“People obtaining an EU nationality must have a genuine connection to the member state concerned,” Věra Jourová, the European commissioner for justice, consumers, and gender equality, said in a statement on Wednesday. “We want more transparency on how nationality is granted and more cooperation between member states.”

Indeed, the sale of residency and citizenship to those rich enough to pay challenges the very idea of citizenship and immigration. From Britain and Germany to Italy and Hungary, Europe is mired in a debate over mass immigration and integration, but the super rich have largely been left untouched. The beneficiaries of golden-visa schemes aren’t photographed walking across borders, jumping over fences, or crossing the Mediterranean. They are wealthy, welcomed by governments, and mostly anonymous.

The EU’s recommendations this week come with golden-visa schemes under increased scrutiny. In Malta, for instance, the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb in October 2017 while she was investigating her country’s own visa program for the rich, which she believed was rife with corruption. Last month, Britain said it was suspending its own program and said it would formulate new rules. It has since reversed its position, though the visas granted to 700 rich Russians are reportedly being reviewed. Portugal’s program is also under the microscope because of allegations of misuse and a lax requirement for residency (those who get Portugal’s golden visa only need to be in the country seven days a year).

Proponents—such as David Lesperance, whose firm, Lesperance & Associates, helps wealthy clients secure residency and nationality in countries like Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.—insist that the overwhelming majority of residencies or citizenships obtained through these programs are legitimate. Applicants are coming, supporters of golden visas say, for many of the same reasons that less-affluent migrants cross borders: to escape political instability and for a better quality of life. And, according to Lesperance, because these visas are open only to the super rich, the number of applications are tiny compared to overall numbers of immigrants, which means that governments can dedicate more resources to screening them. (Over the past decade, the program has created 6,000 new EU citizens and about 100,000 residents.)

“If I’m a scoundrel, I would not be looking at an economic residence or citizenship program,” Lesperance told me.

Read: ‘Expat’ and the fraught language of migration

The visas are especially attractive to the super rich in countries with weak institutions or fickle rule of law: Indeed, China and Russia, in that order, account for the overwhelming majority of golden visas in the EU countries that provide such data. Global Witness and Transparency International said in their report that Chinese nationals were the top recipients of such visas in six countries (Britain, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain), while Russian nationals were the highest number in two (Bulgaria and Latvia).