The Pricing of Belonging

Migration is increasingly a marketplace

10F Consortium, Lina Srivastava, and Scott Smith

Jun 01, 2026

As we wrote in F07: From Selective Migration to People as Asset Class, the humanitarian facade that once masked the socioeconomic and identity-based selectivity of migration systems has dropped. People are processed as stratified assets: mobility is being determined by ascribed economic value, cultural scoring, security algorithms, and identity and origin.

In short, nations are openly engineering population flows to maximise economic returns and to control for preferred identities, treating skills as strategic resources and detention as a profit center. Technology is accelerating explicit valuation, categorisation, and exploitation.

There is a new layer growing underneath this problem set. Since we developed this particular forecast, we’ve observed a deepening erosion of humanitarian norms through a new set of templates, one that allows nations to observe and copy migration design architectures.

Think of these analogies: With a website template, you take a design that suits you and modify it to your own business context. Coders do the same thing with working code. They fork it, modify it, deploy it. Both are the same move: you take a pattern that works, change the parts that don’t fit your situation, and ship your own version.

Nations now do this with migration policy. A government finds an architecture that solves a political problem, takes the parts it can use, and adapts them to its own legal constraints. Italy-Albania becomes UK-Rwanda becomes US-El Salvador.

Once a powerful state demonstrates that a previously constrained behaviour is politically viable, it doesn’t just grant permission, it opens a design space. Other states build their own variants tuned to their own legal systems and political markets. The legal arguments are public. The workarounds are sometimes inspectable. By the time a successful template has run for a year, several other states have already forked it.

The takeaway is this: International migration policy has turned modular and copyable, and is getting faster to the “market”. The unified post-1948 regime isn’t being dismantled by chaos. It’s being routed around by operational design, and the routing is accelerating.

Why now?

Five shifts in the last three months make the pattern legible:

Spain regularized. Royal Decree 316/2026 opened applications on 16 April. Funcas estimates around 840,000 eligible; the government’s working figure is 500,000. The template: regularization-as-economic-policy.

The EU codified the offshore template. On 23 February, the Council adopted a revised “safe third country” rule. From 12 June, member states can declare an asylum claim inadmissible and transfer the applicant to a third country they’ve never been to. The Italy-Albania architecture is now the EU default.

The US scaled bilateral removal. Since January 2025, at least ten countries have signed migration cooperation agreements: Eswatini, Rwanda, Uganda, South Sudan, Kosovo, Paraguay, alongside Central American partners. The Afghan-to-DRC plan being negotiated would apply the same template to roughly 1,100 vetted Afghans, including children of US service members. This is a fork of the UK-Rwanda model with the asylum-processing fiction stripped out, with fewer moving parts and less judicial surface area.

Three governments are industrializing citizenship revocation, in three different registers.

In the UK, the Deprivation of Citizenship Orders (Effect during Appeal) Act 2025, passed last October, prevents courts from restoring citizenship even after successful appeals; around 13 percent of the population is structurally vulnerable.

In the US, USCIS guidance sets a quota of 100–200 denaturalization referrals per month — roughly the entire historical annual rate, every month — and the DOJ has identified almost 400 cases for prosecution as “the first wave.”

In Kuwait, an April 2026 amendment classified citizenship decisions as acts of sovereignty beyond judicial review; more than 71,000 people have been stripped of citizenship since 2024 — 4.6 percent of the official population. Kuwait's programme has deeper local history than the comparison fully captures — questions about the stateless bidoon population, gendered citizenship transmission, decades of layered policy. The structural point isn’t that the issue is new; it’s that the rate has accelerated sharply since 2024.

Three different legal mechanisms, at three different scales, but the same product.

Forecast applied

F07’s central thesis is that people are increasingly priced as a kind of asset class. What’s now visible is that the pricing mechanisms themselves are templated. Five notable products are on the migration policy shelf:

Regularization-as-formalization (Spain). The asset is labour formalization. Almost no one is buying it; no cascade runs in this direction.
Offshore processing-as-deterrent (Italy-Albania, EU-wide). The asset is deterrence.
Removal-to-non-connected-third-states (US bilateral agreements; UK-France; UK-Rwanda before that scheme collapsed). The asset is sovereignty performed as the abandonment of obligation.
Status downgrading-in-place (UK 2.5-year “core protection”). The asset is presence on a subscription model.
Citizenship-as-revocable (Kuwait, UK, US). The asset is the citizen. Three jurisdictions have arrived at the same product through entirely different routes. The norm has shifted; the design space is open; each jurisdiction is building the variant its legal architecture permits.

The frame F07 advanced, that the unified post-1948 migration regime is fragmenting into incompatible operating systems, is no longer prospective. It is the operating environment.

Why it matters

The hardening templates are spreading. The regularization template isn’t. Spain’s move is more sophisticated, more economically defensible, and arguably more humane than anything the UK or US is doing, but it has effectively no adopters.

The international refugee system isn’t being overwhelmed by chaos. It’s being routed around by operational design. The 1951 Convention has not been repealed. It has been rendered procedurally optional in a growing number of jurisdictions, through accumulated technique unlocked by accumulated permission.

Citizenship itself is now the asset being repriced. Kuwait, the UK, and the US — three jurisdictions with completely different legal traditions — have converged on the same product category at the same time, through entirely different routes. That pattern is harder to predict and harder to stop than templates that spread visibly between jurisdictions.

What to do with this

Treat migration regimes as a menu of options, not a single policy field. Plans that assume the options will harmonise will misjudge the risks — and the misjudgement will look different in each jurisdiction.
Watch the evolution. The templates that exist today are downstream of permission cascades that ran one to three years ago. The templates that will exist in 2027 are being assembled now.
Map your population by template exposure. The same Afghan applicant has wildly different prospects in Spain, the UK, the US, and Kuwait — not only because of who they are, but because of which game they’re inside.
Take the citizenship pattern seriously. Naturalized citizens, dual nationals, and people of colour with migrant heritage now face structurally different legal risks in previously “safe” jurisdictions like the US and UK than they did three years ago. This is no longer only a “recognised authoritarian states” story.

Where this goes

The June 2026 entry-into-force of the EU Migration Pact is the next visible deadline. Expect faster spread of offshore processing, continued expansion of US removal deals, potential for further status downgrading in the UK as the right gains greater influence over policy, and the citizenship-revocation pattern reaching more jurisdictions.

As these templates spread, so does the technological infrastructure that enforce them. Surveillance, algorithmic profiling, and biometric monitoring that extend state control across origin countries, transit routes, and even life after arrival create what researchers call the “everywhere border.” These same technologies are being repurposed by migrants to build networks of care, legal resistance, and mutual aid. Both the expansion of that infrastructure and the repurposing of it for resistance deserve watching.

What doesn't appear to be emerging on its own, on any current evidence, is a more humane system. The templates spreading are about deterrence, removal, and revocation. The template that would put protection back at the centre — like Spain’s regularization model — has few other buyers at the moment. There is a market for these models. Almost none benefit the people at their centre.