Citizenship can create equality at home while preserving inequality across borders
Imagine two children born on the same day.
Neither chooses where to be born or who their parents are. Yet those facts may strongly affect where they can live, which countries they can enter, what protection they receive, and which political community will recognize them as a member.
One child may receive a citizenship—and a passport—that makes international mobility much easier. The other may receive one that opens far fewer possibilities.
This difference can last for life.
Ayelet Shachar calls this the birthright lottery.
Her argument raises a question at the heart of this series:
Why should political membership depend so heavily on circumstances no one chooses?
In the previous article, I looked at Kant’s idea of cosmopolitan right and asked what a foreigner may claim at another political community’s border.
Shachar brings us to a different question:
What if the deeper inequality begins even before we reach the border?
Citizenship Is More Than a Passport
Citizenship is sometimes discussed as though it were mainly a matter of identity.
It can certainly be that. But citizenship also carries practical consequences.
It can determine the right to remain in a country, to return after leaving, to vote, to receive diplomatic protection, and to cross borders more easily.
In The Birthright Lottery, Shachar asks us to look at citizenship from another angle.
A valuable citizenship can resemble an inherited asset. A person does not necessarily earn it; it is usually assigned at birth. And its value can differ enormously depending on which political community grants it.
Shachar does not claim that citizenship and private property are literally the same thing. Citizenship also involves political obligations, public institutions, democratic membership, and a shared political life.
The comparison is useful for a more limited reason:
Both property and citizenship can transmit valuable opportunities across generations.
That makes birthright citizenship a question not only of identity, but also of distribution.
Birthright Can Also Protect Equality
There is an important complication.
Birthright citizenship is not simply a system of privilege. Inside a country, it can also protect equality.
Consider citizenship based on birthplace.
If everyone born within the territory receives citizenship regardless of race, ancestry, wealth, or the legal status of their parents, the rule can prevent the creation of a permanent hereditary outsider class.
In a 2026 interview, Shachar described this as an anti-caste principle.
A child born in the country does not have to prove that the “right” blood runs through the family. Membership follows birth in the territory rather than ancestry.
That can be deeply egalitarian.
So there is a paradox:
A rule that promotes equality within a political community can still reproduce inequality between political communities.
Inside the border, birthright may prevent inherited exclusion. Across borders, however, the country into which a person happens to be born can determine access to very different sets of opportunities.
The same institution can therefore look egalitarian from one perspective and unequal from another.
When the Children Grow Up
Now imagine the two children from the beginning of this article as adults.
One may move internationally with relative ease. The other may face visa barriers, expensive procedures, long waiting periods, or no realistic path to residence at all.
The difference did not begin with anything either person chose.
It began with political membership assigned at birth.
This is where Shachar’s argument connects with the World Citizen framework.
Foot Democracy means the ability to make a meaningful choice among political communities—not merely to leave one place, but also to enter another, live there, and eventually build membership.
Seen from this perspective, the question is not simply whether countries are unequal.
It is also:
How much of a person’s political freedom should remain fixed by citizenship assigned before that person could choose?
What Happens When the Rich Can Buy Their Way Out?
Shachar’s recent work adds another layer to the problem.
Some countries allow wealthy foreigners to obtain residence or citizenship through investment programs. These are often called golden visas or golden passports.
The details differ from country to country. But the contrast can be striking.
An ordinary person may spend years trying to qualify for secure residence or citizenship. A wealthy applicant may sometimes obtain a much faster route through a large financial payment or investment.
Shachar argues that this creates another hierarchy.
Birth determines the political membership most people receive. Wealth can then allow some people to escape the limits of that birthright.
Their money may cross borders more easily than most people can.
If the ability to choose a political community exists mainly for those who can afford to buy access, then choice has expanded—but very unequally.
That is not what I mean by Foot Democracy.
Foot Democracy should not mean:
the wealthy may shop for citizenship while everyone else remains where birth placed them.
Political-community choice has to become a meaningful freedom, not merely a luxury good.
Residence or Money?
The contrast becomes sharper when we compare two different claims to membership.
One person has lived in a country for many years. She works there. Her children attend school there. She pays taxes there. Her daily life is governed by its laws.
Yet she may still have difficulty obtaining secure political membership.
Another person may never have lived there at all. But a large investment may provide a faster route to residence or citizenship.
Which relationship should matter more?
Money?
Or living together under common institutions?
Shachar herself proposes a principle she calls jus nexi: membership should give greater weight to a person’s genuine connection to a political community rather than relying only on the circumstances of birth.
The World Citizen framework moves in a similar direction, but gives durable residence a more explicit institutional role.
It gives greater weight to people who have built an actual life under a community’s laws than to either inherited nationality or the ability to purchase privileged access.
That does not mean money is irrelevant to immigration policy. Countries may reasonably welcome investment.
Nor does residence automatically create every political right on the first day.
The question is what should ultimately justify equal political membership.
Does This Mean Abolishing Citizenship?
No.
Shachar does not argue that citizenship should simply disappear.
Citizenship can protect people. It can provide political voice. It can secure the right to remain.
And birthright citizenship can prevent governments from turning the children of outsiders into permanent outsiders themselves.
The problem is not citizenship as such.
The problem is allowing citizenship assigned at birth to become the nearly permanent gatekeeper of political opportunity.
The World Citizen framework reaches a related conclusion from a different direction.
It does not require abolishing political communities, nor does it require abolishing every function of nationality.
Instead, it asks whether political membership can become more open to choice and change.
Birth may remain one way of acquiring membership.
It need not remain the only realistic foundation of secure political belonging.
From Birthright to Political Choice
Shachar’s birthright lottery exposes something modern democracy often leaves untouched.
Democracy gives us choices after we become members. We can vote, organize, criticize governments, and try to replace leaders.
But the initial allocation of political membership usually happens before any of those choices become possible.
We are born into it.
Shachar makes that fact visible.
The World Citizen framework asks what should follow.
If inherited political membership creates large inequalities of mobility and opportunity, should people gain a greater ability to change it?
If so, a formal right to leave is not enough.
There must also be a realistic possibility of Entry, a path to stable residence, and over time a path from residence to political membership.
The objective is not to eliminate birthright citizenship.
It is to make birth less decisive.
Conclusion
Birthright citizenship contains a genuine tension.
Within a country, it can protect equality by preventing citizenship from becoming a hereditary privilege of blood.
Across countries, it can distribute very different political opportunities according to the accident of birth.
And when wealthy people can buy faster access to new citizenships while long-term residents remain excluded, the tension becomes even clearer.
Shachar calls our attention to the lottery.
The next question is what political freedom should do about it.
We do not choose where we are born. Why should that accident remain so powerful over where we are allowed to belong?
That is where the birthright lottery meets Foot Democracy.
Notes
1. Shachar’s comparison between citizenship and inherited property is an analytical analogy. It does not mean that citizenship and private property are historically or legally identical.
2. Her principle of jus nexi gives weight to genuine social connection rather than birth alone as a basis for membership. The World Citizen framework places particular emphasis on durable residence as one institutional expression of such connection.
3. Shachar also discusses a birthright privilege levy, an inheritance-tax-like response to the unequal value associated with privileged citizenship.
4. In April 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled against Malta’s citizenship-by-investment scheme, holding that the transactional naturalization program at issue was incompatible with EU law.
5. In Trump v. Barbara (2026), a 5–4 majority on the constitutional question rejected a challenge to birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.
References
Shachar, Ayelet. The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality. Harvard University Press, 2009.
Nicholasen, Michelle. “Got a Million Dollars? You Could Become a Citizen of Another Country.” Interview with Ayelet Shachar. Epicenter, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, October 6, 2026.
Nishimura, Toshiyuki. The World Citizen Revolution. 2026.
Nishimura, Toshiyuki. The World Citizen Society: Political Freedom, Democratic Choice, and the Institutions of a New Society. 2026.
For the fuller argument about residence-based political membership, see Chapter 4, “Resident Sovereignty, Resident Equality, and Membership Security,” in The World Citizen Society.
If you are new to the larger argument, start with The World Citizen Revolution, which introduces the question of why political membership remains so strongly tied to birth.
Next in this series: From Nationality to Residence: Who Should Belong to a Political Community?
