On February 1st, 2026, Ghana’s Ministry of the Interior suspended new citizenship applications from the historical African diaspora. A few days earlier, Ghana’s foreign minister had announced a Ghanaian passport for IShowSpeed, a YouTube star with tens of millions of viewers. There was public outcry from diasporans arguing that with the new regulations in effect, they could not get their applications processed in a reasonable timeline, and some could not afford the new fees imposed.
The official reason for the citizenship changes was labeled as simply administrative: the process needed to be reviewed, streamlined, and made more accessible and user-friendly. But the details that emerged painted a more complex picture. Applicants complained about the newly imposed excessive number of stages, tight submission deadlines, and high fees. One of the most challenging requirements was the expectation that applicants submit DNA evidence within a week of filing. Dr. Erieka Bennet of the Diaspora African Forum, an organization that supports African diasporans who wish to relocate to the continent, described the timeframe as “impossible” for most applicants, noting that DNA testing typically takes considerably longer and that its reliability and veracity are still being called into question.
The apparent disparity of treatment between a famous YouTuber and the African diasporans is a symptom of something more than administrative discrepancies. It leans toward something more fundamental: what happens when citizenship is a product, conveniently given away in light of opportune photo ops and incredible PR? What happens when belonging is marketed as a product with dynamic pricing? What are the consequences of attracting interested buyers before they understand the totality of what citizenship in a country and society actually means? What are the consequences to the sellers of citizenship whose aim is to bring in as much foreign money as possible, with no regard for their citizenry, that is, until elections? The same people selling citizenship to the highest bidder are also those who withhold it from those most aligned with it as a societal concept rather than a financial instrument.
In Ghana, the Year of Return, the 2019 heritage tourism initiative marking 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, created the emotional and logistical infrastructure for what became a migratory inflow. What began as an invitation to visit became, for hundreds of Black Americans and Caribbean nationals, a pathway to residency and citizenship. The marketing did not simply sell Ghana as a destination. It sold belonging — and belonging, in this context, carried the implicit promise of citizenship as its ultimate expression. The integration infrastructure did not follow.
In Portugal, two overlapping programs did similar work. The Non-Habitual Resident tax scheme, introduced in 2009 in response to the global financial crisis, offered qualifying residents a flat tax rate for ten years and attracted significant foreign inflows. The Golden Visa, the ARI residency-by-investment program, explicitly marketed a pathway to Portuguese citizenship as one of its primary selling points, with naturalization after five years held out as the destination at the end of the investment road. The D7 passive income visa, increasingly popular among remote workers and retirees, particularly post-2020 COVID, carried the same implicit promise. None of these programs were designed with integration in mind. All of them sold citizenship as the reward for participation. And all of them are now revising the terms of that reward, or seemingly revoking the reward altogether.
Both countries marketed citizenship. Neither built the infrastructure that citizenship actually requires. The lessons are not encouraging.
Citizenship has two definitions worth considering. The first is familiar: the status of being a legally recognized national of a particular country. The second is the one almost nobody in the “move abroad” conversation is discussing with sustained vigor, beyond the self-congratulating “don’t be a colonizer” quips — that is, the actual qualities of a person’s conduct as a member of a community. Community beyond Disneyfied fantastical caricatures of people in the places you are entering: perhaps the warm women in the market selling you fruit in Ghana calling you “sista,” or a nice Portuguese avó that immediately takes you and your family in upon arrival.
You can have the first without the second. You can hold a passport, register a tax number, sign a lease, and spend years in a place while remaining entirely outside its social fabric.
I came across Anna Pöysä ’s Substack, The Other Lisbon, in April, and she was kind enough to have a video chat with me about Lisbon. Anna is a Finnish freelance journalist, translator, and scholar who did her PhD in postcolonial studies and has lived in Lisbon since the early 2000s. Our chat was illuminating; she told me just how drastically and quickly Lisbon has changed over the course of her time there. In her most recent post, Who Gets to Be Portuguese?, she writes about a friend of hers from Cova da Moura — a neighborhood in Lisbon’s outskirts built primarily by Cape Verdean migrants — who spent years fighting for Portuguese citizenship in a country where he had been born and raised. When he finally received it, his lawyer asked whether he was going to celebrate. His answer: “Why would I celebrate something I should have gotten a long time ago?”
That sentence epitomizes what Anna’s essay is about and where my curiosities are taking me. Legal status and belonging are not the same thing. And Portugal’s history of citizenship law makes clear that the state has always understood this, and has used that understanding to deliberately determine who gets which one.
The Legal Architecture of Who Belongs
Anna’s argument is precisely this: nationality laws are used to express and manage who is desirable or acceptable citizens and who is not.
To understand why the 1981 law landed the way it did, you have to understand the ideology that preceded it.
Lusotropicalism, the term coined by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in 1951 and adopted as official Portuguese state doctrine by the 1960s, held that Portugal was a uniquely benevolent colonial power. That the Portuguese were more humane, more adaptable, and more given to cultural mixing than other European colonizers. That the empire was not domination but a kind of extended family, a luso-tropical civilization held together by warmth rather than violence. These ideas were transmitted through textbooks, media, official documents, and propaganda channels, and became deeply ingrained in Portuguese self-understanding, outlasting the colonial regime itself and entering the 21st century.
The ideology was, of course, a fiction. What Portugal practiced in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde was extraction and forced labor dressed in the language of civilization. But the fiction had consequences. It created a set of expectations on both sides of the colonial relationship — an implied reciprocity, a sense that the former colonies and the metropole were bound together by something more than conquest. After the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 ended the dictatorship and decolonization accelerated, there was a very large flow of African immigrants coming from the former Portuguese colonies. Portugal had been a country of emigration; it became a country of immigration simultaneously. People arrived from the PALOP countries into a Portugal that had, for decades, told them they were part of a shared civilization. They were needed — for construction, for infrastructure, for the labor that a country rebuilding itself after forty years of dictatorship required.
And then, in 1981, seven years after the revolution that was supposed to change everything, the center-right coalition changed the citizenship law.
The ideology that had welcomed them as colonial subjects did not extend to recognizing their children as Portuguese citizens. The benevolent colonizer turned out to have terms and conditions that the marketing had not adequately disclosed.
The evidence in Portugal is not subtle. In 1981, Portugal shifted from jus soli, the principle that citizenship is granted to those born on the soil, to jus sanguinis, the principle of bloodline. In practice, people born in Portugal since 1981 have found themselves excluded from Portuguese citizenship because of this change. Despite having been born and spending all their lives in Portugal, this misplaced generation were legally considered “foreigners” because their parents’ immigration status was not regularized at the time of their births. It is an issue that, for reasons that are at the same time historical, socioeconomic, and political, predominantly affects Portugal’s Black, Afrodescendant communities, who originate mostly in the African former colonies of Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Mozambique.
In the same family, kids born before 1981 were Portuguese citizens, and the kids born after were not. There are many families like this in Cova da Moura, where the vast majority of residents are of Cape Verdean origin.
At the same time, Portugal extended easy access to citizenship to a different group. Descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition in the 15th century could apply without residing in the country or knowing Portuguese. The principal requirement was a certificate from the Portuguese Jewish community to prove Sephardic origin. The law was presented as a form of historical reparations.
The law was criticized, especially when it was used by Russian oligarchs — most notoriously Roman Abramovich, whose Portuguese naturalization was facilitated by a Porto rabbi later arrested for fraud — to obtain EU citizenship. It has since been revoked. But its existence and its contrast with the citizenship pathways available to PALOP-heritage communities tells you something important: Portugal has always known how to construct a citizenship pathway when it wants to. The question of who receives that construction is a political choice, not an administrative inevitability.
The most recent iteration of this choice is visible in Portugal’s revised nationality law, passed in 2025. The proposal eliminates automatic attribution of nationality based on jus soli. Children of foreign parents born in Portugal will only be granted nationality if at least one parent has three years of legal residence and parents make an express declaration regarding nationality attribution. The Sephardic Jewish naturalization route is formally ended. At the same time, those with Portuguese ancestry now have easier routes to citizenship — grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Portuguese nationals may apply, provided they demonstrate familiarity with Portuguese culture, society, and traditions.
The indignation was not confined to the PALOP-heritage communities watching these changes from the outside. Golden Visa holders, the investors who had entered Portugal through the ARI — Autorização de Residência para Atividade de Investimento, a residency-by-investment program distinct from the Non-Habitual Resident tax scheme but similarly promoted by Portuguese agencies following the 2008-2011 financial crisis, challenged the citizenship changes at the Constitutional Court, arguing they had made life plans based on governmental assurances about naturalization timelines that were now being retroactively altered. More than 20,000 investors expected appointments with AIMA only in the first half of 2026, some having waited since 2021 for decisions the law requires within 90 days. Their lawyers filed briefs arguing that investors had enrolled children in Portuguese schools expecting citizenship acquisition before those children reached adulthood, and that the new ten-year timeline would mean a child aged four today would turn nineteen before parental naturalization could trigger derivative nationality rights.
The contrast is worth sitting with. PALOP-heritage families born in Portugal, classified as foreigners under the 1981 law, spent decades fighting for recognition of the citizenship they arguably should have held by birthright. Golden Visa investors, who entered through a program explicitly designed to attract capital and who paid handsomely for the privilege, mounted a Constitutional Court challenge when the terms of that program were revised, almost immediately. Both groups were caught in the machinery of a state that has always managed citizenship as a political instrument. The difference is in who had the lawyers, the legal standing, and the expectation of being heard.
The voluntary migrants who arrived under the NHR are mostly unaffected by these tightening rules. The NHR was a tax incentive, not a residency pathway, and most NHR holders already held residency through other visa classes. The communities bearing the costs of that wave are not.
The Queue
Anna describes arriving at the citizenship office before sunrise to submit her own application. There were two queues: on one side lawyers in their formal clothes, all of them white; on the other side ordinary people, the majority of them Black and Brown. The first person in line had arrived the previous evening and spent the whole night outdoors waiting.
That image is the policy argument made concrete. Citizenship, as a legal process, sorts people. The sorting is not random. Applying for Portuguese citizenship as a “Portuguese immigrant” requires proof of uninterrupted residence in Portugal for the past ten years. A criminal record from the country you are officially a citizen of, but have never visited. A lawyer typically costs around one thousand euros, plus a two-hundred-and-fifty-euro application fee; many cannot afford the process. For comparison, the minimum salary in Portugal is nine hundred and twenty euros.
The voluntary lifestyle migrant with purchasing power navigates a different process entirely. The visa is transactional. Integration is optional. The relationship to the Portuguese state is largely fiscal. And the communities whose members spent the night outside the citizenship office so they could submit their paperwork the next morning are the same communities being displaced by the rents these newcomers’ presence is driving up.
Something even more peculiar sits underneath this dynamic, something I wrote about during my artist residency in Lisbon. A new cohort of Black voluntary migrants from Nigeria, Kenya, the UK, and the US is entering Portugal, primarily on the D7 visa class that until May 2026 offered a five-year track to citizenship — now extended to ten years for most non-EU applicants under the revised Nationality Law. These new entrants may influence, if not skew, what it means to be Black in Lisbon, let alone Black or Afrodescendant and Portuguese. What does it mean for the complexity of Blackness in this city when new arrivals with purchasing power and American or British passports enter a landscape already shaped by decades of PALOP-heritage community building, legal precarity, and resistance? The question is not rhetorical. It is one of the central questions my doctoral research is designed to investigate.
The Ghana Connection
My interest in Ghana stems from past guests’ experiences in Ghana and also my doctoral research, where Lisbon serves as my primary site and Ghana as a comparative site. I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with Maisha Hyman Sumbry, who is embedded in ways I am not.
Maisha Hyman Sumbry, cross-cultural trainer, diaspora engagement strategist, and co-founder of the Adinkra Group, recently wrote a five-part LinkedIn series, Citizenship, Return, and Responsibility. She frames the central issue: “What does responsibility look like in a place where we may not speak the language, understand the systems, or fully grasp the culture?”
Her context is of diasporan return to the African continent. My context extends that question to voluntary lifestyle migration broadly. But the obligation she names is the same in both contexts. Arriving somewhere creates obligations, not just opportunities. The question is whether anyone — the governments doing the marketing, the migrants responding to it — is actually honoring that.
The diaspora response to the February 2026 citizenship suspension was swift and, in some quarters, loud. The announcement sent ripples of uncertainty and anxiety through Blaxit communities of people planning relocation or investments, with applicants already in the system left without clarity about fees already paid or files already submitted. On social media, the frustration was immediate — questions about fees, about the DNA timeline, about what the pause actually meant for people who had organized their lives around the assumption of a pathway that was now uncertain.
What was interesting to observe, from the outside, was the register of the response. Some of it landed as indignation. As a grievance filed with an authority that owed a remedy. As if the mechanism of American civic protest, a petition, a public statement, a demand for accountability, was the appropriate tool in this context.
In Part 4, writing about what a meaningful return actually requires, Hyman Sumbry observes that diasporans often arrive carrying tactics and orientations that were shaped by entirely different institutional contexts and that those tactics frequently have no leverage in the new one. The confrontational posture that has, with varying degrees of success, produced accountability from American institutions does not translate. The cultural protocol in most of the contexts across the continent where you are seeking to belong requires that you state your purpose first. You demonstrate your commitment before you make your demands. Deploying the language of consumer rights in a conversation about ancestral belonging signals something about where your orientation actually is. Not toward belonging. Toward winning.
The frustration was legitimate, and its source was specific. Under the previous administration, most diaspora citizenship had been granted by presidential decree — ceremonial concessions that bypassed the standard naturalization process and were largely cost-free beyond the expense of living in Ghana. The 524 citizenships granted in a single ceremony in November 2024 had come through exactly this mechanism: presidential discretion under the Citizenship Act 2000, which allows the President to waive standard requirements in special cases. The new process introduced under the Mahama administration replaced that with a formal two-stage application, GH₵1,500 to submit, followed by GH₵25,000 upon being selected to proceed, totaling approximately $2,416, alongside DNA evidence requirements and an uncertain timeline. People who had understood citizenship as a gift, an act of ancestral repair freely given, were now being asked to purchase it. That shift in the nature of the transaction is what landed so badly. And the form the response took revealed something important about the assumption underneath it: that Ghana’s citizenship process was a service being delivered to a consumer, and that the consumer had the right to demand better service. That is not what citizenship is. That is what buying a product is. And the conflation of the two is precisely the problem Hyman Sumbry has been naming throughout her series.
With Ghana, along with Portugal, the question truly is: who set up the system of citizenship as a product? It is convenient to scapegoat overly indulged foreigners for "wanting to speak to the manager" when the rules change. Rules changed, notably, as a show of belated protection for the citizens nobody asked when the product was being sold, and to quell the resentment of the locals whose displacement nobody planned for. But who marketed the product and was gleeful when it was purchased, only to perform indignation when customer service is requested?
What Citizenship Actually Requires
Integration is distinguished from assimilation in a specific and important way: assimilation implies replacement, that you adopt the dominant culture and shed your own. Integration implies addition, that you engage with the community as it actually is while remaining yourself.
Reciprocity is the concept most consistently absent from the move abroad conversation. Most people discuss what they are getting: the cost of living, the weather, the healthcare, safety from gun violence, and the peace of being somewhere that does not organize itself around their subordination. What they discuss far less often is what they are giving. What they are bringing to the community they entered. What the exchange looks like from both sides. And when it is broached, it arrives in the most flimsy, abstract, allyship-adjacent manner — a lot of words that mean nothing, paired with eyes desperately pleading not to be seen as “one of the bad ones”. The specifics are lacking because they were never considered. Their well-meaning, good-intentioned presence is supposed to be enough. But you know as much as I do that the path to hell is paved in good intentions, which we are currently witnessing.
What Hyman Sumbry documents in her series, and what Flourish in the Foreign has documented across multiple geographies, is that the entrance as well as return is frequently physical but not social. People arrive and replicate the cultural formations they left rather than engaging with the place they arrived. The body is in Accra. The orientation is still in Atlanta (and y’all know how much I love my city, but it must remain in the deep south).
The same pattern is visible in Lisbon. The voluntary lifestyle migrant who lives entirely within an Anglophone bubble, who patronizes the businesses other English speakers have opened, who navigates the city through apps designed for people like them, is not integrating. They are consuming. And the communities bearing the cost of that consumption — in rising rents, in displacement, in the erosion of the cultural life that made the city worth moving to in the first place — are pointedly not the ones generating the Instagram content about how wonderful it is to live there.
Although it does make me wonder: what would an established Black American neighborhood or enclave look like within the context of other African diasporic enclaves within Lisbon? How would it function to be rooted in ethnic origins but decidedly be in and of Lisbon? How would that honestly function in Accra? I do not have clean answers. These are the questions I am taking to the doctoral research.
What Pan-Africanism Was and Wasn’t
With mounting tensions surrounding citizenship and the influx of Black Americans into Accra, arriving with ideas and hopes of a pan-African paradise or at least experience, it is important to name something plainly: pan-Africanism was born in the diaspora. It is not an inherently African concept. The idea that shared Blackness produces automatic kinship across the Atlantic is a diaspora construct, shaped by the specific experience of the transatlantic slave trade and the particular racial formations of the Western Hemisphere.
It does not map straightforwardly onto how Ghanaians understand themselves, their ethnic identities, their political affiliations, their relationship to people who arrive from America speaking no Twi or Ga or Fante and expecting to feel at home.
This is not Ghana’s failure, but perhaps a large cultural marketing oversight. Failing to understand the motivations and expectations of their target market and the ill-advised use of words around belonging and invitation that do not share the same cultural or contextual meanings throughout the diaspora.
Which is probably the cause of the emotional response to the citizenship requirement changes. What was seemingly being sold was repair, family, and belonging. That is not what is being delivered. It is a mismatch of expectations that the marketing produced, and nobody adequately corrected it.
And it connects directly to the passport privilege question I have been sitting with for years: the perceived freedom and warmer reception some Black Americans experience in places like Lisbon or Accra is likely far more connected to the class mobility an American passport provides than to any genuine shift in global anti-Blackness or genuine welcome, let alone homecoming. The warmth is real. What it is a response to is worth examining honestly. And if the warmth is a response to passport privilege rather than to who you are, then the integration infrastructure being built around these newcomers, or not built, is responding to the wrong variable entirely.
The Onboarding Nobody Built
Voluntary migrants need onboarding systems. Not because they are children who need to be managed but because the gap between arriving and belonging is real, wide, and currently being left entirely to chance. The governments that constructed the tourism imaginaries bringing these migrants into their cities have a specific responsibility to construct the integration infrastructure that converts arrival into genuine community membership.
This is not charity. It is accountability. And it is, as I will argue in a separate policy brief, also good economics, because the voluntary migrant who integrates genuinely is an asset to the receiving community in ways that the voluntary migrant floating on top of it simply is not.
Concretely, this means: language instruction provided by local residents, funded by visa and residency fees. Cultural orientation that goes beyond tourist-friendly introductions into the actual civic and social life of the place. Mechanisms for identifying the expertise voluntary migrants bring and connecting it to local needs, rather than letting it operate entirely in parallel economies. Civic engagement pathways that give voluntary migrants a genuine stake in the political life of the communities they are reshaping.
And it means being honest about a question that nobody in this conversation is asking directly enough.
What do you think citizenship actually is?
Is it a commitment to a society, a participation in its civic life, its language, its political decisions, its cultural obligations? Is it an identity, a statement of belonging, of ancestry, of the particular emotional weight that the word home carries for people whose home was taken from them? Or is it another tool in the arsenal of geo-arbitrage, a strategic asset, a second passport, a hedge against the instability of the first one?
All three of these motivations exist in the populations currently seeking citizenship in Ghana and Portugal. They are not equally compatible with what citizenship, in its fullest sense, produces for a society. And the fact that all three are currently processed through the same application form, subject to the same fees, evaluated by the same criteria, is itself part of the problem.
Maisha Hyman Sumbry’s tiered framework in her series distinguishes heritage returnees from entrepreneurial returnees from senior returnees, with different pathways and different expectations for each, which is the most rigorous public attempt I have encountered to answer this question structurally. Her argument is that the type of citizenship being sought should shape the pathway through which it is offered and the obligations it carries. Not everyone is in the same line. Not everyone has the same fee structure. Not everyone is subject to the same integration requirements or exempted from them.
I think she is right. And I think the same logic applies in Portugal, and in every city currently receiving voluntary migrants under frameworks that treat them as identical, because the form they fill out is identical. The distinction matters in practice, not just in theory.
Should the person committed to learning the language, building relationships with neighbors, participating in local elections, and embedding genuinely in the community be in the same line as the person who has purchased a visa for portfolio diversification and has no intention of spending more than the minimum required number of days per year in the country? Should the diaspora returnee who has spent years building deep ties to Ghanaian society, learning Twi, participating in community governance, be processed through the same pathway as the one who arrived last year, lives in a compound with other Black Americans, and has not yet learned the names of the families on their street?
The answer, I think, is no. And naming that is not elitism or gatekeeping. It is the beginning of an honest conversation about what citizenship is for, not just for the individual acquiring it, but for the society that grants it.
If citizenship is a commitment, it should be structured to reward commitment. If it is an identity, the pathway to it should honor the weight of what that identity means and what it costs. If it is a transactional tool, it should, at a minimum, be honest about that and be designed to extract genuine reciprocal value rather than simply fees.
Someone marketed a product. Someone was gleeful when it was purchased. Someone is now shocked — shocked — that the customers want customer service. Until the governments, the tourism boards, and the bodies that write immigration policy reckon honestly with the product they created, the pipeline they built, and the communities nobody consulted, we will keep having this same conversation. Just in different cities. With different accents.
The policy framework this essay is building, an onboarding system for voluntary migrants grounded in the Flourish in the Foreign archive and developed through doctoral research, lives in the Canon in Progress. Paid subscribers are inside the development of it in real time.
Thank you for writing this. As someone who has moved to Lisbon only 9 months ago, I’ve been wrestling with how to speak about this tension without falling into the trap of “good” vs “bad” immigration debate. I appreciate how you’ve integrated community involvement in cultivating belonging. It takes a village!
Really fascinating enquiry, deepening questions around the relationship between citizenship and integration, especially. I completely agree with your suggestions around ‘onboarding’ which should go much further than the (voluntary) government language classes for anyone hoping to become a citizen.