On a clear morning in April 2025, the Spanish government announced the abolition of the golden visa program, ending a decade-long practice that had sold residency rights for a minimum investment of EUR 500,000 in real estate. Between 2013 and 2023, Spain issued 14,576 golden visas. Ninety-four percent of applicants came from China, Russia, and the Middle East. During those same years, according to the International Organization for Migration, more than 2,000 people drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Spanish waters. The Spanish state did not sell them a visa. It sold them a coast guard, a naval patrol, and a graveyard.
This is not a contradiction. It is the logic of capitalism expressing itself through the institution of the border. The passport is no longer merely a document of national identity. Under late capitalism, it has become a commodity—a thing produced, priced, and exchanged on a global market. The golden visa is the purest form of this commodification, stripping away all pretense that citizenship represents anything other than the ability to pay. The working class, meanwhile, is treated not as mobile labor deserving of rights but as a reserve army of labor—Marx's term for the mass of unemployed or underemployed workers whose existence depresses wages and disciplines those who have jobs. For this class, borders are not gates. They are walls.
Golden Visas Reveal Citizenship as a Commodity Reserved for Capital
The Marxist category of the commodity is not a metaphor. A commodity is anything produced for exchange on a market, where its value is determined not by its use but by the abstract labor time required to produce it and the price it can command. The golden visa program makes explicit what was always implicit: that the state treats the right to reside within its territory as a thing to be sold. Spain priced that thing at EUR 500,000 in real estate. Portugal sold it for EUR 280,000. Malta set its minimum at EUR 150,000. Greece priced residency at EUR 250,000. Cyprus offered a full passport, not just residency, for EUR 2 million.
The buying class understands this transaction with perfect clarity. They are not purchasing a home or an investment portfolio. They are purchasing mobility itself—the right to cross borders, to access healthcare and education, to store capital in a stable European jurisdiction, to escape political instability or tax regimes. For the capitalist class, borders are porous because money dissolves them. For the working class, borders are concrete because labor does not command the same price as capital. The golden visa reveals the fundamental class character of the border: it exists not to regulate movement in the abstract but to filter movement by class position.
This is not a bug in the system. It is the system's most honest feature. When the Spanish government marketed the golden visa, it explicitly pitched it as a way to attract "high-net-worth individuals" who would stimulate the real estate market. The state did not pretend that these individuals had any connection to Spanish society, culture, or history. They did not need to speak Spanish. They did not need to work. They did not need to contribute anything except EUR 500,000. Citizenship was reduced to its pure exchange value.
The Same States That Sell Passports Drown Those Who Cannot Pay
The integration of European border enforcement is the other side of the same coin. While Spain sold golden visas to wealthy foreigners, it simultaneously contracted with Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, to patrol the Mediterranean and intercept migrant boats. While the Spanish Interior Ministry processed EUR 500,000 applications in Madrid, its Maritime Rescue Service coordinated returns to Libya, where migrants faced detention, torture, and sale into slavery. The same state apparatus that issued golden visas also funded the surveillance drones, the radar systems, and the pushback operations that killed or returned those without capital.
This dual function is not an accident of overlapping bureaucracies. It is the structural requirement of capitalism under conditions of imperialism—the stage of capitalism in which the core economies of Europe and North America extract surplus value from the peripheral economies of the global South, including through labor migration regimes that treat workers as disposable. The point is not that European states "should" let everyone in. The point is that they have already decided who gets in and on what terms. The terms are capital. EUR 500,000 unlocks the gate. EUR 0 activates the wall.
Consider the numbers. In the decade Spain ran its golden visa program, the country also intercepted and returned over 80,000 migrants attempting the Mediterranean crossing. The cost of intercepting a single boat can exceed EUR 50,000. The cost of processing a golden visa application is effectively zero—the applicant pays the fee. The state subsidizes the exclusion of the poor while generating revenue from the inclusion of the rich. This is not a humanitarian failure. It is a market operating exactly as designed, clearing the border of those who cannot pay and selling access to those who can.
The contradiction is not that states both sell and deny entry. The contradiction is that the working class has been convinced that this system is natural. "We must" secure our borders. "We must" attract investment. These formulations hide the class content of the policy: whose borders are being secured, and whose investment is being attracted. The answer is always the same: the borders are secured against the working class, and the investment is attracted from the capitalist class. The liberal response—that we should be "more compassionate" toward migrants—misses the point entirely. The issue is not compassion. The issue is that the border is a class weapon.
Real Estate Investment Visas Inflate Housing Costs for the Working Class
The golden visa's mechanism—real estate investment—deserves specific attention because it reveals how citizenship commodification directly attacks the working class's living conditions. Between 2013 and 2023, Spanish real estate prices rose by over 40 percent in major cities like Madrid and Barcelona. While multiple factors drove this increase, the golden visa program was a measurable contributor. Investors from China alone purchased over 12,000 properties under the visa scheme, concentrating purchases in high-demand urban districts. These were not homes. They were commodities—assets to hold, rent out, or leave vacant while the visa term ran.
The working class does not compete on equal terms in a housing market distorted by capital flight. A Chinese or Russian investor willing to drop EUR 500,000 on a Barcelona apartment is not subject to the same constraints as a Spanish rental worker earning EUR 1,200 per month. The investor treats the apartment as a store of value and a visa ticket. The worker needs it as a place to live. When the state incentivizes the investor over the worker, it is not a market failure. It is a class decision. The state chose to turn housing into a border commodity, and the working class pays the rent—literally.
This mechanism is not unique to Spain. In Portugal, the golden visa program drove up housing prices in Lisbon and Porto by an estimated 20 percent. In Greece, real estate investment visas concentrated in Athens and the islands, exacerbating a housing crisis that has left thousands of Greek workers unable to afford apartments in their own capital. In Malta, the passport-for-investment program directly inflated the luxury property market while social housing construction stagnated. The pattern is consistent: when the state sells residency through real estate, it transfers wealth upward. The investor gains a European passport and a property asset. The developer gains a buyer at inflated prices. The working class gains higher rents and scarcer housing.
This is not merely a distortion. It is a direct transfer of surplus value—the value created by workers in production that exceeds their wages and is appropriated by capital. The real estate investor extracts surplus value from the housing market by purchasing property that working-class tenants then rent, paying the investor's mortgage and generating profit. The state facilitates this extraction by granting the investor a visa, which is itself a commodity the state produced at negligible cost. The state takes a cut of the surplus value in visa fees and taxes, the investor takes the rest, and the working class pays both the rent and the cost of being excluded from the citizenship market.
The Abolition of Spain's Golden Visa Does Not Resolve the Contradiction
In April 2025, Spain's left-wing coalition government, facing a severe housing crisis and public outrage over rising rents, announced the termination of the golden visa program. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez framed the decision as a victory for housing justice: "Access to housing is a right, not a speculative business." The announcement was met with relief from housing activists and condemnation from real estate developers. The European Commission, meanwhile, has been pressuring member states to tighten golden visa programs, citing money laundering and security risks.
This abolition is welcome, but it resolves nothing fundamental. It does not challenge the underlying principle that citizenship can be bought. It does not alter the fact that the same border apparatus that sold golden visas still stops migrants at sea. It does not address the structural role that migrant labor plays in suppressing wages for the domestic working class—a dynamic that operates regardless of whether the border is sold or enforced. What Spain abolished was a specific pricing mechanism. The commodity form of citizenship remains.
The deeper contradiction is that capitalism requires both the free movement of capital and the controlled movement of labor. Capital must be able to cross borders instantly, seeking higher rates of exploitation, lower taxes, and weaker regulations. Labor, on the other hand, must be restrained, because the free movement of workers would equalize wages across regions, eliminating the super-exploitation of migrant labor that generates enormous profits for capital. The golden visa satisfies the first requirement: capital moves freely, and the capitalist who moves with it pays for the privilege. The Mediterranean wall satisfies the second: workers are stopped, deterred, or drowned, keeping the reserve army of labor available but contained.
The abolition of the golden visa does not touch this structure. It eliminates one pricing mechanism while leaving the commodity form intact. Citizenship is still for sale; the price is just no longer EUR 500,000 in Spanish real estate. It remains for sale through corporate investment visas, through wealth-based residency schemes in Portugal and Greece, through the entire apparatus of investor migration that the European Union has spent decades building. The Spanish working class wins a small victory against housing speculation, but the class character of the border remains unchanged.
The task, then, is not to abolish golden visas. The task is to abolish the commodity form of citizenship itself—to refuse the premise that the right to move and to reside can be bought or sold. This means demanding open borders, not as a liberal gesture of compassion, but as a material necessity for working-class internationalism. It means recognizing that every border enforced against the poor is a border that protects the wealth of the rich. It means building organizational forms that can fight for the free movement of labor with the same ferocity that capital has secured for its own free movement. The golden visa was never a scandal. It was a revelation. The scandal is that the working class is still fighting for the right to move while capital has already bought the keys to the gate.
