Other real-estate schemes have fallen into disrepute thanks to even murkier political arrangements. A decade ago, a Kuwait-backed company set out its stall on the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros. As Atossa Araxia Abrahamian explains in her recent book, The Cosmopolites, Comoro Gulf Holdings erected billboards along the seafront of Grande Comore featuring computer renderings of business parks and luxury apartment complexes designed to appeal to wealthy foreigners in search of passports. But the buildings never got off the drawing board. Instead, Comoros found itself entangled in a much shadier deal with the Gulf states. Having agreed to open up its citizenship to investors, the islands—or at least certain members of their government—received huge payments, mostly from the United Arab Emirates. But the passports, sent over in bulk and frequently surfacing on the black market, weren’t for Emiratis. Rather, they were for the Bidoon: the more than 100,000 people across the Gulf nations who, despite residing in the region for generations, have never been included as citizens, and are effectively stateless.

For years, the Gulf states have come under international pressure to address the issue of their stateless populations. The United Nations has declared that it wants to end statelessness by 2024. The market in citizenship provided a tempting opportunity to resolve the problem. Once again, people were given the chance to acquire the passport and associated rights of a place they’d never seen and where they probably never intended to live. In this case, however, they were more coerced than willing: Few Kuwaiti and Emirati Bidoon had ever heard of, let alone visited, Comoros. Many were tricked into accepting when renewing other documents, or had travel permits and driving licenses held ransom until they signed. While most have been allowed to remain in the Gulf, the acquisition of a passport means that troublesome Bidoon—particularly those agitating for better conditions—can be quietly shipped out of the country.

The legal frameworks of virtual citizenship invert and globalize the logic of the special economic zone—a geographical space of exception, where the usual rules of state and finance don’t apply. Special economic zones are one of the key innovations of global capitalism, stretching back to the British Empire’s treaty ports in China and Japan in the 19th century, and underpinning the hyper-accelerated growth of Shenzhen and Dubai in the 21st. Historically, they’ve been used to protect commercial interests and allow for wild experiments in industry and real estate, but increasingly they are being touted as a solution to issues of migration and citizenship.

In Jordan, where most of the 650,000 Syrian refugees are barred from jobs, the King Hussein Bin Talal Development Area has been set up on the outskirts of the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp. It is mandated to employ the refugees as a percentage of its workforce. The zone is the result of the Jordan Compact: an agreement between the Hashemite Kingdom and the European Union to provide jobs for refugees in return for special trade rules and access for European companies. Among the proposed launch partners are Ikea and the supermarket giant Asda, who will get access to cheap labor, and whose produced goods can be imported tax-free into Europe. The refugees, meanwhile, are required to stay where they are. Their position is akin to the passport-trading cosmopolites in one respect: They are subjects of the globalized economic system more than citizens of a nation.

Other states are exploring ways in which they can adjust their own citizenship laws to benefit from shifting populations. The small Baltic nation of Estonia prides itself as the most wired nation on Earth, having spent decades investing in new technologies and structuring government policy to reward innovation and Silicon Valley–style disruption.