Why We Should Sell Citizenship on eBay
I have a couple of friends and more relatives who are ticket-clippers in visa-mills. Academics, in other words.
The higher education we sell in this country isn't worth a damn compared to good universities in Asia, and is more expensive, but it comes with the promise of a slice of rights to the country's natural resources, and its particular political, administrative and justice systems build up by our ancestors.
People are willing to pay for a slice of the fruit of that, and to get away from the alternative traditions of their homelands. No judgement. My wife did just that, so did many of my friends.
But then they complain that the exact things they paid to leave behind are following them here in record numbers.
"Where does Australia find these people???" an Arab friend once asked me in horror.
"Diluting out" minor shareholders by management recklessly selling new shares is an offence, and company directors have gone to jail for it.
But there are no such consequences for the diluting out of working-class citizens by politicians, by academics, and by abusive and incompetent corporate managers who can't retain local staff and have to depend on "bonded labour" immigrants on temporary visas. The whole system is a ponzi scam, and rife with waste, fraud, sexual coercion and vote-banking. I don't judge the buyers of citizenship, but I certainly judge the (elite, well-connected and treasonous) sellers!
Ancient Byzantium used to recruit its Varangian Guard by essentially selling positions, and citizenship with it. Mediaeval Catholicism was rife with simony, and Early Modern Spain bought and sold basically all government posts. I used to think this was terrible, but I slowly learned the present system in Western countries is nothing more than a wasteful, corrupt, politicised caricature of its ancient equivalents.
An investor's loyalty to his investment is nothing particularly strong or admirable, but it is a stronger attachment to a homeland than the attitudes indoctrinated into new immigrants by the institutions they are required to please. And the present system openly favours criminals, corrupt officials of defeated regimes, and the spoiled children of bribe-sucking bureaucrats, who have the time, the lack of shame, and the contacts required to find the easy (non-education) paths in.
Cut out the middlemen.
End the waste, the corruption, the sexual coercion and the vote-banking. Turn citizenship into an alienable form of property, and allow people to sell theirs on the market IF they have arranged legal residence elsewhere.
If policymakers want to recruit particular types of foreigners, they can offer grants and subsidies to qualifying fireigners to purchase citizenship. Skilled workers, romantic partners, persecuted LGBTIQ2Ss etc etc.
And any local citizen who is willing to sell out probably isn't much of a citizen anyway. I wouldn't sell, but a junkie with a statistical life expectancy of seven years might like to get residence in a cheap-drugs country and move there in return for payment. So might various reverse-Nationalist ideologues of the sort that infest politics and academia.
One in, one out. Win-win.
#controversial #UnpopularOpinion #migration #politics