German Law Journal (2024), 25, pp.

1290–1307
doi:10.1017/glj.2024.73

ARTICLE

Special Issue: Legal Infrastructures

Citizenship as Legal Infrastructure

Christian Brown Prener1 and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen2
1
European University Institute, Florence, Italy and 2University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Email: [email protected]

(Received 06 December 2024; accepted 09 December 2024)

Abstract
Whenever a person intends to cross a border, citizenship de facto determines—more than any other status—
whether that person can enter the territory of another state. Yet, despite its ubiquity and centrality within global
mobility infrastructures, the exact mechanisms through which citizenship shapes human movement on the
planetary scale remain surprisingly ambiguous. This Article examines the multifaceted ways in which
citizenship operates as an organizing principle within the complex of rules and norms governing transnational
human mobility, including how the increasing acceptance of dual nationality status and the emergence of
citizenship-by-investment schemes reverberate throughout the legal infrastructure and create new pathways for
elite mobility. Using citizenship as an exploratory lens, the Article thereby seeks to theoretically complement
and nuance existing scholarship in migration and mobility studies, arguing that physical space remains the
dominant structure for human mobility. As we show, legal infrastructures reconfigure access to human mobility
in ways that simultaneously fragment and compress physical space as it pertains to transnational movement.

Keywords: Citizenship; legal infrastructure; migration; tourism; free movement; transnational mobility

A. Introduction
Technological advances have made transnational human movement easier than ever.1 For the first
time in history and for large parts of the global population, transnational mobility2 is both
relatively safe and affordable.3 As a result, human movement has risen enormously in the past
three decades,4 with yearly border crossing estimates now close to three billion globally.5 Tourists
make up a striking eighty-two percent of all transnational movement, international migrants
1
See generally Massimo Livi Bacci, Is Homo sapiens A Growingly Mobile Species (In the Very Long Run)?, in HANDBOOK OF
HUMAN MOBILITY AND MIGRATION (Ettore Recchi & Mirna Safi eds., 2024); HEIN DE HAAS, HOW MIGRATION REALLY
WORKS: THE FACTS ABOUT THE MOST DIVISIVE ISSUE IN POLITICS (2023).
2
This Article uses mobility as reference to human spatial mobility, that is, the physical movement of human beings in space and
time. Compare this term with social mobility, which refers to a change in societal position. For more on the relation between these two
archetypes of mobility, see AHARON KELLERMAN, UNDERSTANDING PERSONAL MOBILITIES (2023); Adrian Favell & Ettore Recchi,
Social Mobility and Spatial Mobility, in SOCIOLOGY OF THE EUROPEAN UNION 50–75 (Adrian Favell & Virginie Guiraudon eds., 2011).
3
See HEIN DE HAAS, supra note 1; VINCENT CHETAIL, INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION LAW 3 (2019).
4
See generally Ettore Recchi & Mirna Safi, Introduction, in HANDBOOK OF HUMAN MOBILITY AND MIGRATION, supra note 1;
STEFFEN MAU, SORTING MACHINES: THE REINVENTION OF THE BORDER IN THE 21ST CENTURY (2022); AXEL DREHER, NOEL
G. GASTON & PIM MARTENS, MEASURING GLOBALISATION: GAUGING ITS CONSEQUENCES (2008).
5
See generally EMANUEL DEUTSCHMANN, MAPPING THE TRANSNATIONAL WORLD (2022); Ettore Recchi, Emamnuel
Deutschmann & Michele Vespe, Estimating Transnational Human Mobility on a Global Scale (Eur. Univ. Inst., Working
Paper No. RSCAS 2019/30, 2019).

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the German Law Journal. This is an Open Access article,
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
 German Law Journal 1291

16.9 percent, while refugees and asylum seekers comprise less than one percent.6 Yet, despite
borders being crossed by more people and at a higher frequency than ever before, human mobility
has not become more global in nature, nor have borders become more permeable in recent years.7
Increases in transnational movement are, on the contrary, primarily driven by a small minority of
privileged citizens who travel more often and to more destinations, while the majority of the global
population is increasingly limited in their ability to move beyond the territory of the state to which
they “belong.”8
Coinciding with this global mobility divide, recent empirical observations have shown that
transnational mobility—contrary to popular belief—tends to cluster within, not across,
geographical regions.9 Research by Deutschmann and Recchi shows that around eighty percent
of all transnational mobility happens within world regions, and only twenty percent between
regions.10 In other words, international human mobility is in fact not particularly global, or inter-
regional, in nature, but overwhelmingly regionalized. While annual cross-border movements have
steadily increased over the past decades, longitudinal data going back to the 1960s point to the
regionalized spatial pattern of transnational movement being remarkably robust across time.11
Based on these observations, Deutschmann & Recchi conclude that physical space remains the
dominant structure shaping transnational movement and that the notion that human mobility has
undergone a “death of distance”12 or a “time–space compression”13 is empirically unfounded.14
The robust relationship between human mobility and physical space over time is a remarkable
finding. It has significant implications not only for scholarly explanations of major shifts in
immigration law and policy, as linked to for example the advent of “jet age asylum-seekers,”15 but
also for ongoing policy discussions in many Global North countries, which for decades have
remained wedded to a “deterrence paradigm”16 and rarely, if ever, consider how transnational
migration control and legal mechanisms of non-entrée might obstruct free movement
arrangements in other parts of the world.17 The conclusion drawn by Deutschmann and
Recchi, however, seems to miss the other side of the equation—namely the extent to which
complex webs of law related to, for example, immigration, travel, and deterrence themselves
reconfigure transnational spaces for human mobility. It is not geographical distance, a lack of

6
DEUTSCHMANN, supra note 5, at 6.
7
Ettore Recchi & Emanuel Deutschmann, How Global Is International Mobility?, in HANDBOOK ON HUMAN MOBILITY AND
MIGRATION, supra note 1; MAU, supra note 4.
8
Steffen Mau, Fabian Gülzau, Lena Laube & Natascha Zaun, The Global Mobility Divide: How Visa Policies Have Evolved
over Time, 41 J. ETHNIC & MIGRATION STUD. 1192 (2015); ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, THE HUMAN CONSEQUENCE 18 (1998);
Thomas Spijkerboer, The Global Mobility Infrastructure: Reconceptualising the Externalisation of Migration Control, 20 EUR.
J. MIGRATION & L. 452 (2018).
9
See Recchi & Deutschmann, supra note 7.
10
See DEUTSCHMANN, supra note 5; Recchi et al., supra note 5; Recchi & Deutschmann, supra note 7.
11
Recchi & Deutschmann, supra note 7. For more on levy-flight patterns of human movement, see Dirk Brockmann,
Levente Hufnagel & Theo Geisel, The Scaling Laws of Human Travel, 439 NATURE 462–65 (2006).
12
FRANCIS CAIRNCROSS, THE DEATH OF DISTANCE: HOW THE COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION WILL CHANGE OUR LIVES
(1997).
13
DAVID HARVEY, THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY 240 (1989).
14
DEUTSCHMANN, supra note 5, at 126, 133–34.
15
David A. Martin, The New Asylum Seekers, in THE NEW ASYLUM SEEKERS: REFUGEE LAW IN THE 1980S, 1 (David
A. Martin ed., 1988); Matthew J. Gibney, The State of Asylum: Democratisation, Judicialisation and Evolution of Refugee Policy,
in THE REFUGEES CONVENTION 50 YEARS ON: GLOBALISATION AND INTERNATIONAL LAW 16 (Susan Kneebone ed., 2003).
16
Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen & Nikolas Feith Tan, The End of the Deterrence Paradigm? Future Directions for Global
Refugee Policy, 5 J. ON MIGRATION & HUM. SEC. 28, 28 (2017).
17
See generally James C. Hathaway & Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Non-Refoulement in a World of Cooperative Deterrence,
53 COLUM. J. TRANSNAT’L L. 235 (2014).; Marie Deridder, Lotte Pelckmans & Emilia Ward, Reversing the Gaze: West Africa
Performing the EU Migration-Development-Security Nexus, 51 ANTHROPOLOGIE & DÉVELOPPEMENT 9 (2020) (Fr.); Rahmane
Idrissa, Dialogue in Divergence: The Impact of EU Migration Policy on West African Integration: The Cases of Nigeria, Mali,
and Niger, FRIEDRICH EBERT STIFTUNG 1 (2019) (Ger.).
1292 Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen

economic capacity, nor historical similarities that deter, say, Mexicans from crossing the border
into the United States, North Koreans from entering South Korean territory, or Tunisians from
entering the Schengen Area. In each of these cases, an assemblage of domestic, regional, and
international laws creates additional sociotechnical barriers for mobility between otherwise
proximate geographies.18
Without refuting the empirical observations around the enduring centrality of physical space or
“distance decay” for human mobility,19 a central premise for this Article is that transnational
movement cannot be reduced to a function of “spatial nearness” alone. In each of the examples
above, law—together with its associated material configurations of border controls,20
transportation services, airports and harbors—determine which borders a person can cross,
how quickly they get to pass, for what purpose, and at what cost.21 Laws related to human
mobility, in other words, both fragment and compress geographical distances, and as such
significantly reshape global mobility patterns. This speaks not only to law’s infrastructural
properties, but also to how, beyond geography and technology, law today has become a central
organizing medium for the mobility not only of people, but also of goods, money, and
information.
Yet, despite its ubiquity, the mechanisms by which law shapes human mobility on the global
scale remain unclear and often obscured. Rules related to human mobility are dispersed across
numerous fields of study—from human rights law, refugee and humanitarian law, through visa
and diplomacy law, maritime and aviation law, labor law, immigration law, and nationality law, to
name but a few.22 Traditional legal research on this issue is not only thematically and
geographically skewed,23 it has also remained largely siloed in terms of adopting regime-specific
perspectives.24 Consequently, we know surprisingly little about how legal mobility regimes
interact and reconfigure in response to each other, and the outcomes produced by these
dynamics.25 Different calls have been made for more multidimensional and non-formalist
approaches to the legal regimes that govern human mobility.26 Recent research has already shown

18
William H. Byrne & Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Untangling the Legal Infrastructure of Schengen, 9 EUR. PAPERS 157
(2024).
19
Whereby the likelihood of movement between two places decreases as the distance between them increases. See Harvey
J. Miller, Tobler’s First Law and Spatial Analysis, 94 ANNALS THE ASS’N AM. GEOGRAPHERS 284, 284–89 (2004); Robert Toovey
Walker, Geography, Von Thünen, And Tobler’s First Law: Tracing The Evolution of A Concept, 112 GEOGRAPHICAL REV. 591
(2022).
20
See generally PETRA MOLNAR, THE WALLS HAVE EYES: SURVIVING MIGRATION IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
(2024); Spijkerboer, supra note 8.
21
See generally E. Tendayi Achiume, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen & Thomas Spijkerboer, Introduction to the Symposium
on COVID-19, Global Mobility and International Law, 114 AM. J. INT’L L. UNBOUND 312 (2020); Vincent Chetail, The
Architecture of International Migration Law: A Deconstructivist Design of Complexity and Contradiction, 111 AM. J. INT’L
L. UNBOUND 18 (2017).
22
See Vincent Chetail, Professor of Int’l L. at the Graduate Inst. of Int’l and Dev. Stud., Remarks at the one-hundred-tenth
meeting of the American Society of International Law: Conceptualizing International Migration Law, in AM. SOC’Y INT’L
L. PROC., at 201 (2017).
23
See Thomas Spijkerboer, The Geopolitics of Knowledge Production in International Migration Law, in RESEARCH
HANDBOOK ON THE LAW AND POLITICS OF MIGRATION 172 (Catherine Dauvergne ed., 2021).
24
See Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Moving Beyond the Refugee Law Paradigm, 111 AM. J. INT’L L. UNBOUND 8, 8–12 (2017); Chetail,
supra note 21.
25
See William H. Byrne, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, & Nora Stappert, Legal Infrastructures: Towards a Conceptual
Framework, 25 GERMAN L.J. 1229 (2024) (appearing in this same special issue). See also, MAU, supra note 4; Mikael Rask
Madsen & Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Regime Entanglement in the Emergence of Interstitial Legal Fields: Denmark and the
Uneasy Marriage of Human Rights and Migration Law, 40 NORDIQUES 1 (2021) (Fr.).
26
See, e.g., Chantal Thomas, What Does the Emerging International Law of Migration Mean for Sovereignty?, 14 MELBOURNE
J. INT’L L. 1 (2013); Cathryn Costello & Itamar Mann, Border Justice: Migration and Accountability for Human Rights
Violations, 21 GERMAN L.J. 311–34 (2020); Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Migration Emergencies, 68 HASTINGS L.J. 118 (2017); Chetail,
supra note 22.
 German Law Journal 1293

how legal mobility regimes indeed do interact and entangle in ways that may eventually impact
and reshape its constituent parts27 with both intended and unintended systemic effects for the
evolution of international law.28 For example, the so-called “human rights turn”29 within
international refugee law, and subsequent uptake of migration cases before regional human rights
courts and international human rights bodies, illustrates how the two fields over the course of a
gradual normative process have become so intimately interdependent that it is now virtually
impossible to separate one from the other.30
In contribution to this burgeoning scholarship, this Article aims to unpack some of the
complexities that pertain to the “juridical puzzle”31 that is “global mobility law.” It does so in
two steps: The first section considers the benefits and pitfalls of approaching an inherently
fragmented legal field such as mobility law as a legal infrastructure and, through this lens,
reconnects existing scholarship on human mobilities with a legal perspective on how
interlocking norms reconfigure physical space and mobility patterns. In the second section, we
argue that citizenship provides a particularly useful analytical entry point for understanding the
distributive effects of this legal infrastructure. As the legal status connecting person and state,
citizenship not only serves as the prime determinant of individuals’ legal access to and range of
transnational mobility, 32 but also functions as an organizing principle across the wide array of
different rules and norms governing this area. Finally, we turn to how the legal infrastructure for
citizenship itself is evolving through an increasing acceptance of dual nationality status across
jurisdictions, and specifically how this creates new mobility pathways for a small global elite
capable of navigating the opportunities this affords them.

B. The Legal Infrastructure of Transnational Mobility

A central theme in this Special Issue concerns the benefits and pitfalls of approaching assemblages
of legal regimes as legal infrastructure for the purpose of improving current understandings of the
interplay between law and socio-material dynamics.33 Despite the ontology of “infrastructure”
becoming increasingly open-ended within the social sciences, the notion that formally different
laws—in this case pertaining to human mobility—operate as one still requires an expansive view
on how law and infrastructure come together, affect each other, and their individual ontological
meanings34—which is clear for neither.35 Infrastructures have been described as “matter that

27
See generally Rask Madsen & Gammeltoft-Hansen supra note 25; Anna Wyss & Janine Dahinden, Disentangling
Entangled Mobilities: Reflections on Forms of Knowledge Production Within Migration Studies, 10 COMP. MIGRATION STUD. 33
(2022); ENTANGLED LEGALITIES BEYOND THE STATE (Nico Krisch ed., 2021).
28
See Dimitry Kochenov, Inter-Legality—Citizenship—Inter-Citizenship, in THE CHALLENGE OF INTER-LEGALITY 133 (Jan
Klabbers & Gianluigi Palombella eds., 2019).
29
Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Extraterritorial human rights obligations in regard to refugees and migrants in THE
ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK ON EXTRATERRITORIAL HUMAN RIGHTS OBLIGATIONS (Mark Gibney, Gamze Erden Türkelli, Markus
Krajewski, Wouter Vandenhole eds., 2021) See also RUTH RUBIO-MARIN, HUMAN RIGHTS AND IMMIGRATION (2014).
30
See, e.g., JAMES C. HATHAWAY, THE RIGHTS OF REFUGEES UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW (2005); VINCENT CHETAIL,
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION LAW (2019); Vincent Chetail, Migration and International Law: A Short Introduction, in
INTERNATIONAL LAW AND MIGRATION 1 (Vincent Chetail ed., 2016); Rask Madsen & Gammeltoft-Hansen supra, note 25.
31
RICHARD B. LILLICH, THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF ALIENS IN CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL LAW 122 (1984).
32
See generally AYELET SHACHAR, THE BIRTHRIGHT LOTTERY: CITIZENSHIP AND GLOBAL INEQUALITY (2009); Seyla
Benhabib, THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS: ALIENS, RESIDENTS, AND CITIZENS (2000); Francesca Strumia, Migrant Citizenship:
Rethinking the Citizenship-Mobility Nexus, 38 NORDIC J. SOC. L. 127 (2024).
33
See Byrne et al., supra note 25.
34
As opposed to a “laws of infrastructures” framework, which denotes the symbiotic relationship between law and physical,
digital, or other socio-material infrastructures, for example the physical structures and services involved in their enforcement
and the laws related thereto, as well as the power and politics pertaining to infrastructures. See Byrne et al., supra note 25.
35
See Benedict Kingsbury & Nahuel Maisley, Infrastructures and Laws: Publics and Publicness, 17 ANN. REV. LAW & SOC.
SCI. 353–73 (2021).
1294 Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen

enable the movement of other matter,”36 “the grounds on which other technologies can operate,”37
or as “material systems of substrates”38 working invisibly to make “other things work.”39 Today,
however, infrastructure terminology pertains as much to railroads, roads, and harbors as it does to
the socio-technical distribution of digital information or financial ecosystems.40 Despite this
enlargement of its terminological meaning, a certain insistence remains consistent within the
literature: Infrastructures are, at some level, human-made—something built as opposed to
natural.41 In addition, infrastructures are defined as much by their structure as they are by the set
of “relations, processes and imaginations”42 that connect their component parts; “they are things
but also the relation between things.”43 Enfolding and overlapping in multiple coexisting systems,
infrastructural relations are often both recursive and entangled.44 Personal access to the internet,
for instance, relies on a computer connected to a host of network cables in the ground—both of
which rely on electricity, which relies on power plants, which are in turn controlled by computer
systems. Here, computers are both the parent and child of the systems that facilitate access to the
internet. An infrastructure is thus not a hard-shelled system, “[n]ever a ‘thing’”45 on which a
particular set of functions or technologies operate, but always in a relationship or an infinite
regress of relationships.
To speak of global mobility law as infrastructure in this vein may be met with opposition
from certain scholars, arguing that the field lacks the kind of “formal or coherent multilateral
institutional framework regulating states’ responses to international migration” that one would
normally expect from international law.46 Aleinikoff suggests that the field of international
migration law “may well be conceived of as a body of legal norms of substance, but not one of
architecture.”47 Mégret questions whether the global body of law pertaining to human mobility
might be more of a “law of obstacles to human mobility than a body of law premised on a more
fundamental commitment to freedom of movement,”48 and Chetail emphasizes that the
architecture of international migration law is so contradictory, distorted, and asymmetrical that
the legal field is better described in deconstructionist terms.49 Shortcomings in terms of both
codification issues and uneven ratification of existing instruments has led to arguments that
“[w]hen it comes to human mobility, only refugees are the object of a legal regime.”50 The legal
framework for human mobility is indeed—as Lillich describes it—“a giant unassembled

36
Brian Larkin, The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure, 42 ANN. REV. ANTHROPOLOGY 327, 329 (2013).
37
Michael Fisch, Tokyo’s Commuter Train Suicides and the Society of Emergence, 28 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 320,
320–43 (2012).
38
Susan Leigh Star, The Ethnography of Infrastructure, 43 AM. BEHAV. SCIENTIST 377, 377–91 (1999).
39
Id. at 380.
40
Larkin, supra note 36; Byrne et al, supra note 25.
41
Larkin, supra note 36.
42
Benedict Kingsbury, Infrastructure and InfraReg: On Rousing the International Law “Wizards of Is”, 8 CAMBRIDGE INT’L
L.J. 171, 179 (2019).
43
Larkin, supra note 36, at 329.
44
See Penny Harvey, Infrastructures In and Out of Time: The Promise of Roads in Contemporary Peru, in THE PROMISE OF
INFRASTRUCTURE 84 (Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand & Akhil Gupta eds., 2018).
45
GREGORY BATESON, STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND 249 (1978).
46
Alexander Betts, Introduction, in GLOBAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE (Alexander Betts ed., 2011).
47
Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff, Toward a Global System of Human Mobility: Three Thoughts, 111 AM. J. INT’L
L. UNBOUND 24 (2017); Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff, International Legal Norms on Migration: Substance Without
Architecture, in INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION LAW: DEVELOPING PARADIGMS AND KEY CHALLENGES 471 (Ryszard
Cholewinski, Richard Perruchoud & Evan MacDonald eds., 2007).
48
Frédéric Mégret, Transnational Mobility, the International Law of Aliens, and the Origins of Global Migration Law, 111
AM. J. INT’L L. UNBOUND 13, 13 (2017).
49
Chetail, supra note 21.
50
Antoine Pécoud, Philosophies of Migration Governance in a Globalizing World, 18 GLOBALIZATIONS 103, 103, 106–07
(2021).
 German Law Journal 1295

juridical jigsaw puzzle,” for which “the number of pieces is uncertain, and the grand design is
still emerging.”51
Yet, it is precisely for these reasons that an infrastructural lens may be useful. First, in
contrast to more doctrinal approaches invariably emphasizing normative gaps and
fragmentation, an infrastructure approach enables us to explore normative connections
and conjoined impacts between formally separate legal regimes. Ascertaining a person’s access
to transnational movement only really makes sense when considering how different laws
interoperate.52 In his article elsewhere in this Special Issue, Frédéric Mégret traces how travel
visas have become a “ubiquitous legal infrastructure” for everyday mobility, with broad-scale
and heavily skewed impact on global mobility.53 On their own, however, visa rules are largely
ineffective in preventing the physical arrival of, for example, asylum-seekers, thereby
triggering core obligations of prospective host states in the Global North. The enforcement of
visa rules instead depends on other legal constructs. The most important being the global
spread of carrier sanction legislation, by which commercial travel operators are fined for
carrying passengers without proper travel authorization. This has led to a de facto
privatization of migration control, requiring airlines across the world to perform extensive
pre-embarkation screening and registrations.54 Another is the host of bilateral and cross-
regional agreements between the Global North and transit and origin countries, enlisting
national authorities in these states to perform exit or en route document and migration
control.55 It is only through the interaction between these different legal constructs that the
osmotic “filtration” instigated by visa regimes gains its practical significance for (in)access to
transnational mobility.56 And it is only by bringing these different elements—of which the
above-mentioned are only a few examples—into constellation that we may appreciate what
Shachar terms the “shifting borders of the twenty-first century,” by which the physical
enforcement of mobility restrictions in the form of border control is no longer based on
affixed territorial markers, but rather subject to prosperous states’ constant utilization of
sophisticated legal tools to either selectively restrict or incentivize particular mobility
patterns.57
Second, a legal infrastructure approach underscores that mobility law—like all
infrastructures—is not a hard-shelled system operating within a vacuum, but a structure
inextricably linked to other mobility determinants and wider normative structures. Mobility law
both shapes and is being shaped by socioeconomic, spatial, and material structures that pertain to
human mobility.58 Just as geography and technology have historically shaped spatial
accessibility,59 social structures—whether legal, socioeconomic, or material—form their own
topographies of accessibility. Free movement of people regimes (“FMPRs”) are a case in point. As
legal constructs, the European Schengen Zone or the South American Common Market
(“MERCOSUR”) are often hailed as liberal models that enhance social circulation by limiting

51
Lillich, supra note 31, at 122.
52
MAU, supra note 4.
53
See Frédéric Mégret, The Travel Visa as the Ubiquitous Legal Infrastructure of Everyday Global Mobility Arbitrariness, 25
GERMAN L.J. (2024) (appearing in this same special issue).
54
Spijkerboer supra, note 8 at 456; Tilman Rodenhäuser, Another Brick in the Wall: Carrier Sanctions and the Privatization
of Immigration Control, 26 INT’L J. OF REFUGEE L. 223–247 (2014).
55
Hathaway et al supra, note 17.
56
Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Filtering out the Risky Migrant: Migration Control, Risk Theory and the EU, 52 AMID
WORKING PAPER SERIES (2006).
57
AYELET SHACHAR, SHIFTING BORDER: LEGAL CARTOGRAPHIES OF MIGRATION AND MOBILITY (Manchester University
Press, 2020).
58
Byrne et al., supra note 25. See also Niamh Keady-Tabbal and Itamar Mann, Weaponizing rescue: Law and the materiality
of migration management in the Aegean, 36 LEIDEN J. OF INT’L L. 61 (2022) (presenting Keady-Tabbal and Mann’s analysis of
systematic “drift-backs” in the Aegan Sea).
59
Toovey Walker, supra note 19.
1296 Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen

states’ capacity for restricting the entry of foreigners into their territory.60 Yet as “macro-
territorializations”61 formed along socioeconomic divides, FMPRs not only promote social
circulation internally, but are equally legal arrangements that reconfigure social stratifications and
economic divides by simultaneously hardening external borders.62
In our context, the legal infrastructure actively distorts and reorganizes physical mobility
pathways, rather than merely reflecting pre-existing or “natural” boundaries. On the one hand, this
may serve to compress physical distances by creating specific mobility corridors or “legal
wormholes” facilitating specific patterns of transnational movement. Consider, for example, the
bilateral visa waiver agreements between Australia/New Zealand and European countries, the web of
bilateral transnational labor agreements between the Gulf and various countries in Africa and Asia,
or the so-called China–Ghana corridor. Each of these are legal arrangements that have reshaped
mobility flows by facilitating cross-regional movements. Vice versa, legal infrastructures in many
cases carve up and obstruct human movement between otherwise proximate territories. Consider,
for example, how EU enlargements in both 2004 and 2007, and the subsequent Schengen processes,
created new “hard borders” in parts of Eastern Europe, which previously had enjoyed free
movement—literally splitting villages along the new Schengen border down the middle.63
These dynamics can be observed on larger scales as well. International tourism, student
mobility, and labor migration are all characterized by a “global mobility divide”64 produced and
sustained by law. The evolution of visa-waiver rules have meant that travel opportunities have
increased for citizens of OECD countries over the past forty years, but have stagnated or
diminished for citizens in less affluent countries.65 Across the same period, visa costs have become
almost perfectly inversely proportional to the GDP of a country: Low for citizens of wealthy
countries—if not waived entirely—while citizens of poor countries pay exceedingly more for a
visa in both relative and absolute terms, in some countries costing more than an average monthly
income.66 Finally, increasingly high visa rejection rates for citizens of low-income countries
exacerbate the mobility divide. Forty to fifty percent of visa applicants from Ghana, Senegal, and
Nigeria are, for example, rejected in the EU.67
In sum, even if eight out of ten transnational movements do occur intra-regionally, it would be
reductive to conclude, as Deutschmann and Recchi do, that transnational movement is
predominantly structured by physical space.68 What is missing from this interpretation is that
legal infrastructure (re-)configures mobility opportunities across any “portion of the surface of the
globe.”69 Laws related to transnational mobility in many cases do sustain intra-regional
60
Rainer Bauböck, Free movement regimes: is the EU experience exportable?, in HANDBOOK OF HUMAN MOBILITY AND
MIGRATION 242–256 (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024); Diego Acosta Arcarazo, The Expansion of Regional Free Movement
Regimes. Towards a Borderless World?, in CAUGHT IN BETWEEN BORDERS: CITIZENS, MIGRANTS AND HUMANS (Wolf Legal
Publishers, 2019). See also Florian Hofmann & Andrea Jimenez, Unruly Practices at the Border: From Mobility Regimes to
Infrastructures in a Latin American Key, 25 GERMAN L.J. (2024) (appearing in this same special issue).
61
MAU, supra note 4, at 116.
62
SHACHAR, supra note 57; Spijkerboer, supra note 8; MAU, supra note 4.
63
Etienne Ciapin, Western Border Issues of Ukraine in Crisis: Transcarpathia, Border Interface with the European Union, 20
POLITICKÉ VEDY 174–189 (2017).
64
Mau et al. supra note 8; Bauman, supra note 8. See Mathias Czaika, Hein de Haas & Maria Villeras-Varela, The Global
Evolution of Travel Visa Regimes, 44 POPULATION & DEV. REV. 589, 589 (2018) (suggesting that “instead of a global mobility
divide, it is more appropriate to speak of multiple regional mobility divides in an increasingly multi-polar world”).
65
Mau et al., supra note 8.
66
Recchi et al., supra note 7.
67
Commission Report on Statistics on migration to Europe (Apr. 11, 2024), https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/
priorities-2019-2024/promoting-our-european-way-life/statistics-migration-europe_en#irregular-border-crossings; Benjamin
Fox, EU cashes in on €130m in rejected visa applications, EUOBSERVER (June 5, 2024, 11:13 AM), https://euobserver.com/
eu-and-the-world/ar1aabb08b.
68
DEUTSCHMANN, supra note 5, at 126 and 133–134.
69
Gail Lythgoe, The changing “landscape” of sovereignty viewed through the lens of international tax: Reterritorializing the
offshore, 59 CANADIAN YEARBOOK OF INT’L L. [ANNUAIRE CANADIEN DE DROIT INTERNATIONAL] at 171 (2022).
 German Law Journal 1297

movement—either directly, such as in the case of regional free movement arrangements, or

indirectly through corollary barriers for mobility between world regions. Yet, at a more
fundamental level, mobility law enables exactly the kind of “time-space compression”70 that
Deutschmann and Recchi seek to refute—on the one hand, it establishes distinct mobility
corridors across world regions, and on the other it carves up hard boundaries within historically
important spaces of transnational mobility. The importance of law in this context is not a new
insight, even among social scientists. Sociologists such as Torpey have insightfully pointed to visas
and passports as means of “population movement control” through which states “monopolize the
legitimate means of movement.”71 Yet, in both law and other disciplines such analyses have largely
focused on singular legal regimes. The significance of an infrastructural approach in this context is
thus first and foremost to draw out the structural and accumulative effects of law in shaping
transnational mobility patterns.72 It enables a combined perspective on how laws related to
mobility produce “differentiation, stratification, and hierarchy”73—not just in terms of geography
and space, but equally in relation to elements such as nationality, class, and socio-material
conditions.74 Second, by foregrounding law as a particular type of infrastructure, our approach
brings attention to the complex interplay between different bodies of law and how changes in one
legal regime may reverberate across several others, ultimately producing system-wide
reconfigurations. In the following sections, we turn to illustrate each of these dynamics using
citizenship as an explorative frame.

C. Citizenship and (Im)Mobility

Moving beyond regime-specific perspectives to consider the wide array of laws related to human
mobility as forming a particular type of infrastructure presents an immediate analytical challenge.
Like other large-scale infrastructures, it is much easier to offer examples of mobility law’s
structuring role or its impacts from an experiential basis than it is to neatly delineate its
boundaries or attempt to perceive its totality.75 Within infrastructure studies this problem has led
to a host of different analytical strategies, from vertically unearthing different layers (“substrata”)
of infrastructure,76 to shifting attention to the activities and actors that enable infrastructures to
function (referred to as “infrastructural inversion”).77 The solution offered here is more horizontal,
namely to exploratively trace particular nodes of the legal infrastructure—in our case those related
to citizenship. Building on the notion that all infrastructures are “distributions of features or
qualities along several axes,”78 we argue that citizenship operates almost as an axial centerpiece
70
HARVEY, supra note 13; CAIRNCROSS, supra note 12.
71
JOHN C. TORPEY, THE INVENTION OF THE PASSPORT: SURVEILLANCE, CITIZENSHIP AND THE STATE, 5 (Cambridge
University Press, second edition, 2018); Mark B. Salter, The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the
International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics 31 ALTERNATIVES 167, 167 (2006).
72
Spijkerboer supra note 8.; MAU supra note 4.
73
Kingsbury, supra note 42, at 179.
74
See generally Byrne et al., supra note 25.
75
Mark Thomas Young, Now You See It (Now You Don’t): Users, Maintainers and the Invisibility of Infrastructure, in
TECHNOLOGY AND THE CITY: TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF URBAN TECHNOLOGIES 101–119 (Michael Nagenborg, Taylor
Stone, Margot, González Woge, & Pieter E. Vermaas, eds., 2021); Christine L. Borgman, The invisible library: Paradox of the
global information infrastructure, 51 LIBRARY TRENDS (2003).
76
Susan Leigh Star, The Ethnography of Infrastructure, 43 AM. BEHAV. SCIENTIST 377–391 (1999).
77
GEOFFREY C. BOWKER, SCIENCE ON THE RUN: INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND INDUSTRIAL GEOPHYSICS AT
SCHLUMBERGER, 1920–1940 (1994). For more recent critiques of such approaches see, for example, Larkin, supra note 36;
NIKHIL ANAND, AKHIL GUPTA, AND HANNAH APPEL, THE PROMISE OF INFRASTRUCTURE (Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and
Hannah Appel eds., 2018).
78
Kingsbury & Maisley supra note 35; Geoffrey C. Bowker, Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, and David Ribes, Toward
information infrastructure studies: ways of knowing in a networked environment, in INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF INTERNET
RESEARCH 97–117 (J. Hunsinger et al eds., 2009).
1298 Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen

within the legal infrastructure of mobility. As both a medium and outcome of the assemblage of
rules, norms, and institutions that regulate human mobility, citizenship is in one way or the other
connected to most, if not all, legal regimes pertaining to human mobility. Beyond its role within
mobility law, citizenship also influences global mobility across socioeconomic, spatial and material
dimensions. Indeed—as we will come to see—once approached for its multidimensionality,
citizenship, more than any other social or legal status, determines the extent to which an
individual can move freely around the world.79 For this reason, citizenship serves as a particularly
useful lens to explore, examine, and ultimately elucidate how law shapes human movement on the
planetary scale.
In the following, we thus examine how citizenship operates within the legal infrastructure for
human mobility. Specifically, we highlight five central mechanisms through which citizenship
structures global patterns of (im)mobility. First, while in most states citizenship confers on its
holder an—almost—unconditional right to reside and move within the territory of the granting
state, citizenship is simultaneously leveraged to disenfranchise large parts of the world’s
population from moving beyond the borders of the state to which they “belong.” Because only
citizens can move, reside, and work within the borders of the issuing country without fear of
deportation,80 citizenship offers on the one hand an unrivaled degree of freedom of movement
within the territory of the citizenship-granting state, yet on the other it is a status that effectively
ties people down to the physical locality recognized as the territory of the issuing state. Second,
citizenship indirectly provides its holder with varying degrees of extraterritorial mobility
privileges, that is legal permissions granted by other states to cross into territories other than
that of the citizenship-granting state. Extraterritorial mobility privileges are the reason why, for
example, a French citizen may settle or travel in large parts of the world visa-free, while a
Somalian can only travel visa-free to a handful of countries—most of which are other African
states.81 As both bilateral and multilateral visa waiver programs and domestic visa rules almost
exclusively differentiate based on nationality status, extraterritorial mobility privileges pivot on
citizenship. Third, more subtly and on a smaller scale, nationality status shapes transnational
mobility as an increasingly important criterion across a range of other international legal
regimes, including refugee law, human rights law, and statelessness law. Fourth, citizenship
determines not only where a person lives, but also from where a person’s transnational
movement may begin, exhibiting profound impacts on both the spatiotemporal and economic
costs of—and access to—transnational movement. Finally, we consider how two recent and
intersecting legal developments in nationality law—namely the increasing acceptance of dual
nationality status and the emergence of citizenship by investment (“CBI”) schemes—might
reverberate throughout the legal infrastructure of transnational mobility and create new
mobility pathways for economic elites.

I. Citizenship as Mobility Disenfranchisement

Although empirical research shows that transnational movement predominantly occurs within
world regions, it says little about the large demographic left entirely out of such statistics because
they do not move transnationally at all. With respect to spatial mobility, the starting point and
principal feature of citizenship is that it is a legal status that ties people down to the territory in
which they were born—a “spatial fixation”82 of the individual to the geographically delineated area
79
See generally SHACHAR, supra note 32; Benhabib, supra note 32.
80
DIMITRY KOCHENOV, CITIZENSHIP (MIT, 2019). See CHRISTIAN PRENER, DENATIONALISATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
(Brill, 2022) (providing the exception, being deportation following citizenship revocation for terrorist offences or other serious
criminal offences).
81
For an overview of visa requirements according to citizenship status, see, for example, The Passport Index, ARTON, https://
passportindex.org/ (last visited Oct. 15, 2024).
82
Distinct From Harvey’s concept of “spatial fix.”
 German Law Journal 1299

internationally recognized as under the rightful sovereign control of the state.83 While this may
contradict the lived experience of say, a Danish or Singaporean citizen, who precisely because of
their citizenship can travel to more countries than ever before, it is here crucial to emphasize that
while a few “super citizenships” may indeed provide access to a plethora of transnational mobility
opportunities, nationality status per se is never the source of such extraterritorial mobility
privileges. Rather, extraterritorial mobility springs from, and is thus contingent on, other states
granting such mobility privileges based on either domestic law, bilateral or multilateral
agreements. Ultimately, access to another territory is always a privilege contingent on the
hospitality of a receiving state and never a right deriving from citizenship. With respect to
transnational mobility, citizenship represents at its core rather immobility—a legal and ultimately
physical confinement of the individual to the territory of the issuing state.84 The fact that most
states today grant their citizens a right to leave their own country85 has not changed this
fundamental aspect of the citizenship–mobility nexus, as the exit from one country always relies
on the entering of another. In the absence of a permissive right—such as a visa—to enter another
country, the legal infrastructure of mobility works to ensure that people remain where they hold
citizenship. From this perspective, the minority of the global population who, due to the color of
their passport, may travel and reside within large parts of world are thus not transnationally
mobile because of their citizenship, but rather because of mobility law having been organized
around citizenship.
That citizenship ties people down to territories is abundantly evident in the spatial distribution
of the global population. As shown by Milanovic, a hallmark of the spatial distribution of the
global population is indeed that people overwhelmingly live where they are born.86 When coupled
with the fact that international migrants account for less than four percent of the world’s
population87 and citizenship acquisition after birth remains an exceptionally rare occurrence—
currently accounting for less than two percent of all citizenship statuses in the world88—the
absolute majority of the global population not only live where they are born—they live where they
hold citizenship. The fact that transnational movement has soared tremendously over the past
decades89 is not an indication that this territorial confinement prompted by citizenship has
lessened. On the contrary, it is a testament to, on the one hand, the technological ease and
affordability of cross-border travel today, and, on the other hand, the unprecedented degree of
access to visa-free movement that a small minority of the world’s more privileged citizens enjoy.
For the absolute majority of the global population, freedom of movement exists only within the
geographically delineated area, territory, to which they “belong”—and in some cases not even
there either.90

83
GAIL LYTHGOE, THE REBIRTH OF TERRITORY (CUP, 2024) (arguing that the meaning of “territory” should be redefined).
84
For an introduction of the underlying historical reasons, see Torpey supra note 71.
85
G.A. Res. 217 (III) A, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 13.2 (Dec. 10, 1948); Convention for the Protection of
Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Nov. 4, 1950, 213 U.N.T.S. 221, art. 2, Protocol 4 [hereinafter European
Convention on Human Rights].
86
BRANKO MILANOVIC, GLOBAL INEQUALITY, (Harvard Press, 2016); KOCHENOV, supra note 80.
87
There were some 258 million migrants globally in 2017. UN DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS
POPULATION DIVISION, INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REPORT 2017 (UN, 2017); and around 281 million in 2021 according to
IOM, WORLD MIGRATION REPORT 2022 (M. McAuliffe & A. Triandafyllidou eds., 2021).
88
All cases of naturalization globally amount to less than two percent of the world’s population. See KOCHENOV, supra note
80, at 12.
89
While the global population has grown 2.5 times over the past sixty years, the growth rate of cross-border travels in 2019
was approximately 22 times that of 1960 according to the UN World Tourism Organization. Note that the UNWTO’s
definition of “tourism” includes all types of transnational travels, except day trips and returns to one’s country of residence. See
Ettore Recchi & Mirna Safi, Introduction, in HANDBOOK OF HUMAN MOBILITY AND MIGRATION (Ettore Recchi & Mirna Safi
eds., 2024).
90
Spijkerboer, supra note 8; MAU, supra note 4; Bauman, supra note 8.
1300 Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen

II. Extending Mobility Privileges Through Citizenship

In reverse, the second mechanism by which citizenship shapes transnational mobility is as the
medium through which extraterritorial mobility privileges—the legal permissions granted by
other states to cross into territories other than that of the citizenship-granting state—are
distributed.
As shown by empirical research on visa waivers91 and visa costs,92 access to transnational
mobility is today both regionally stratified and highly unequally distributed, producing a “global
mobility divide” between the Global North and South93 or indeed “multiple regional mobility
divides in an increasingly multi-polar world.”94 Whereas a Norwegian or Singaporean citizen may
effortlessly travel large parts of the world, the average Sudanese or Pakistani citizen has very
limited legal options for moving beyond the territory of their state.95 For a variety of reasons,96
most countries design their domestic visa and immigration rules to deliberately “filter out” citizens
from low-income countries such as Sudan or Pakistan. This kind of differential treatment based
on nationality status has long been a hallmark of the global visa regime, which, in the words of
Czaika et al, can be seen as “systems of institutionalized discrimination based on nationality,”
justified from a logic of “protecting the exclusive residency and political rights of citizens.”97 While
principally nationality-based, EU visa policies have further been shown to strongly correlate with
ethnic, religious, class, and gender divides, fueling arguments that visa rules broadly violate non-
discrimination principles.98 Within legal scholarship, Spijkerboer has argued that a legal
infrastructural approach may precisely aid such arguments by bringing attention to the intimate
connections between different rulesets and their combined effects, ultimately pointing to
international law’s “partisan character” in sustaining a marginalization of mobility rights for large
parts of the world’s population along these lines.99 According to den Heijer, the legal proceedings
around the 2017 US travel ban, which targeted predominantly Muslim countries, show some
potential for concrete actions in this regard—even if a revised policy ultimately was accepted by
the US Supreme Court.100 At the same time, however, concrete attempts to challenge this status
quo face the obstacle that international law has for more than a century granted states an
extraordinary degree of leeway to adopt differential treatment based on citizenship, not just in
migration law but on a range of different issues.101 Indeed, the way in which mobility law has
historically developed through webs of bilateral or regional agreements reciprocally extending
certain rights and privileges to third-country nationals means that citizenship-based
discrimination is effectively baked in. By formally classifying nationality as a non-hierarchical
status, despite all evidence to the contrary, mobility law effectively allows states to circumvent
evolving discrimination norms within the domain of territorial access.

91
Mau et al., supra note 8.
92
Ettore Recchi, Emanuel Deutschmann, Lorenzo Gabrielli, and Nodira Kholmatova, The global visa cost divide: How and
why the price for travel permits varies worldwide 86 POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY (2021).
93
Mau et al., supra note 8; Bauman, supra, note 8.
94
Czaika et al., supra note 64 (suggesting that “instead of a global mobility divide, it is more appropriate to speak of multiple
regional mobility divides in an increasingly multi-polar world”).
95
ARTON, supra note 81.
96
Gammeltoft-Hansen & Tan, supra note 16.
97
Czaika et al., supra note 64.
98
Maarten den Heijer, Visas and Non-discrimination, 20 EUR. J. OF MIGRATION AND L. 470, 470 (2018).
99
Spijkerboer, supra note 8.
100
den Heijer, supra note 98.
101
Id.; Christian Prener, The dichotomy within denationalisation: Perpetuating or emancipating from its discriminatory
past?, 22 INT’L J. OF DISCRIMINATION AND THE L. 305, 305–25 (2022); ROGERS BRUBAKER, CITIZENSHIP AND NATIONHOOD IN
FRANCE AND GERMANY (Harvard University Press, 2009).
 German Law Journal 1301

III. Citizenship-Based Differentiation Across Different Mobility Regimes

Citizenship-based differentiation likewise plays an important, albeit more subtle, role for access to
transnational mobility across several other international legal regimes, including human rights
law, refugee law, and statelessness law.102 These are legal regimes usually celebrated as universalist
exceptions to the principles of sovereignty and self-determination. Consider, for example, the
international refugee regime: While refugee organizations in the Global North may insist on
individual determinations of asylum seekers’ protection needs as part of national procedures, the
reality in many large-scale refugee hosting countries in regions of origin is often strikingly
different in terms of adopting prima facie or group-based recognition based largely on
nationality.103 In Europe, a similar approach was adopted in regard to Ukrainian refugees, again
prompting arguments about differential treatment based on nationality.104 Important in this
regard was the EU’s prior extension of visa-free access for Ukrainian nationals as part of labor
agreements, which not only incapacitated the EU’s existing model for asylum reception—the
so-called Dublin system—but also highlights how nationality-based distinctions in one area of
mobility law, labor, may ultimately come to determine responses in other areas, asylum.105
Even within the ordinary asylum systems of many Global North states, there is an increasing
tendency to short-cut legal niceties through collective procedures strictly based on nationality
status.106 As part of the recently adopted EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, many more asylum
applicants will be subjected to expedited procedures if they are deemed nationals of countries with
an acceptance rate of lower than twenty percent.107 Vice versa, Frontex routinely refers to “a large
number of false declarations of nationality among claimed Palestinian nationals, in particular by
nationals from Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco) and Middle East countries (Iraq).”108 While an
asylum seeker potentially declaring another nationality may be incentivized by imaginations about
their rights, the phenomenon ultimately reveals how the “right nationality” translates into refugee
and human rights protection. As Itamar Mann notes, asylum seekers declaring a false nationality
is not about seeking the cover of another nationality, but rather calls for “universal humanism”—
being human “sans the added layer of citizenship.”109 For those falsely claiming to be Palestinian,
for instance, Palestine functions as “a symbol for crisis”; a locality so awful that it calls for the
immediate protection for all those who come from there.

IV. Citizenship, Socioeconomic Status and Global Mobility

Our fourth perspective is that citizenship not only determines where a person lives, but also from
where—in both geographic and socioeconomic terms—a person may embark on a transnational
journey. While increasingly affordable, transnational movement remains a demanding financial
expenditure relative to average income levels for most of the world’s population. As the average
person’s socioeconomic capacity is increasingly, and in many cases almost entirely, determined by
102
Christian Prener, Citizenship Revocation and The Question of Proportionate Consequences: Latest Judgment from The
Danish Supreme Court Sheds New Light on the Limits of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, 5
STATELESSNESS & CITIZENSHIP REV., 112, 112–117 (2023); Prener, supra note 101.
103
Tamara Wood & Ahmed Elbasyouny, Analysing group refugee recognition in African states’ law and practice, 11 REF.
MIG. WORKING PAPERS (2023); Jean-François Durieux, The many faces of “prima facie”: group-based evidence in refugee status
determination, 25 REFUGE 151 (2008).
104
Cathryn Costello & Michelle Foster, (Some) refugees welcome: When is differentiating between refugees unlawful
discrimination?, 22 INT’L J. OF DISCRIMINATION AND THE L. 244, 244 (2022).
105
Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen & Florian Hoffmann, Mobility and legal infrastructure for Ukrainian refugees, 60 INT’L
MIGRATION 213–215 (2022).
106
Elspeth Guild, The Right to Dignity of Refugees: A Response to Fleur Johns, 111 AJIL UNBOUND 193 (2017).
107
Cecilia Manzotti, Nationality Status Determination in Asylum Procedures under the CEAS and the Potential Impact of the
“New Pact on Migration and Asylum”, 35 INT’L J. OF REFUGEE L. 193, 193–212 (2023).
108
FRONTEX, EXTRACT FROM THE ANNUAL RISK ANALYSIS 2010, 15 (FRONTEX, 2010).
109
Itamar Mann, Border Masquerades, 39.1 (8) BERKELEY J. INT’L L., 127, 141 (2021).
1302 Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen

the country in which one is born, the importance of citizenship in this regard has only been
magnified in recent years.
Traditionally, research on citizenship has concerned itself with the status within the nation-state
entity. Foregrounding the rules for acquisition and loss of citizenship within general politics of
inclusion and resistance, much citizenship literature focuses on citizenship as a legal reflection of
citizens’ (in)ability to affect change in society, citizenship as a means of social inclusion—and
exclusion—and citizenship as a tool for integration through equal rights, national belonging,
identity, and civic responsibility.110 Rights-based approaches in particular have dominated
citizenship literature over the past many decades, with countless variations of either Marshall’s
formative conceptualization of citizenship as a bundle of political, civil, and social rights along with
duties such as taxation, military service, and political participation,111 or Arendt’s notion of
citizenship as a “right to have rights,” a meta-right necessary for the protection of all other rights.112
In contrast, a growing critical strand of citizenship literature has approached citizenship as a
distinct form of social closure—in both national, regional, and global contexts.113 Noting the lack
of any sustained analysis of the relevance for citizenship in Weber’s concept of social closure,
Brubaker, for instance, argues that closure—as embodied in a host of institutions and practices
such as the territorial border, universal suffrage, universal military service, and naturalization—
always pivots on the legal institution of citizenship.114 Only citizens have an unqualified right to
enter and remain in the geographical space defined as a state’s “territory,” and naturalization—
which governs access to citizenship status after birth—is itself restricted to the qualified. For these
reasons, Brubaker argues, citizenship is both an instrument and object of closure.115 Spatially,
citizenship excludes unauthorized non-citizens from the national territory; politically, citizenship
excludes non-citizens from political decision-making; economically, citizenship excludes non-
citizens from the labor market and welfare rights; socially, citizenship excludes non-citizens from
the national community.116
Within this critical strand of literature, a particular focus is on citizenship as a driver of global
socioeconomic inequalities. From different disciplinary backgrounds, scholars such as Joseph
Carens, Seyla Benhabib, Aylet Shacar, and Branko Milanovic—and more recently, Dimitry
Kochenov, Yossi Harpaz and Sara Kalm—have all argued that citizenship, in combination with
the international system of passports and visa restrictions, reinforces global socioeconomic
inequalities.117 Moving further in this direction, Mau argues that the institution of citizenship
operates as a “global hierarchy of mobility,” designed to keep the masses from accessing the
110
See e.g., Rainer Bauböck, Democratic inclusion: A pluralist theory of citizenship, in DEMOCRATIC INCLUSION (Manchester
University Press, 2018); Rainer Bauböck, Expansive citizenship—voting beyond territory and membership, 38 PS: POL. SCI. &
POL., 683 (2005); Rogers Brubaker, Migration, membership, and the modern nation-state: Internal and external dimensions of
the politics of belonging, 41 J. OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HIST. 61 (2010); Christina Gathmann & Julio Garbers, Citizenship and
integration, 82C LAB. ECON. (2023); Maarten Vink & Gerard-René De Groot, Citizenship attribution in Western Europe:
International framework and domestic trends, 36 J. OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUD. 713 (2010); Maarten Vink, Comparing
Citizenship Regimes, in THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CITIZENSHIP, 221 (2017).
111
T.H. Marshall famously defined citizenship as a set of civil rights guaranteeing individual freedom, protected by law;
political rights of participation in the civil polity, as protected by Parliament; and social rights to economic welfare and security,
protected by a welfare state. See generally T. H. MARSHALL & THOMAS BOTTOMORE, CITIZENSHIP AND SOCIAL CLASS (1950).
112
HANNAH ARENDT, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM 2 (1958).
113
See, e.g., Joseph H. Carens, Who Belongs? Immigration, Democracy, and Citizenship, in OF STATES, RIGHTS, AND SOCIAL
CLOSURE: GOVERNING MIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP (Oliver Schmidtdke & Saime Ozcurumez eds., 2008).
114
See generally ROGERS BRUBAKER, CITIZENSHIP AND NATIONHOOD IN FRANCE AND GERMANY (2009).
115
See Rogers Brubaker, Beyond Ethnicity, 37 ETHNIC & RACIAL STUD. 804, 804–808 (2014).
116
Id.
117
See generally JOSEPH H. CARENS, THE ETHICS OF IMMIGRATION (2013); Seyla Benhabib, The Emergence of Citizenship as a
Political Problem in an Era of Globalization, in CITIZENSHIP, EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CONFLICT 37 (2012); Shachar, supra
note 32; Milanovic, supra note 80; Kochenov, supra note 80; YOSSI HARPAZ, CITIZENSHIP 2.0: DUAL NATIONALITY AS A
GLOBAL ASSET (2019); Sara Kalm, Citizenship Capital, 34 GLOB. SOC’Y 528 (2020); Yossi Harpaz, Citizenship and Residence
Rights as Vehicles of Global Inequality, in CITIZENSHIP AND RESIDENCE SALES (Dimitry Kochenov & Kristin Surak eds., 2023).
 German Law Journal 1303

territories and limit benefits to a privileged few.118 Brubaker describes the institution of citizenship
as an “international filing system” allocating persons to states.119 Perhaps most seminally, Shachar
labels modern citizenship as a “birthright lottery,” in which life opportunities are bestowed on the
essentially “morally arbitrary terms of where (ius soli) or to whom (ius sanguinis) one is born.”120
Shachar’s criticism echoes that of Benhabib and Carens who for decades have held that citizenship
is merely the “modern equivalent of the feudal privilege”—an inherited status that either greatly
enhances or diminishes one’s life chances.121
When coupled with the fact that around ninety-eight percent of all citizenships today are
granted by either bloodline (ius sanguinis) or territory (ius soli),122 the idea that citizenship is an
inequality-perpetuating institution rests on a solid empirical foundation. The very same status
which within the polity was “the antidote to the feudal privilege and barriers to internal
movement,”123 today propagates precisely the kind of hierarchical ordering of individual rights,
worth, and freedom of movement in the transnational sphere that it was once designed to
eliminate. Increasingly, as a legal institution, citizenship has produced “the naturalization of its
own arbitrariness.”124
This criticism has gained substantial empirical support from economists such as Branko
Milanovic. Based on his comprehensive study of global income-level distribution, Milanovic
explicates how the territory into which one is born is the single most important predictor of the
level of economic prosperity one is likely to experience in life.125 According to his study, two-
thirds of income variability across country percentiles is governed by one variable: The country in
which people live. For example, a person born in the United States will earn on average ninety-
three times more than a person born in Congo. On this basis, Milanovic puts an empirical
spotlight on the remarkable socioeconomic privilege that comes with a “top–tier citizenship”—
what he terms the “citizenship premium.”126 Furthermore, because socioeconomic inequalities are
increasingly occurring in between states, as opposed to class–based within the state, citizenship—
Milanovic argues—becomes a key driver for migration as “people born in poor countries will
naturally seek their fortunes in relatively richer ones.”127
This inextricable link between geography, citizenship and global socioeconomic inequalities
has a profound impact on the nexus between citizenship and transnational mobility. As
citizenship status determines where on the surface of Earth one may reside, citizenship ultimately
also determines from where a person’s transnational movement may begin. This reflects not only
the level of socioeconomic capacity one may leverage in the pursuit of transnational movement,
but also in which corner of the physical world one’s travel begins. As the average person’s
socioeconomic capacity increasingly varies based on the country in which one is born, the
importance of citizenship for transnational mobility has thus only been intensified in recent
decades. While gradually becoming more affordable, cross-border travel—and in particular cross-
regional travel—is still a demanding financial expenditure relative to average income levels for
most of the world’s population. With this in mind, we may think of citizenship not only as a legal
118
MAU, supra note 4, at 69.
119
This is what Harpaz subsequently coins as the “fourth dimension of citizenship.” HARPAZ, supra note 117, at 3.
120
Shachar, supra note 32, at 46.
121
Benhabib, supra note 117; CARENS, supra note 117.
122
Kochenov (2019) supra note 28.
123
Peter J. Spiro, An Intellectual History of Citizenship, in THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 541, 541 (M.
Borges & M. Hsu eds., 2024).
124
PIERRE BOURDIEU, OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF PRACTICE, 164 (Cambridge, 1977) (“Every established order tends to
produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”).
125
Milanovic, supra note 87, at 138; KOCHENOV, supra note 80.
126
A person at the tenth—or fiftieth or seventieth—percentile of American income distribution is, for example, better off
than a person at the tenth—or fiftieth or seventieth—percentile of, say, Kenyan income distribution. See MILANOVIC supra
note 86, at 138.
127
Id. at 156. Cf. de Haas, supra note 1 (contending that labor demand is the dominant reason for migration).
1304 Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen

infrastructure that distributes access to transnational mobility based on nationality status, but also
as an infrastructure that co-shapes the socioeconomic position from where one’s transnational
movement may begin in the first place.128

V. Evolving Infrastructures: Citizenship Changing

Over the past century, the greatest transformation of modern citizenship has been imposed by the
gradual “deterritorialization” of rights regimes led by the proliferation of human rights
instruments.129 The fact that most rights today are granted based on one’s humanity rather than
one’s citizenship status stands today not only as a major triumph of the human rights movement,
but also as one of the most foundational transformations of modern citizenship.130 Despite
historical and still reverberating hesitations of international human rights institutions to properly
engage with migrants’ and foreigners’ rights,131 human rights law makes perfectly clear that rights
protection cannot be based on citizenship status, but solely on territoriality and jurisdiction.132 By
gradually dissociating rights from citizenship, human rights norms have increasingly challenged
traditional conceptions of citizenship as a “right to have rights,” and prompted contemporary
citizenship scholars to distill a new and altered meaning of citizenship in light of its historical,
rights-based rooting.133 A growing body of literature has in this regard pointed to citizenship
undergoing an “instrumental turn.”134 Approaching citizenship for its ability to increase personal
mobility, quality of life, education, business opportunities, and tax advantages, Harpaz argues that
we are in the midst of a shift towards a “new form of citizenship” driven by those with inferior
citizenship’s quest for a “compensatory citizenship.”135 Joppke argues that citizenship is
undergoing an inevitable “lightening.” Characterized by a gradual thinning as a concept,
“citizenship light”, he argues, is increasingly dissociated from the nationhood, rights, and exclusive
allegiance that historically gave the status its weight.136 Yet, while the importance of citizenship
has undeniably diminished in recent decades in terms of political, civil, and social rights, the
“lightening” of citizenship has, as Spiro points out, one significant exception: Mobility privileges.137
With respect to transnational mobility, the particular nationality status one holds has only become
more central in recent years.
In this final section, we turn, however briefly, to two recent and intersecting developments
within citizenship law to illustrate how the legal infrastructure of citizenship itself might be
changing in ways that will ultimately reverberate throughout the legal infrastructure, and deepen
the global mobility divide by creating new mobility corridors and opportunities for economic
elites.

128
Byrne et al., supra note 25.
129
For a discussion on “de-territorialization”, “re-territorialization” and “territorialization,” see Stuart Elden, The state of
territory under globalization: Empire and the politics of reterritorialization, in TERRITORIES, ENVIRONMENTS, POLITICS 15, 15–
36 (Routledge, 2022).
130
KOCHENOV, supra note 80.
131
MARIE-BÉNÉDICTE DEMBOUR. WHEN HUMANS BECOME MIGRANTS: STUDY OF THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS
WITH AN INTER-AMERICAN COUNTERPOINT (OUP, 2015); Rask Madsen & Gammeltoft-Hansen, supra note 25.
132
Article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stipulates, for instance, that “Each State Party to the
present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the
rights recognized in the present Covenant [ : : : ]”. G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI) International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
Dec. 16, 1966, 999 U.N.T.S. 171, art. 2.
133
Spiro, supra note 123.
134
Harpaz, supra note 117.
135
Yossi Harpaz & Pablo Mateos, Strategic citizenship: negotiating membership in the age of dual nationality, 45 J. OF
ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUD. 897, 898 (2019).
136
Christian Joppke, The Inevitable Lightening of Citizenship, 51 (1) EUR. J. OF SOCIO. ARCHIVES 9, 12 (2010).
137
Spiro, supra note 123.
 German Law Journal 1305

Over the past two decades, a newfound consensus has emerged: While “land cannot belong to
two states at the same time, [ : : : ] people can.”138 As a result, dual nationality status has gained
widespread popularity in recent years, with the share of countries fully accepting dual citizenship
increasing significantly.139 Driven most strongly by origin country reforms on dual citizenship,140
increasing from twenty-seven percent in 1960 to seventy percent in 2022, acceptance of dual
citizenship is now a predominant trend in nationality laws across the world.141 This “liberalization
of dual citizenship”142 is remarkable considering that until recently the idea of a person holding
two citizenships was regarded as entirely incompatible with the foundational principles of state
sovereignty. Citizenship, after all, marked an exclusive allegiance to the state.143 This shift towards
citizenship acquisition after birth no longer operating on “zero-sum” conditions, has opened the
possibility for nationality statuses to be accumulated and leveraged for a number of different
reasons. This includes the pursuit of improved rights and related economic, educational or other
livelihood opportunities—as well as higher degrees of global freedom of movement. Catering to
such interests, a commercialized market for citizenship has unsurprisingly emerged in recent years
with some countries offering their national membership in return for a financial investment,144
and various commercial brokers operating in this market.145
Depending on the size of the investment, CBI schemes146 exempt applicants from traditional
naturalization requirements such as a period with permanent residence or employment in the
country.147 Gaining momentum over the past decade,148 dozens of countries, most of them small
islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Pacific, today sell up to 50,000 citizenships
annually.149 While many states have for decades offered residence programs with fast-tracks for
citizenship status,150 the idea of states selling their citizenship for cash is both a novel and
significant development with several potential repercussions. Some scholars have criticized CBI
schemes for potentially distorting the interests and meaning of active membership within the

138
Rainer Bauböck, Genuine links and useful passports: Evaluating strategic uses of citizenship, 45 J. OF ETHNIC AND
MIGRATION STUD., 1015, 1020 (2019).
139
Maarten Vink, Luuk Van Der Barren, Rainer Bauböck, Jelena Dzankic, Iseult Honohan, & Bronwen Manby, Codebook:
GLOBALCIT citizenship law dataset - Dual citizenship, EUI Research Data, 2021, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced
Studies, https://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/73190; Maarten Vink, Luuk van der Barren & David Reichel, A Global Panel
Dataset of Dyadic Dual Citizenship Acceptance (forthcoming 2024, preprint at https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/6x3jt); Spiro,
supra note 123.
140
Maarten Vink, Arjan H. Schakel, David Reichely, Ngo Chun Luk, & Gerard-Rene de Groot, The international diffusion of
expatriate dual citizenship, 7 MIGRATION STUD. 362, 365 (2019).
141
Spiro, supra note 123.
142
Vink, Schakel, Reichely, Luk & de Groot, supra note 140 at 377.
143
PATRICK WEIL, THE SOVEREIGN CITIZEN: DENATURALIZATION AND THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, 25 (2012).
144
Spiro, supra note 123.
145
See KRISTIN SURAK, THE GOLDEN PASSPORT: GLOBAL MOBILITY FOR MILLIONAIRES (2023).
146
Christian Joppke, Citizenship by Investment: A Case of Instrumental Citizenship, in CITIZENSHIP AND RESIDENCE SALES,
supra note 117.
147
Kristin Surak, Global Citizenship 2.0 – The Growth of Citizenship by Investment Programs, INVESTMENT MIGRATION
WORKING PAPER 2016/3 (2016); Luuk van der Barren, Investor Citizenship and State Sovereignty in International Law, in
CITIZENSHIP AND RESIDENCE SALES, supra note 117.
148
A 2016 review identified sixty different Immigrant Investor Programs in fifty-seven countries, which includes residence-
by-investments, of which half had been established since the year 2000, see Gamlen et al. Re-thinking Immigrant Investment
Funds, INVESTMENT MIGRATION WORKING PAPER 2016/2 (2016). By 2019, in the EU, half of Member States had an investor
program scheme, up from only four in 2010, see Kristin Surak, Who wants to buy a visa? Comparing the uptake of residence by
investment programs in the European Union, J. OF CONTEMPORARY EUR. STUD. (2020).
149
Kristin Surak, Investment migration globally: The dynamics of supply and demand, COMPAS WORKING PAPER WP-20-
159 (2022).
150
In the UK, for instance, a residence program with a six-year path to citizenship can be acquired for GBP 2 million but
may be shortened in return for a larger contribution (GBP 5 million: 3 years; GBP 10 million: 2 years). See Henley & Partners
2021, 97, 113; Sara Kalm, The Business of Citizenship: Investment Citizenship Firms in Global Governance, 37:1 GLOBAL SOC’Y,
69, 68–92 (2023).
1306 Christian Brown Prener and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen

polity, while others highlight the practice’s potential for exacerbating global inequalities by
offering the “global elite” the means to unshackle itself “from any meaningful relation to a
particular location.”151 Shachar highlights how both golden visas and CBI schemes exacerbate,
rather than alleviate, “pre-existing economic inequality by distorting the opportunity for
individuals to gain access to membership in safer and more prosperous nations.”152 In the context
of wealth taxation, Piketty has described how “secession of wealth tends [ : : : ] to obscure the very
idea of nationality, since the wealthiest individuals can to some extent take their money and
change their nationality, cutting all ties to their original community.”
There is no shortage of reasons as to why CBI schemes are increasingly popular and cater to the
industry’s current “clientele.”153 Research by Surak shows that individuals who purchase an
additional citizenship are predominantly incentivized by the ability to travel visa-free to more
countries.154 Yet for those capable of purchasing it, an investor citizenship in Malta, for example,
functions as a “gilded backdoor to Europe”155 that offers not only a unique degree of visa-free
mobility within European territories, but also the residency rights and privileges that come with an
EU citizenship.156 From this viewpoint, the acceptance of dual nationality and its enablement of a
commercialized market for citizenship has indeed opened a new and attractive pathway for
wealthy individuals to gain not only unrestricted global freedom of movement, but also the
financial, cultural, and social benefits that often come with it. Not unlike Harvey’s notion of
mobility, which foregrounds the expansionist nature of capitalism constantly seeking new ways to
expand further and faster,157 “golden passports” emerge as something catering to an elite for
whom everything is increasingly within reach—even citizenship in a state where one never has nor
intends to set foot. Conversely, some might argue that the marketization of citizenship could—at
least in theory—reflect an imperfect yet progressive new form of naturalization. A way for
minorities of economically affluent but otherwise mobility disenfranchised individuals to
“unchain” themselves from the physical confinement enforced upon them by the citizenship
status granted by birth—a naturalization mode that operates on market conditions rather than
feudal principles.
Ultimately, the marketization of citizenship and the increasing possibility for individuals to
hold two or more citizenships contribute to an increasing “strategization” of citizenship158 by
establishing a novel and significant pathway through which economic elites can leverage economic
capital to become “kinetic elites.”159 The current impact of CBI remain limited in actual practice.
Dual nationality status remains a rarity on the global level—currently comprising less than two
percent of all citizenship statuses worldwide, and CBI programs remain only economically feasible
for a relatively small fraction of the global population.160 Nevertheless, both still in their infancy,
the legal acceptance of dual nationality status and the emergence of CBI schemes are today fast-
growing global phenomena that foreshadow a potentially profound reconfiguration of the
citizenship–mobility nexus. These developments may reverberate in unforeseen ways throughout
the legal infrastructure of transnational mobility. However, by tethering access to particular

151
Id.
152
Ayelet Shachar, The Marketization of Citizenship in an Age of Restrictionism, 32 ETHICS & INT’L AFFS (2018).
153
Kalm, supra note 116.
154
Surak, supra note 146, at 34.
155
Aylet Shachar, Dangerous liaisons: Money and Citizenship, in DEBATING TRANSFORMATIONS OF NATIONAL CITIZENSHIP
8 (Rainer Baubock ed., 2018).
156
Harpaz, supra note 117.
157
HARVEY, supra note 13; Ettore Recchi & Aurore Flipo, Spatial Mobility in Social Theory, 10 SOCIETÀ MUTAMENTO
POLITICA 125–37 (2019).
158
Harpaz & Mateos, supra note 134.
159
TIMOTHY CRESSWELL, ON THE MOVE: MOBILITY IN THE WESTERN WORLD, 255–257 (2018).
160
All cases of naturalization globally amount to less than two percent of the world’s population. See Kochenov, supra note 80.
Dimitry Kochenov & Kristin Surak, Introduction, CITIZENSHIP AND RESIDENCE SALES, supra note 117.
 German Law Journal 1307

citizenships to individual economic capacity, CBI schemes seem poised to drive yet another wedge
into the global mobility divide, further bifurcating the global population into a small minority for
whom the legal infrastructure increasingly facilitates transnational movement, and the global
majority for whom the legal infrastructure is increasingly a source of mobility disenfranchisement.

D. Conclusion
In this Article we have underscored the significance of law in shaping patterns of transnational
mobility on the global scale. We have shown this by, firstly, approaching the array of laws related
to human mobility as a coherent legal infrastructure that operates to both facilitate and obstruct
transnational mobility and thereby significantly reconfigure global mobility patterns. Secondly,
using citizenship as an exploratory lens to analyze this legal infrastructure, we have outlined five
central—yet often overlooked—mechanisms through which mobility laws increasingly pivot on
citizenship. Each of these mechanisms serve to stretch or compress the physical world—
establishing mobility corridors that explicitly enhance transnational movements between distant
geographies or posing immense socio-technical barriers to transnational movement between
otherwise proximate geographies. Elucidating how mobility laws unevenly distribute access to
transnational mobility based on the nationality status of the traveler in question, we have sought to
spotlight the legal infrastructure’s distributive and stratifying effects, with legal opportunities for
transnational mobility increasingly distributed along socioeconomic divides.
As a centerpiece of mobility law, citizenship has provided a particularly useful analytical entry
point for understanding the conjoined effects of this legal infrastructure. As shown, citizenship de
facto determines not only the territories a person can access and reside in, but also the level of
socioeconomic resources that a person may leverage in the pursuit of transnational movement.
For a small “kinetic elite,”161 nationality status increasingly operates as a unique resource which
enables them to navigate the legal infrastructure in historically unprecedented ways to maximize
individual mobility capital. Yet, for the vast majority of the global population, citizenship and the
swath of mobility laws orchestrated around it form an infrastructure of transnational immobility,
with territorial borders transformed into tightly knit osmotic filters that selectively prevent almost
all attempts of regular border crossing.
Without refuting the empirical findings by Deutschmann & Recchi that transnational
movement remains overwhelmingly intra-regional,162 our overarching contention is thus that
global mobility patterns are not resistant to “alterable social factors,”163 but rather inextricably
linked to and co-constituted by an assemblage of mobility laws, which ultimately both fragment
and compress traditional notions of geographical space as it pertains to human movement.
Acknowledgements. We are thankful for the valuable feedback we have received on earlier versions of this Article presented
in Florence and Copenhagen, with special thanks to William Hamilton Byrne and Maarten Vink.

Competing Interests. The authors declare none.

Financial Support. Research for this Article has been funded by the Danish National Research Foundation, Center of
Excellence for Global Mobility Law, grant no. DNRF169, and the Carlsberg Foundation, grant no. CF22-0097.

161
Sheller, supra note 159.
162
DEUTSCHMANN, supra note 5, at 150.
163
Id. at 29, 134; Recchi & Deutschmann, supra note 7.

Cite this article: Prener CB, Gammeltoft-Hansen T (2024). Citizenship as Legal Infrastructure. German Law Journal 25,
1290–1307. https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2024.73