Let me take a moment up front to expound briefly on immigration considerations in general, because long before you get to the question of who can afford a citizen-shareholdership, you start dramatically reducing the set with the question of who is permitted to purchase one in the first place.
The Empire, after all, simultaneously runs the most permissive and the most restrictive immigration policy in the Associated Worlds. There are, for example, no restrictions on personal versus business travel, and no restrictions on length of stay (and thus no special status for permanent residents). There are no work permits. There are no limits on owning property. There are no visas¹. You just turn up, and if they admit you, you can stay as long as you like.
If they admit you.
The Empire is a mite particular about who it wants hanging around, and while some countries on Earth at least pretend to exercise some discretion with regard to citizenship², the Empire both takes those things a lot more seriously, and applies them to all admissions.
To summarize: you can and will be refused entry by the Imperial Guard of Borders and Volumes for any of:
- posing a security threat (including citizenship of a threat nation or membership in a proscribed organization);
- being a public health risk (including insanity, and that’s by their standards, not yours or your country’s);
- being a felon or habitual misdemeanant (and again, that’s by their standards, nor yours or your country’s);
- being obviously indigent;
- lying to your inplacement officer, or having been previously deported;
- or failing to sign and seal in good faith and under an alethiometer your acceptance of form I-180.
That last, of course, is the big one.
You can find the text of the major affirmation (that you agree with and are attached to the principles of the Fundamental Contract) over here, and that also notes that the full form includes your agreement to respect the law and pay the ESF on earned income during your stay.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to contemplate the percentage of potential applicants from Earth likely to be culled by this clause, but I note that this is where a lot of what section three of the Charter labels as “widely-accepted dyspraxic defect, philosophical incompatibility, or other unassimilability” comes in. (And that while they have received over history more than a few diplomatic complaints about large sections of other countries’ populations being rejected as lunatics, polits³, bad religionists⁴, shopping-cart-non-returners, litterati, people who talk at the theater, etal., said complaints are generally taken as evidence that the policy in question is all of good, right, and necessary to preserve social trust, harmony, and civilized standards in general.)
Having said all that, yes, they’re expensive⁵. As I said back here, the market price of a citizen-share is determined by the ability of the capital & obligations⁶ attached to that share to balance the Dividend and provisions likewise. That ain’t cheap; it’s basically saving/investing enough money to live off without depleting your capital.
(I believe JHPrime’s figure is based on an old comment of mine reading:
To come up with a decent comparison – and I reserve the right to change this if I think I was wrong – it’s probably something of the order of buying a nice house in a good neighborhood, in some suitably average city here.
I’ll stand by that until I have a better way to compare the really hard to compare. Call it $750k in hard currency.)
On one hand, it’s inevitably going to be expensive. It has so many features that regular citizenships don’t (remember, if you get something for free, you’re the product), starting with actual clearly defined contractual limits, and extending on through such things as a perpetual revenue stream that will more than repay its value over time, complimentary full-coverage crime insurance, all the Barbarian Repellent™ you could ever need, and so on and so forth.
On the other hand, it’s good that it’s expensive. It is, after all, the Worlds’ leading premium citizenship brand. When people get something for free, they don’t value it, and/or start feeling entitled to it as a gift from the magic entitlement-satisfaction fairies. The high asset value of a citizen-shareholdership is a reminder to everyone that Civilization Is Not Free.
On the gripping hand, as I also mention in the referenced post, it’s not impossibly expensive for most people. For one thing, it comes with an income stream, which you can use to at least partially cover a loan to get it⁷. There are also entire organizations which exist to sponsor/invest in new immigrants, for a fairly wide variety of reasons.
(When I used the example of the girl turning up at inplacement with nothing but her abuela’s book of family recipes, a dream of opening a restaurant, and a helping of determination - well, I wasn’t kidding, folks. The Empire loves people like her. Finding sponsorship and investment for her restaurant will be downright easy.)
((Incidentally, for Post-Contact Hilarity purposes, some people are going to be mightily offended that – well, let’s just say that down on the US’s southern border, we have would-be immigrants willing to undergo many privations and then work miserable jobs in shitty conditions to get a better life for themselves and their families. It should not surprise anyone, but inevitably will, that said sponsorship organizations will find it a much better deal to invest in putting Esteban, there, through Space Engineer School than in the inplacement of one of America’s finest college-educated commies with a major in political whining.))
Plus, of course, the reason I talked about the admission requirements so extensively up there (and, indeed, there rather than naturalization is where most of the barriers are) is because you don’t have to get the citizen-shareholdership first. You can come and stay and work and earn money as a non-citizen resident, and as such can earn the price of your citizen-share in a real economy, not some half-crippled emerging market. That goes much quicker.
(The Imperials like this option, because this helps select for people likely to prosper in their society. It also solves, to a large extent, the problem of getting your hands on hard currency. The exchange rate vs. the gAu sucks.
…I feel like I’ve commented elsewhere on things that tend to have value in first-contact scenarios, so I’ll dig that up and get back to it.)
Anyway, this post is long enough on its own, so close for now and continue on specific points later.
Footnotes:
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Well, technically, there are four visas. Two of those don’t change anything in the inplacement process: one, the I-series, simply notes that you chose to clear inplacement at the consulate at your point of departure, rather than at your port of entry, and the other, the N-series, is used by people who live next door to an exclave and cross the border every day, and so don’t need to repeat the whole process every day. The other two which do bypass the normal inplacement process are the D-series (which also serve as proof of diplomatic immunity), issued to accredited diplomatic personnel on the grounds that there are some nasty little fascists you occasionally have to talk to; and the V-series, which require that a citizen-shareholder in good standing has taken full personal responsibility for everything you do in the Empire, on pain and penalty of sharing all your pains and penalties - including loss of citizen-shareholdership if you get yourself deported. Either is about as rare as a snowball in a supernova, and as such are irrelevant here.
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The US, for example, requires in theory for naturalization “good moral character” and “attachment to the Constitution”.
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If you have strong views on things the government should be forcing people to do or on how other people’s property ought to be allocated, the alethiometer will pick up that you are blatantly lying about your attachment to certain principles in re liberty and property, and leave you to hold a bitchfest in the extrality area with the rest of the slavers. Also, by their standards, this requires obligation. Strategic defaulters and adulterers beware, you’ve basically made a public declaration that your word is no good. Like I said: painfully high standards.
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To pick the obvious example, there are those certain religions with, 'hem, ideas about the proper place of women in society, which tend to attract the response that they and the god that produced them can both fuck off back to the shithole rapetopia that they crawled out of. Yes, they will judge you for your beliefs. What the hell else are they going to judge you on?
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Of course, unlike the fees most countries charge for naturalization, when you die - or renounce your citizenship, although not when you are stripped of it - the citizen-share returns to the Empire and its value is paid out to your estate. An Imperial citizen-shareholdership is an investment, and not one purely expressed through the Dividend.
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And while the Empire has high expectations of its citizen-shareholders, it also has high expectations of itself where its responsibilities to its citizen-shareholders are concerned. Lots of polities say things like “the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens”; rather fewer task themselves with, say, making good the victims of any crime within their territory, or a certain amount of battlecruiser diplomacy.
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And, no, they don’t use something wacky like the US’s credit rating system. It’s more like the Japanese system in which they ask relevant questions like “do your numbers make sense (i.e., can you actually pay this)?”, “do you have a history of default?”, and “are you, fundamentally, a sophont of integrity?”