# Securitize Citizenship!

Source: https://nav.al/securitize-citizenship

## Summary

The author proposes giving every US citizen an extra, transferable passport that could be sold to would-be immigrants, with markets setting prices based on how well the country is governed. The idea is that the combined value of all passports would equal the capitalized value of the government, so poor trade or tax policy would lower passport prices and pressure leaders through citizen-shareholders. The post also suggests that unmonetizable policies, such as those on abortion or environmental issues, would gain a visible cost, and in a far-fetched scenario, well-run countries could take over poorly run ones by buying their passports.

## Article

People hate immigration and immigrants as it’s seen as competing with newcomers over finite resources in a zero-sum game. This argument is flawed on many economic levels, but let’s overlook that for a moment. Let’s give everyone a stake.

Suppose that we gave every US citizen an extra passport – a blank one. Within certain common-sense restrictions (i.e., no terrorists) each person could sell their extra passport to a would-be immigrant. You could give it to someone deserving, or patriotic, or brilliant, or whoever would just pay you a lot of cash. You could perhaps exchange it for a foreign one. Likely, markets would emerge to value and trade these things, and people would pay or promise future earnings streams (personal IPOs in the best case, indentured servitude in the worst) to get into desirable countries.

But now think what would happen if a country enacted bad trade or tax policy. The sum of all of the value of the passports would equal the capitalized value of the government of the country. Poor policy that reduced this value would result in the demand, and therefore the price, of passports falling. Your passport and your extra one would probably be your most valuable possessions, worth millions of dollars. Poor government policy would lead to massive negative feedback from the citizen-shareholders.

In fact, certain un-monetizable policies would now reveal their costs, and we could see the value of pro-choice v. pro-life, certain environmental policies, etc. If your government isn’t doing things the way that you want, you can always sell your passport and get out, but likely the poor government would be ousted by citizen-shareholders first.

Finally, in the fanciful stretch case, countries that have shown themselves to be astute economic managers could engage in hostile yet peaceful takeovers of the publicly-traded passports of poorly managed countries. If each passport entitled you to one vote in a democracy, China could buy India, put it on the same economic program that has worked well for the Chinese, and perhaps even sell it off for a profit later!

## Comments

**@macbudkowski**: Very interesting idea, synthesized here (https://x.com/naval/status/1856792010297852298). Pretty crazy it's been written in 2005.

**rvolz.eth**: Around the turn of the millenium these ideas were popular, it seems. Even in Snow Crash (1992)  "Franchise-Operated Quasi-National Entities" do appear. Maybe their time has come? 

As the current revival of the nation state doesn't go very well, this could be an alternative.

**@macbudkowski**: There is something intriguing about this idea. At the end of the day, it's a referral program for citizenship. And since COVID nomad lifestyle acceleration, I think countries need to compete more than ever for productive people to live there (and pay taxes). Unless we have a war that makes the world less open, I think this trend will only intensify, so a referral program like that would help a country to compete based on the UX.