Imagine that United States citizens could sell/trade/transfer their citizenship to another person (at the expense of forfeiting their own citizenship).
What effect would it have on society? How much would a citizenship sell for on the open market?
Would the selling parties be deported?
In my opinion, people who could afford to pay for my citizenship (if I were to sell it), could also afford to come into the country legally and would have no need to buy it.
Not sure what you mean by selling, but you can totally “buy” citizenship in many cases. For example, the Canadian Investor Program is/was for wealthy businessmen who make a minimum investment of $800000 (note it’s a guaranteed investment, not a cost), and after a few years of residency you can get your citizenship.
For the transfer of citizenship to be valid, the seller has to leave the country. If they try to come back, they’ll be treated like any other non-citizen who tries to enter. They may eventually be able to regain residency and/or citizenship, but it would be a long and complicated process.
Given the rampant greed and total lack of honor that permeates this society, I think Putin would be a citizen, he would have gotten the rules changed regarding who can run for president, and his army of hackers would be working hard to make him president in 2020.
It would end up like any other product that can be bought or sold - the rich people would end up owning 80+% of it.
So, no need to bribe politicians any more, just literally buy the votes you need to put anyone you want into any office.
Really, it would be far more efficient and cost-effective.
But probably not so great for democracy.
It is.
What if we stipulated that an individual can only own one citizenship at a time? That way Bill Gates couldn’t simply buy thousands of citizenships.
Sure, it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely. It would be far more cost effective to buy campaign ads than to import new voters.
Personally, I would have no issue with people being able to swap citizenship with nationals of other countries, by buying, selling, or straight exchange. Gets people who want to be here, here, and people who don’t want to be here, out.
Unless you are sticking these new non-citizens on a raft in international waters, where would they go? Other countries have their own rules and regs concerning citizenry, y’know.
Yes, it would require other countries to reciprocate. We couldn’t have stateless people.
Then he’ll just push it back a step. Find a few thousand economically desperate US citizens, match them with the same number of non-citizens who want to move to the US, and then hire the new citizens for the purposes of voting as Bill tells them to. I’m sure you could find lots of people who would be willing to vote as told for the opportunity to live in the US as a citizen.
But as we saw with Trump, a few thousand votes in the right place can outweigh millions of votes in the wrong place. It wouldn’t take all that much to steer a key election the way you want it.
This effect would be even more pronounced in mid-term elections and special elections where voter turnout is usually lower. The people who were brought in this way would be expected to vote every time they are told to vote.
I’d trade even up with a Canadian. But I might have to pony up a case of beer to sweeten the deal.
Who says it is not?
It’s illegal to bribe people into voting a certain way. That wouldn’t change. Since voting is done by secret ballot, there wouldn’t be any way for Mr. Moneybags to verify they voted the “correct” way.
There are things we could do to disincentivize vote buying. We could require newly minted citizens to wait 5 years before they can vote. Undercover sting operations against vote buyers, with severe penalties against perpetrators. Vote buying wouldn’t be very attractive from an economic cost/benefit standpoint.
Wow…How would…um…Wow.
Putin is now literally* Lex Luthor to Democrats.
How would he have gotten the Constitutional amendment required for him to be president?
How many Facebook ads do our conspiracy theorist uncles have to scroll over in order for Putin to pull off a plot like this?
*figuratively
The U.S. has a similar program.
The US program requires a $500k to $1m investment (depending on things) to get a Green Card. And you have to live in the US for 5 years with a Green Card in order to apply for citizenship, or live with your US-citizen spouse for 3 years.
That puts the monetary cost of US citizenship at whatever the opportunity cost of tying up $500k-1m for 3-5 years is. On average, fairly low, since there are plenty of good market-price opportunities to invest in new businesses in the US. There’s also a time commitment, but assuming you want to be a US citizen, you probably also want to live here, so that’s not much of a cost.
I would expect that allowing citizenship to be bought and sold on the open market would drive the price up substantially, since it would greatly expand the demand. There are very few people who have a spare $500k/$1m to invest. On the other hand, if you could just buy it outright, there would be a lot of people who can scrape together $10s of thousands.
Many people close to death would be happy to sell their citizenship. They’re not going to need it much longer anyway.