MIGRAFISC

Problematic, unprecedented and innovative nature of the project, change of scale

Since the financial crisis of the late 2000s, tax exile and evasion have been at the heart of public debate in Europe and North America. At a time when state debts and wealth inequalities are exploding (Piketty, 2013), the various leaks have caused a scandal by revealing the extent of the "hidden wealth of nations" (Zucman, 2013) in territories described as tax havens. Academic research has focused on these grey zones of globalization, which have multiplied over the last 50 years. Recent work on the subject is mainly by economists, and focuses on capital flows and their financial impact on source countries. Few studies analyze the mobility of people and transnational living patterns associated with these financial flows, and their territorial effects in destination countries. While tax evasion is now better known, tax exiles remain understudied.  De  manière  générale,  l'étude  des relations  entre  fiscalité et migrations internationales reste limitée (Kleven et al, 2019), alors qu'elle avère cruciale pour comprendre l'inégalisation croissante des régimes de mobilité à travers le monde (Cresswell, 2010).

The project proposes to grasp the relationships between transnational mobilities and tax optimization through a spatial entry, by studying their effects in tax havens. The term "tax havens" refers to states in which tax legislation for foreign residents, whether individuals or companies, is exploited to enable them to evade the tax obligations of their home states (Chavagneux and Palan, 2017). Four "tax havens" will be studied in the project: Malta and Belgium, within the European Union, the United Arab Emirates and Mauritius outside the Union.

Since the financial crisis, specific real estate products for foreign investors have proliferated in these territories, combined with programs offering access to tax resident status in exchange for local investment (residence and citizenship by investment programs, Dzankic, 2019) and a veritable "migration infrastructure" aimed at attracting wealthy foreigners (Koh and Wissink, 2018). Thus, to better understand tax exile, which is difficult to measure by public statistics, the project proposes an entry through the migratory infrastructure it produces. The concept of "migratory infrastructure" formalized by Biao Xiang and Johan Lindquist in 2014 has in fact renewed transnational approaches (Düvell and Preis, 2022), proposing an all-encompassing notion designating all the devices that make a migratory flow possible and facilitate it, be they political-institutional (notably through visa policies), commercial (professional migration intermediaries), technological (transport systems) or social (migrants' family and interpersonal networks). Developed with regard to the migration of low-skilled workers, the concept has been little applied to privileged migrants, for whom the literature has postulated an ability to play across borders. Against the image of isolated, sovereign individuals who, escaping the bureaucracies and shackles of the nation-state, would "vote with their feet" (Sassen, 1996: 41) by choosing their country of election, our project studies the importance of the collective state and private arrangements that produce these privileged migrations.

The project is also situated within a spatial justice perspective, seeking to deconstruct the discourses that legitimize contemporary migratory inequalities. Entering through space enables us to criticize the "investment migration" thesis often put forward to justify the implementation of policies to attract wealthy migrants (Hines, 2010). This thesis ignores the social and environmental costs of tax exile, which become apparent when we observe the socio-spatial fragmentation and urban sprawl it generates in tax havens. The discourses produced by privileged migrants and by professional sites to justify tax exile (in the name of "freedom of movement" or "investment") - are also of interest in a comparative perspective with rhetorics legitimizing, on the contrary, the closure of borders and participating in the political construction of undesirable migrants.

Positioning the project in relation to the state of the art

The few existing works on privileged migration infrastructure have so far mainly addressed the first two dimensions identified by Xiang and Lindquist: political-institutional mechanisms on the one hand, with the field of studies on the sale of citizenship and investment migration (Aronczyk, 2013; Bauböck, 2018; Dzankic, 2019), and the commercial intermediaries of affluent migration on the other (wealth managers, tax lawyers, relocation companies; see Harrington, 2016; Koh and Wissink, 2018). The project will extend these two streams of research, studying the public and private actors facilitating migration to tax havens. The aim is, by crossing fields, to study the possible emergence of global models of attractiveness policies for wealthy migrants.

But the project will also analyze an aspect very little studied by the current of research on migratory infrastructure: its material and territorial dimension. One of the project's innovations is to analyze tax exile from the perspective of countries of destination, and not just of departure. We'll be analyzing how tax exile transforms host territories, with a particular focus on real estate products specifically designed for wealthy foreigners. Indeed, while much work has focused on citizenship by investment programs, the urban forms these programs produce remain poorly understood. Yet they generate novel spaces, since these policies of acquiring residency in exchange for real estate investment are designed to temporarily "fix" (Harvey, 1989) capital and residents alike. We will conduct a cartographic and landscape analysis of these programs in the various project areas. In addition to the residential sector, we will study the other facilities developed to attract privileged migrants: coworking spaces for wealthy teleworkers, international schools, health services, which are disrupting the landscapes of these spaces.

The final axis of the project will confront this migratory infrastructure with the lifestyles and discourses of the tax exiles themselves, through ethnographic surveys. Work directly on the latter remains very rare indeed, due to the strategies of discretion that characterize this milieu (Harrington, 2016). We intend to break down these barriers by entering through real estate, and investigating territories that team members know well and where they have "allies". Recent years have seen a proliferation of studies on the new mobile living patterns of elites (Cousin and Chauvin, 2021), but few have examined the role of tax optimization strategies within these circulations. Tax havens are particularly relevant fields in which to raise the question of the emergence of a "transnational capitalist class" (Sklair, 2001).

Considering that international migration is always the result of an arrangement of complex factors (Massey et al., 1993), this ethnographic investigation will also aim to deconstruct the category of "tax exiles" - that is, people who have explicitly migrated for tax reasons. Rather than the category of tax exile, we will use the category of "privileged migration" to designate the more or less lasting settlements in tax havens of people "privileged by class, race or citizenship" (Kunz, 2016). The project is indeed situated in the recent current of research on privileged migration (Cosquer et al, 2021). The latter has demonstrated the relevance of intersectional approaches to understanding the mechanisms of domination in a migratory context. It has also shown the phenomena of "moyennisation" of so-called elite migrations. We hypothesize that, with the return of rent in developed societies and the telecommuting possibilities enabled by new technologies, migrations to tax havens are no longer limited to an elite super-rich(Hay, 2013). They concern large fractions of the upper classes, those whose main income depends on annuities or self-employment, and for whom migration is associated with transnational wealth management techniques (affluent retirees, skilled digital nomads, real estate timeshare owners).