Title: Commodification of Citizenship and Racialization Processes

The widening of the worldwide inequality gap is paralleled by an increase in the commodification of citizenship. The emergence of official economic citizenship programmes (aka "citizenship by investment") as well as the illegal trade in EU passports ("buy a EU citizenship" schemes)  are similar strategies of eluding the ascription of citizenship through recourse to the market. As the -- real or perceived risk -- of more people gaining access to citizenship of wealthy countries increases, so does the racial criminalization of migrants to core regions -- most prominently, the European Union and the United States, regardless of the citizenship regime of the country of arrival. Thus,the ethnic profiling of Moldovans in the European Union is directed against immigrants suspected of having abused the right of blood in order to acquire citizenship, by trying to prove Romanian ancestry in order to acquire a EU passport. On the other hand, the ethnic and racial profiling of immigrants who come to the US to give birth targets pregnant women accused of having abused the right of soil to the same purpose. The scandalization of "forged descent" in one case and of what could analogously be called "forged ascent" in the other is simultaneously a statement about the immutability of the ascription of citizenship through both bloodline and birthplace for the wider population, and ultimately a denial of equal opportunities for upward social mobility at the global level.