The trouble with selling your citizenship is what happens next. Where are you going to go? You sell your citizenship, and ICE puts you on a bus to Mexico the next day. Except Mexico isn’t going to take you unless you also have Mexican citizenship.
So unless your plan is to sell your citizenship, hand the money to your family, and then blow your brains out, this isn’t going to work out very well.
I could imagine a cottage industry of people coming to the United States to give birth, and then immediately selling the citizenship of their newborn baby, and then heading back home. I mean, people already sometimes do this so their child can have American citizenship.
If we allow people on their deathbeds to sign away their citizenship just before they die, on the theory that ICE isn’t going to arrest and deport someone in a hospital bed, well, I guess that could happen. But we now live in a dystopia where citizenship isn’t an inalienable right, instead it’s a form of property. So in this world gone mad I guess the ICE agents just rip off the IVs and oxygen and drag your limp form down the hall to the waiting bus as the machine goes “beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…”
And on that note, what’s the value of “citizenship” in a YA dystopia? If the plutocrats make all the decisions anyway, what’s in it for the plutocrats to allow their subjects to convey intangible property that in reality belongs to the plutocrats? The oligarchs are the ones who decides who gets to live where, not the people. Citizenship isn’t guaranteed by right, it’s a privilege you earn by your service to your masters. So if anyone would have the right to sell citizenship it’s the oligarchs, not the peasants.
It seems reasonable that when you “sell” your citizenship, you’d get the buyer’s citizenship in return. Sort of a student exchange program, except permanent. Well, permanent until you could find another taker to swap with, anyway.
Obviously all involved countries would have to sign off on this. And, just as obviously, it wouldn’t always be the case that the (former) USian would be the one getting paid - there would be cases where the USian wanted to leave more than the person they’re swapping with, in which case the USian would pay them.
Were this to happen I imagine that you’d fairly rapidly notice that free market forces would cause these ‘human capital exchange rates’ to become a reasonable indicator of how much people want to be in a country - we’d learn which countries the “shitholes” really are.
Well, hypothetically, I could picture an elderly American (“John”) swapping citizenship with a young adult from, say, Belize (“Sam”). John leaves the U.S. with his accumulated wealth and retires to Belize, which will tax to pay for law enforcement and senior medical care but not for a bloated military, so taxes may be low enough for John to live the rest of his life off his savings. Sam, meanwhile, gets to start a new life by going to an American university and starting a career and 30-40 years later, he’s in John’s former position and considering expatriating.
The U.S. doesn’t have to pay for John’s elderly medical care, gets an energetic young worker (and working taxpayer) in return. Belize might become one big retirement community, attracting medical professionals who specialize in geriatrics. Win-win?