By Julian Ashworth · Editor-in-Chief
There is a phrase I have heard in several conversations recently with people who advise high-net-worth families on residency and citizenship strategy. They call it "passport fatigue" — the exhaustion that sets in among clients who have spent several years being told that a second or third citizenship is the most important thing they can do to protect their family's future, and who have consequently assembled a collection of travel documents they rarely use and are not entirely sure they needed.
The fatigue is understandable. The citizenship-by-investment industry produced, particularly in the years immediately after the 2008 financial crisis and again after 2020, a wave of promotional energy that significantly outran the quality of underlying product. Passports were presented as solutions to problems that often did not exist. The "plan B" narrative — compelling in theory — was frequently deployed to sell planning that was neither coherent nor necessary.
But there is a version of the citizenship and residency story that deserves serious attention, and Priya's piece this month on the Caribbean CBI programmes represents that version. The Caribbean programmes — in St. Kitts and Nevis, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, and Dominica — have spent five years reforming themselves following sustained pressure from the EU and the OECD, who correctly identified that lax due diligence in some programmes was creating risks for the visa-free access that gives these passports their value.
The result of that reform process is a set of programmes that are, by some metrics, the most rigorously scrutinised alternative residency products in the world. Multi-source background checks, mandatory interviews, enhanced beneficial ownership declarations, and detailed source-of-funds documentation are now standard requirements in programmes that previously asked rather less. The EU has, for the most part, acknowledged this progress while maintaining political pressure on the concept itself.
When the arithmetic makes sense
The clients for whom a Caribbean citizenship makes genuine practical sense in 2026 are more specific than the industry sometimes acknowledges. They tend to be nationals of countries with restricted travel documents — where the Caribbean passport's visa-free access to Europe and the UK represents a material quality-of-life improvement. They are often business families with structures that require flexibility of residency and travel that a single passport constrains. They may be planning for next-generation mobility in ways that require thinking now about options that will take years to mature.
For nationals of strong passport countries — the US, UK, Germany, Australia — a Caribbean citizenship rarely changes the mathematics in a meaningful way. It may add some travel convenience, it may provide legal diversity, but it is rarely a transformative decision. The advisors I most respect are honest about this in their initial client conversations.
Priya sets out the comparative landscape this month with characteristic rigour: the costs, the processing timelines, the visa-free counts, and the specific scenarios in which each programme is most compelling. I commend it to you not as a sales document but as a guide to understanding whether you are in the cohort for whom this decision actually matters.
The best citizenship planning, like the best property planning, starts with an honest question: what problem are you actually trying to solve? The answer changes everything that follows.
Julian Ashworth is Editor-in-Chief of Holiday Home Times. He is based in Lisbon.