Investor visas as postcolonial wealth extraction: Sarah Kunz in conversation with Mette Louise Berg

Dr Sarah Kunz (Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Capitalism Studies) will be in conversation with Professor Mette Louise Berg (Head of the UCL Social Research Institute) to discuss Sarah's new research paper "Investment migration as postcolonial wealth extraction: The case of the UK Investor Visa".

What does it mean for the UK, one of the richest countries and largest economies in the world, to have wealth-based immigration provisions? How do we think about such migration provisions as an economic strategy in historical and global context, specifically in the context of Britain’s past colonial empire and its continuing prominent role in an unevenly integrated international political and economic system?

Between 1994 and 2022, the UK offered its so-called ‘investor visa’, an early residence-by-investment (RBI) provision. Also known as ‘golden visa’ schemes, RBI programmes offer residence in return for a payment to the government or a qualifying investment. The UK investor route was introduced by a Conservative government in 1994 and subsequently liberalised by both New Labour and the Conservative-Liberal Coalition governments, before rules were increasingly tightened against the backdrop of scandals and controversy. In 2022, the visa was abolished by a Conservative Home Secretary against the backdrop of Russia’s impending invasion of Ukraine.

This talk conceptualises the UK’s investor visa as a policy of postcolonial wealth extraction. To this end, the paper brings into conversation two literatures, on investment migration and on the political economy of extraction. Political economy research has made great strides in showing the importance of colonial extraction for the economic development of European imperial states. It has also examined mechanisms of transnational wealth extraction in the postcolonial era, noting unequal trade exchange, financialization, and capital flight via offshore structures. Research also examines migration regimes as sites of extraction, primarily focusing on the ‘brain drain’ of skilled labour from the global south and profits from commercialised border management. This paper adds to this literature by thinking about wealth-based migration provisions in core countries as contemporary mechanisms of (attempted) wealth extraction from the Global South.

All welcome but please register to attend: https://ccs-investor-visas.eventbrite.co.uk

Photo by Kit (formerly ConvertKit) on Unsplash

This event has been organised by the UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies. It is a world-leading centre for critical interdisciplinary research into the past, present, and future of capitalism. It brings together UCL faculty and students studying how markets, finance and economic institutions shape our everyday life, structure societies’ capacity to change, and are contested and remade across time and space.