residence’, but goes so far as to categorise this as the place ‘where you live with your family and sleep at night’ (ATO 2023a, emphasis added).

For fiscal authorities, home is extended. It is not just a house. ‘[H]ome is broadened’ as a ‘tactical localisation, an attempt to turn’ potentially ‘mobile subjects into taxable subjects through grounding’.Footnote ¹ As official Australian advice asserts ‘[Y]ou may have no fixed place of abode [no place “where you … sleep at night”] but under the law you will always have a domicile’ (ATO 2023a). That domicile may be a country that could be substituted for home in the absence of a permanent place of abode. As the Australian advisory, aiming to resolve these two seemingly contradictory positions, states, ‘In practice, if you’re a resident who has always lived in Australia, you will retain domicile here when you are absent overseas, unless you choose to permanently migrate to another country’ (ATO 2023a, emphasis added).

Abode, domicile, and home are contingent categories and practices with meanings that shift in and between countries, intersecting with migration, mobility, residency, and liability for taxation, in contested and varying ways. The ambiguity in these categories, instantiated when they shift between borders, gives rise to opportunities for international tax planning to reduce amounts payable. This is particularly evident in the United Kingdom’s ‘non-dom’ tax status.

In the United Kingdom, the distinction between residency and domicile is perhaps clearer than elsewhere. A person can be resident in the United Kingdom but maintain a separate domicile in a foreign country if that is where they have a permanent home, they were born there, or their parents are from that place. In the United Kingdom, the relationship between domicile and residency determines taxation. This allows people, who may have even been born and raised in the United Kingdom to maintain non-domiciliary status, with substantial tax benefits. They are known as ‘UK non-doms’. As Simon Bowers (Reference Bowers2015) writing for The Guardian put it, ‘[T]he tax status allows so-called non-doms to name another country as their true domicile, meaning they do not have to pay UK tax on overseas earnings despite being resident in Britain. Only income and capital gains generated in Britain, or sent back to the UK, must be subject to tax by HMRC.’

Up until 2008, UK non-doms, which included prominent politicians, businesspersons, and civil servants who held British citizenship and travelled on British passports, were exempt from tax on offshore income. Since 2008, non-dom incentives have changed significantly. These changes have included obligations to pay an annual lump-sum levy of between £30,000 and £60,000 (Society of Trust Estate Practitioners (STEP) 2013), similar to the lump-sum tax that is applied to wealthy foreign citizens in twenty-two out of twenty-six Swiss cantons. Prior to this levy, UK non-doms paid no, or very little, tax at all. If their parents, and particularly a father, had a domicile elsewhere, this could be extended to children who would in turn benefit from significant tax deductions, and in this way, UK non-dom status could be transmitted through the generations (Rawlings Reference Rawlings2005: 306). Even this levy, however, is a relatively small amount to pay given the high incomes earned by most non-doms.

For the wealthy, the interface between domicile and residency remains a source of private fiscal privilege. The wider public, who do not enjoy this privilege, cover the costs through taxation that non-doms are charged at a proportionately reduced rate. For working-class migrants, navigating the interface between domicile, residency, and abode reinforces inequalities even if they also qualify for tax credits and housing support (Dupont, Anderson, & Vicol Reference Dupont, Anderson and Vicol2019). In her research amongst Romanian migrants in London, Dora-Olivia Vicol explores how taxation can be invoked in claims for citizenship through hard work and self-sufficiency which end up concealing ‘precarity’ (Reference Vicol2020: 101). Non-doms have pursued an ambiguity in citizenship to reduce their tax obligations and are often wealthy enough not to work for salaries and wages. By contrast working-class migrants in the United Kingdom make efforts to comply with tax obligations to ‘substantiate’ citizenship and accompanying moral economies of belonging (Vicol Reference Vicol2020: 115). Citizenship has become ‘differentiated’, mediated by taxation (Vicol Reference Vicol2020: 115). As Vicol suggests, ‘fiscal regimes’ have become ‘material infrastructures that silently underscore citizenship in ways that do not always map onto moral imperatives in public debate’ (Reference Vicol2020: 115).

In Australia, where there is no equivalent to the British non-dom status, the number of disputes over residency, abode, and domicile has increased from 650 in 2015–2016 to 18,000 in 2019. The reason for this rise in numbers is not fully explained in media coverage of these disputes (McIlory 2019). In 2019, the Australian Financial Review covered a case in the country’s Federal Administrative Appeals Tribunal whereby an ‘Australian aircraft mechanic’, Alexander Handsley, had disputed residency for the 2013 tax year (McIlory 2019: 3). In 2013, he had only spent fifty days in Australia, far less than the 183 days required for tax residency in the first instance. He was divorced, had no home, and no car in Australia. He had Australian bank and superannuation accounts but had no other connections to the country. He was mobile, dividing his time between the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore. The most Handsley ever spent in any one of these countries was forty-three days in Vietnam, not enough to be considered resident for local taxation purposes. Handsley’s contract was organised out of the Isle of Man. While the ATO accepted that Handsley had severed his residency connections to Australia, they also contended that he had not done enough to establish residency elsewhere: ‘he had not changed his residency to another place outside Australia or made himself a permanent home’ abroad (McIlory 2019: 3, emphasis added). It was not possible to be a ‘resident of nowhere’ (McIlory 2019: 3), reflecting the enduring legacies and ‘assumptions of sedentism’ that inform orthodox tax administration ‘and the use of residency as the basis’ for revenue collection.Footnote ² Handsley’s application to be classified as a non-resident was rejected, meaning that his offshore non-Australian income had to be declared in his tax returns and was liable for taxation.

Thus, these disputes between revenue authorities and residents seeking to exclude their worldwide incomes from taxation do not just concern multi-millionaires and billionaires seeking to shift their fiscal obligations offshore. They also affect transnational workers, professionals, and contractors who have geographically mobile lives and internationally diverse livelihoods, demonstrating how residency ‘affects a very diverse group of taxpayers’.Footnote ³ Taxpayers are not homogeneous but are demarcated, distinguished, and divided by wealth, property, and employment, and ‘crucially’ ‘by’ the ‘ability to negotiate the lived realities of work and home-making as they are’ interpreted ‘through the fiscal categories of residency and domicile.’Footnote ⁴ Class is not fixed to territoriality. The ability to work and own property in multiple countries has become transnational. Where this was once confined to nobility and royalty in earlier historical eras, this bracket has widened to include mobile workers. These include transnational working peoples in a range of sectors, for instance health care (particularly nursing), teaching, seafaring, domestic work, aged care, childcare, mining, engineering, and fishing. The tax obligations of these workers contrast significantly with those of elite residents in the United Kingdom (and other comparable jurisdictions offering RBI and/or CBI schemes) who can avoid tax for generations by maintaining a foreign domicile as ‘non-doms’ or through purchasing citizenship in a tax haven. They are also able to pay for accounting, financial, and legal advice to reduce taxes wherever they are. Internationally, mobile workers are unable to invoke the same claims to a new abode to reduce their tax obligations, mirroring broader inequalities between capital and labour internationally and domestically.

Citizenship and Tax Residency

Citizenship has no uniform or consistent pattern of connection to residency, domicile, and abode. UK non-doms can be British citizens and residents, but if they are domiciled elsewhere, they can be eligible for generous tax reductions. In Australia, the ATO considers ‘nationality’ as ‘almost irrelevant in determining where you reside. However, in a borderline case, your citizenship may be useful where all other relevant facts are not conclusive’ (ATO 2020b). In New Zealand ‘[T]ax residence is not the same as nationality. An overseas tax resident may be a New Zealand citizen (such as someone working or travelling overseas). Or they may be an overseas citizen who lives and works in New Zealand, but is counted as overseas for tax purposes’ (Land Information New Zealand).

In Switzerland non-citizenship can confer specific tax advantages. Since 1862, the country has offered tax advantages to wealthy foreign residents (Huerlimann Reference Huerlimann, Buggeln, Daunton and Nützenadel2017: 84). Instead of paying progressive income taxes, foreign residents pay a set annual lump-sum tax (pauschalbesteuerung or forfait fiscal), irrespective of total worldwide wealth (Kälin Reference Kälin2002: 17). The amounts, averaging CHF 152,000 per annum in 2016, may represent substantial savings over what qualifying individuals would have paid in their home countries (Allen Reference Allen2017). Tax scholar Gisela Huerlimann refers to this as the ‘lump-sum privilege for wealthy foreigners’ that she analyses within the context of Swiss federalism. Huerlimann has examined the lump-sum tax in terms of market forces, while lawyers and accountants have been actively participating in promoting Swiss residence for decades (Reference Huerlimann, Buggeln, Daunton and Nützenadel2017: 94). It is precisely the lack of (Swiss) citizenship that makes individuals eligible for the lump-sum tax. Domicile is thus separated from but mutually entangled with citizenship.

The contrasts between domicile, residency, and abode between Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom – a diversity in approaches which could be extrapolated to many countries – demonstrate how subtly variable, contingent, and diverse these concepts and categories are. Crucially, they all bear ambiguous relationships to citizenship. The strict absence of local citizenship (in Switzerland, for example) is contrasted with its enthusiastic conferral (in for instance, Dominica, Malta, St Kitts and Nevis, and Vanuatu), intersecting with conflicting and contingent approaches and definitions to abode, domicile, home, and residence elsewhere, resulting in a fiscal world of arbitraged opportunities and possibilities where elites can negotiate their own tax advantages, concessions, and arrangements. In some locations citizenship has become a gateway to changing domicile, transferring permanent place of abode and either lowering taxation or escaping it completely (Christians Reference Christians2017). At this point, the transformation of the passport into a commodity that signifies connections to new homes becomes anything but irrelevant. As such, some countries have thus turned these categories into commodities for sale that transcend the taxing powers of orthodox fiscal states.

Commodifying Residency

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic at the start of 2020, the CBI firm,Footnote ⁵ London-based Henley and Partners, reported that there had been an upsurge in applications to purchase additional citizenships (Arlidge Reference Arlidge2020). Los Angeles-based luxury lifestyle magazine The Robb Report, for example, noted that there had been a 42 per cent increase in the first three months of 2020 over the same period in 2019. From 2000 to 2021, there was a surge in the number of countries offering CBI and/or RBI programmes. The latter residence programmes often provide pathways to eventual citizenship. For a predetermined price, passports can be bought for US$100,000–US$150,000 in the Caribbean states of Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Lucia (Astons n.d. (circa Reference Astons2020a, Reference Astonsb); Dominica Citizenship by Investment 2020; Government of St Kitts and Nevis 2017; La Vida Golden Visas 2020a; Shachar Reference Shachar2018). In Vanuatu, whose people were stateless until independence in 1980, the government offers citizenship for a US$130,000 investment (La Vida Golden Visas 2020b). A low-income country whose government has struggled since independence to earn enough revenue to fund essential public services, Vanuatu’s CBI programme has provided sufficient funds to not only balance the national budget, but also cover the loss of income because of the suspension of international tourism following the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 (McGarry Reference McGarry2020).

Citizenship by investment follows longstanding options enabling wealthy individuals to change their residency and move to low or no tax locations. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing throughout the twentieth century, a select number of countries and territories have allowed wealthy foreigners to immigrate and benefit from particularly low tax regimes. These countries and territories have included Monaco, Switzerland, Bahamas, the Channel Islands, Hong Kong, and from 1924 to 1956, the Tangier International Zone (Norr Reference Norr1964; Ogle Reference Ogle2020: 220–222; Palan Reference Palan2003; Palan, Murphy, & Chavagneux Reference Palan, Murphy and Chavagneux2010: 81–82). As industrialising nation-states in Australasia, Europe, Japan, and North America expanded their bureaucracies and provided an increasing range of social services, including pensions, education, housing, and health care, taxation was consolidated and regularised as a contract between citizen and sovereign (Palan Reference Palan2003: 112; Roberts Reference Roberts, Hampton and Abbott1999).

However, not all nation-states were the same. Microstates such as Monaco did not require income taxation, being able to fund its government from its casino revenues and indirect sales and consumption taxes (Norr Reference Norr1964: 472; Palan Reference Palan2003: 113). While the United Kingdom became a taxing state, its self-governing colonies, territories, and dependencies, which possessed fiscal autonomy, remained either income tax free (Bahamas, New Hebrides which became Vanuatu in 1980) or set rates at low levels (Hong Kong, the Crown Dependencies of Guernsey and Jersey in the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea). The absence of taxes, or their relatively low rates, attracted wealthy people to these places, as they could reduce their tax bills at home by moving abroad and settling in new homes. Part-time residency could suffice on occasions, with the wealthy dividing their time between their tax haven homes (where they might have been domiciled) and their countries of citizenship, particularly international cities such as London, Paris, and New York. As Palan observed in Monaco, ‘low taxation and the Mediterranean climate attracted many wealthy visitors and residents, and Monaco became the model of a cheerful, fabulously rich tax haven’ (Reference Palan2003: 113). From the 1860s, Switzerland started offering similar tax concessions for foreigners, followed by Guernsey, Jersey, and the Isle of Man in the 1960s. The tropical climes of the Bahamas appealed to initially small numbers of wealthy Americans seeking fiscal refuge in the 1930s and they were joined by new entrants such as the New Hebrides in the Pacific (Vanuatu) in the 1970s accompanied by the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands in Caribbean from then onwards.Footnote ⁶

These fiscal migration opportunities were the preserve of a wealthy few, and while countries that offered low-tax living had the requisite legislation in place, they never explicitly marketed them as RBI programmes (although in effect this was what they were, and they have been marketed as such from the 1980s). Moreover, these countries seldom required substantial foreign direct investment (FDI) in their local economies. They allowed people who had multi-million and multi-billion-dollar international portfolios, who could live on passive income earned abroad, to settle within their borders while enjoying a borderless lifestyle themselves.

These more discretionary permits allowing expatriates to live ‘tax free’ in selective jurisdictions have been joined by a second form of RBI offered by countries that are not archetypical tax havens or OFCs but offer clear pathways for business-based investment. These have become commonplace and are offered by most countries. In New Zealand, for example, wealthy individuals can apply to ‘live, work and invest in New Zealand’ for NZ $15 million (US $9.2 million) (Immigration New Zealand 2024). Between its launch in 2008 and its closure in 2022, Tier One permit holders were able to move to the United Kingdom after investing between £2–10 million and apply for leave to remain (permanent residency) after five to two years respectively (UK Government 2019). In the United States, green cards are available to immigrants willing to invest US$500,000 to US$1 million under the EB-5 programme, depending on destination within the country (Shachar Reference Shachar2018).

All of these programmes offer pathways to citizenship. They are not always pursued for tax advantages alone. Most countries that offer these programmes expect migrants and new residents to establish new enterprises or invest in existing businesses which pay tax on income, sales, turnover, payroll, and profits. In the United States, immigrants are eligible for an ‘EB-5’ at ‘a “discounted” rate of $500,000 if funds are for specially designated rural areas of high unemployment’ (Shachar Reference Shachar2018: 3). However, tax concessions continue to be available. In the United Kingdom, holders of Tier One permits were eligible for non-dom status when the scheme operated from 2008 to 2022. Even though the Tier One investor scheme was closed in the UK in 2022, permit holders who acquired them up until the programme was terminated could continue to claim non-dom tax status. In New Zealand, new residents can apply for an exemption from foreign source passive income for the first four years of residency (NZ IRD 2020).

This granting of tax concessions in countries that are not tax havens represents a third option in RBI programmes. In return for an investment, usually in real estate, countries will issue a tax residency certificate. They will then simultaneously provide an exemption on tax payments for up to fifteen years. Greece, for example, ‘[I]n an effort to attract high net worth individuals’ allows them to purchase real estate for €500,000 and then pay a lump-sum tax on worldwide income of €100,000 per annum, irrespective of earnings (KPMG 2023: 6–7). It is similar to Switzerland’s long-standing lump-sum tax for wealthy foreign residents.

Countries have thus effectively commodified tax residency certificates and are selling them to compete for foreign investment, secured by the purchase of real estate – a second (or more) home – which is far more prevalent than programmes that involve starting a new business and employing workers from local communities that the US EB-5 investor visa at least requires.

In her ethnographic research on domestic space in France, Sophie Chevalier (Reference Chevalier and Cieraad1999: 85) has documented how:

This shares synergies with HNWIs who seek second homes via RBI programmes in a range of countries and jurisdictions as a way to build inter-generational privilege and secure their lineage in multiple locations. These homes are bought to establish tax residency in jurisdictions that do not charge tax, provide generous tax holidays, or grant substantial concessions by way of lump-sum levies. Those who benefit from these lower taxes do not necessarily plan to live there permanently, but they often claim them as their new domicile or permanent place of abode which can then be invoked to terminate their fiscal obligations with the countries that they have moved from, and importantly these privileges then flow down the generations. Family and home are reconfigured as lineages and appear in new offshore locations, and those offering RBI programmes.Footnote ⁷

Chevalier (Reference Chevalier and Cieraad1999: 85) suggests, ‘[I]t is only recently that the French countryside has lost its productive dimension to become a recreational landscape.’ Countries that participate in RBI programmes are also rendering up forms of ‘recreational landscapes’. Recreation that is available to HNWIs and families as landscape is transformed into a patchwork of competing fiscal opportunities for escape, re-domicile, and tax abatement. The ‘recreational landscape’ that draws HNWI participants in RBI programmes is both one of luxurious lifestyles, where inter-generational wealth can take root and grow, and one of fiscal flexibility for the elite amongst the globally mobile.

The Commodification of Citizenship: From the Fringes to the Mainstream

In 1984, St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean launched the world’s first full CBI programme (Brinker and Dalson Reference Brinker and Dalson2008: 23). By 2020, admission to CBI in St Kitts and Nevis was available for a ‘donation’ of US$150,000 or purchasing US$200,000–US$400,000 worth of real estate (La Vida Golden Visas 2020c). St Kitts and Nevis were then joined by several competitors including Belize (1986–2002) in Central America, the Marshall Islands, and Nauru in the Pacific (van Fossen Reference van Fossen2007).

In the decade that immediately followed the launch of St Kitts and Nevis’s programme in 1984, CBI were largely obscure and opaque schemes often associated with scams, money laundering, tax evasion, and the abuse of diplomatic passports issued by states that had been influenced by notorious individuals with dubious backgrounds (van Fossen Reference van Fossen2007). As a result, CBI programmes stagnated in the 1980s and remained so into the early years of the twenty-first century. The sector was subdued even in St Kitts and Nevis, which had pioneered CBI. As Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (Reference Abrahamian2015: 78) recalled, the CBI ‘program’ in St Kitts and Nevis lay practically dormant for twenty years, with only a couple hundred passports exchanged.’ Even by 2006, the CBI programme on St Kitts and Nevis only provided one per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) (Abrahamian Reference Abrahamian2015: 80). But by 2014, it had increased to 25 per cent of GDP. The massive increase in CBI revenues in St Kitts and Nevis was the result of ‘restructuring’ coordinated by Christian Kälin, Chair of CBI advisory Henley & Partners. A standardised fee of US$200,000 was charged as a donation into a ‘fund’ to retrain sugar plantation workers, the waiting time for citizenship was reduced to three months and travelling to St Kitts and Nevis for naturalisation was no longer required (Abrahamian Reference Abrahamian2015: 78). An option of naturalising by investing in real estate, acquiring a second home in St Kitts and Nevis, was also introduced (Abrahamian Reference Abrahamian2015: 78). As a result, participation in the CBI programme in St Kitts and Nevis increased dramatically.

These programmes are no longer confined to the Caribbean or the Pacific. Since 2005, several EU and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries have introduced CBI programmes themselves (European Commission 2019; Weingerl & Tratnik Reference Weingerl and Tratnik2019). These include Malta, where prospective investors can acquire citizenship for between €816,000 and €1.175 million depending on marital status and if a home is purchased or rented. All options include a non-refundable government ‘donation’ of €650,000 and a requirement to invest €150,000 in local money markets (Henley & Partners 2020). The Maltese citizenship by investment scheme has been subject to widespread criticism, opposition, and scrutiny since its inception in 2013, particularly by the European Parliament (Weingerl & Tratnik Reference Weingerl and Tratnik2019: 102). Citizenship in all four countries – Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta – offers access across the EU. As a result, these programmes potentially threaten the integrity of EU citizenship. The ‘EU Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders’ has observed that CBI/RBI programmes undermine ‘the essence of EU citizenship. European values are not for sale’ (Reynders, cited in Ziener Reference Ziener2021). In 2020 and 2021, the legality of CBI programmes in Europe was heard in the European Court of Justice (ECJ), with Malta, in particular, actively defending its position. The Cypriot programme (where citizenship could be purchased for €2.15 million from 2016 to 2020) was suspended in November 2020 due to allegations of corruption and infiltration of criminal money. Austria, with its high entrance price of €3–€10 million, and Bulgaria, which has indicated it will amend its laws, have been less of a concern, but they too (and any other EU member state that launches a CIB programme) will be in scope of any ECJ ruling on the matter.

Outside of Europe, in 2015, Australia, which already offers its own investor migration programme, asked its Productivity Commission to explore the possibility of introducing a direct CBI programme (Mac Reference Mac2015: 3). While it was not pursued, the Australian government’s interest in such a programme demonstrates how extensive and acceptable the concept of a market for citizenship as a commodity has become.

Alongside this increasing commodification of citizenship, there have also been significant changes in international taxation practices. Since 2000, multilateral organisations such as the OECD have taken concrete steps to tackle tax haven abuse (Rawlings Reference Rawlings2005, Reference Rawlings2007). Before citizenship, taxation, or a lack thereof, had become effectively commodified as countries competed to attract investment by lowering tax rates (and in tax havens, not having any income tax at all) (Christians Reference Christians2017). The OECD’s initiatives have focused on reducing ‘harmful tax competition’ using complex offshore structures (Rawlings Reference Rawlings2005, Reference Rawlings2007; Sharman Reference Sharman2006). To circumvent the OECD’s measures against OFCs, HNWIs could instead move abroad with their global investments intact and reduce their tax liabilities through navigating the arbitraged boundaries between abode, citizenship, domicile, home, and residency.

Tax holidays, concessions, and rate reductions together with free trade zones, once favoured policies for attracting FDI in the 1970s and 1980s, have thus been replaced by the figure of the ‘noble’ individual investor who embodies capital mobility and is worthy of at least residency or, where they are particularly welcome and sought after, citizenship. The HNWI, and ‘the investor’ can at once be the same personage or distinguished by hopes for entrepreneurship that lead to economic growth, employment opportunities, and ‘downstream’ auxiliary opportunities for local service sectors – banking and finance, construction, hospitality, real estate, recreation and tourism. Judgments for investments and their benefits are built into visa regimes from the American EB-5, through to the United Kingdom’s Tier One permits (2008–2022) and Malta’s citizenship by investing in real estate and government bonds.

Through changing location or moving residence to a country (or countries) offering these programmes, people can reduce tax obligations significantly, either legally, illegally, or through porous and blurred boundaries between licit incomes and illicit circumventions that exist in ambiguous financial and fiscal spaces between these categorisations. As Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham observed, ‘Determining thresholds of distinction – boundaries – between the legal and the illegal will always come, in words, by appeal to powerful state interests or international social mores rather than by an ability to “know” in some objective fashion where the dividing line between the two lies’ (Reference van Schendel, Abraham, van Schendel and Abraham2005: 5).

In 2014, the OECD recommended that countries introduce a Common Reporting Standard (CRS) for the automatic exchange of tax-related information among participants (both OECD countries and non-member states). In 2018, the OECD identified twenty-one countries with RBI/CBI golden passport schemes which posed a risk of tax loss, minimisation, and evasion through potentially bypassing the new CRS measures. The multilateral CRS complements and eclipses the longer standing bilateral Tax Information Exchange Agreements negotiated between individual OECD states and tax havens. Both allow tax authorities to request information about their residents’ offshore investments, accounts, and deposits, although the CRS extends the reach of information sharing by reducing legal barriers and evidentiary thresholds.

The OECD agreed, however, that there might be legitimate reasons for participating in RBI/CBI programmes. These include ‘visa-free travel’, ‘education’, employment, and the ability to ‘live in a country with political stability’ (OECD 2018: 2). Even so, RBI/CBI programmes also pose risks to tax systems together with an increased vulnerability to crime, particularly money laundering. The OECD has emphasised that this risk is greatest where the country offering the RBI/CBI has no physical presence requirements (participants do not actually have to live in the country of which they are resident), are known tax havens, maintain territorial fiscal systems (exclude worldwide income from taxation), provide bespoke agreements on an individual basis, are not parties to the CRS, permit post office box addresses in lieu of physical location, and accept ‘self-certification’ without further due diligence (OECD 2018: 4).

Contemporaneously, OECD and even EU countries are competing for inward FDI with each other and have reimagined ‘the investor’ and the ‘HNWI’ as embodied bearers of capital and the promises of riches they offer in the form of ‘economic growth’, ‘employment opportunities’, and ‘innovation’. The HNWI investor, willing to change nationality, abode, domicile, and residency in exchange for lower tax costs, fulfils not only the criteria for citizenship but has arguably become citizen and denizen par excellence.Footnote ⁸

Conclusion

At its inception, anthropology was associated with territoriality. Culture was viewed as embedded in place, fixed to location. Anthropologists have long since rejected these assumptions of bounded cultures and have acknowledged the influence of mobility, history and the mutually constitutive entanglements between peoples, places, and processes (Gupta & Ferguson Reference Gupta and Ferguson1992). The anthropology of taxation, however, must deal with the fact that tax continues to be associated with territoriality in form and assumption, even where it is collected on worldwide income. Residence in a specific place, in a given territory, governs tax obligations. While anthropologists have abandoned the ‘assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture’ (Gupta & Ferguson Reference Gupta and Ferguson1992: 7), tax authorities have struggled to accommodate transnational mobility, migration, and the reconfiguration of territoriality.

At one level, nation-states seek to reinforce and reinscribe the relationship between territoriality and fiscal policy as it is fixed in abode, domicile, and residency, particularly for the majority of peoples who are bound to place as taxpayers. At another level, nation-states seek to attract capital by providing tax incentives to HNWIs, who are bound by no place, to relocate within and between their borders as investors. Not only has tax residency been turned into a commodity but so too has citizenship, with the acquisition of a home abroad sufficient to confer nationality and claim a changed abode, domicile, and new tax status in countries that pursue the most audacious efforts to lure foreign capital. Nation-states are in effect in conflict with themselves as they make efforts to attract HNWIs and their capital while not losing the tax revenues of their own citizens, not just the wealthy, but new transnational professional classes as well, generating an ongoing fiscal paradox.

These paradoxes in tax policy are evident in debates about abode, domicile, and residency that centre around competing definitions, notions, and ideas of the house, the household, and the home. As Shelley Mallett has concluded, home is ‘multidimensional’ (Reference Mallett2004: 62). The uneven distribution of wealth and income, mirroring intensifying national and global inequalities, can influence what people think of as the ideal home, with schisms emerging between national regulators and tax collectors, who are bound to defend the revenue basis for the local, and transnational, expatriates who have embraced the global. Their livelihoods resonate with Mallet’s observation that ‘home is less about ‘where you are from’ and ‘more about where you are going’ (Reference Mallett2004: 77).

In these negotiations and renegotiations, where concessions and incentives are provided to HNWI investors for whom citizenship has become a commodity and local revenue authorities for whom tax remains an obligation embedded in more fixed notions of place and territoriality, the home as it is expressed in the fiscal categories of abode, domicile, and residence has become reclassified as an offshore opportunity. Tax authorities are challenged by the fact that ‘“home” as a durably fixed place,’ as Gupta and Ferguson have observed, ‘is in doubt’ (Reference Gupta and Ferguson1992: 11). With the commodification of citizenship and residence, sheltered from taxation, these doubts and reclassifications continue to perpetuate the multiple inequalities associated with contemporary global capitalism, whereby elites are released from the ordinary and everyday obligations of the tax-paying household, and are instead free to enjoy the opportunities provided by their global homes and ‘passports of convenience’. To draw from C. Wright Mills and his analysis of the power elite, HNWIs ‘may live in many hotels and houses, but they are bound by no one community.’ Rather ‘they can escape’ (Mills [1956] Reference Mills2000: 3).