Academic legitimation strategies by the investment migration industry

The “investment migration industry” comprises for-profit actors who assist states in carrying out investment migration programmes and advise clients on their residence and citizenship planning. In this article, we explore how and why this controversial industry uses academic authority for legitimation. We develop a sociological reading of “academic legitimation strategies” and conceptually differentiate between substantive and symbolic legitimation. Empirically, we map three main types of academic legitimation strategies and compare how industry actors and academics explain and view their interactions. We find that seeking academic authority represents an explicit and important legitimating strategy for some firms and industry bodies and argue that most often it is not academics’ substantive knowledge that is in demand by the industry, but rather the symbolic prestige of these scholars—their institutions and academia itself. Academics who engaged with the investment migration industry, in turn, were not motivated by a desire to legitimate it, even if some recognized that their engagement contributed to doing so. We situate academics’ engagement within the broader neoliberalization of academia, and suggest that shifting academic practices raise new professional and ethical dilemmas.