EU's Attacks on Golden Passport Schemes Risk Finishing Off Globalization for Good

Less than a week ago, the European Union ruled that Malta's so-called golden passport scheme, through which the world's richest can invest a large sum in the country in exchange for citizenship, is illegal. The Eurocrats' objection is that Malta treats access to Europe as a "commercial transaction" through which those with money can simply enter and stay not just in the island country but anywhere in the bloc. On a continent that is seeing increased popular skepticism of foreign presence in recent years, perhaps it is not surprising that the move would be politically palatable.

But even among the blatantly anti-immigrant far-right, targeting the world's richest should not be a priority. The logic behind limiting immigration often comes down to the immigrants stealing jobs from the native population, driving down wages, and hogging limited public resources while providing little in return. This is clearly not the case for the world's richest. With their wealth, they need not even have a job in the new country, and they can pay for premium prices on anything from hospitals to education, the types that most locals cannot afford anyway. 

If anything, the far-right should see the ultra-rich as the immigrants they want. Often, the world's wealthiest are only too happy to send their children into elite Western education, meaning that European nationalists should not see them as a threat to Christian values. And their wealth will create jobs, buy up real estate, and generate additional consumption in ways that only help the left-behind places that usually support the far-right more quickly get out of economic doldrums that they have found themselves in through deindustrialization and emigration to more economically productive places. 

The increasing scrutiny against the likes of Malta's golden-passport scheme shows that a new era of deglobalization is now defying both political and economic logic. I had always believed that even in the most closed-off, autarkic world, they would remain a globalized elite, running the multinational corporations and transnational political institutions that are necessary to ensure different countries communicate and fulfill market demands. Even in earlier historical eras when international transport was much slower, intrepid traders crossed continents. The same should remain true today.

For such a globalized elite, identity is and should be fluid, with where they go and live pretty much, as the EU stated, responsive to commercial transactions. It is only rational that they are given access to other countries, sometimes through the purchase of a new passport, to facilitate further transactions that underpin their need to be globalized in the first place. As much as the likes of Trump dislike the reality, as long as products and services, not to mention diplomacy and war, flow across national borders, the globalized elite, however small, needs to exist and flourish.

And the attacks have not stopped. Trump's announcement today that he will slap a 100% tariff on any American movie not shot in the US will further hurt the movement of rich people, this time the kind that succeeded in the cultural business. With Hollywood actors and directors no longer showing up at the likes of Malta Film Studios, it is not just the direct people-to-people exchange that gets hammered. It is the cultural exchange that inspires people to become global, including showing off the beauty of Malta to the world, that also been beaten down.

Clearly, the trade war he initiated has now destroyed such norms, not just the economic rationale of international commerce, but also any inhibitions to go after those partaking and succeeding in it. Small countries that depend on the movement of trade and people, whether it be Singapore, Dubai, or indeed Malta, will be the primary victims. The EU may think that preventing rich foreigners from buying European passports or permanent residency is a bureaucratic matter of taking back border control, but in reality, it is destroying one of the last planks of globalization that has yet to be attacked so far.