Caribbean Leaders Say Europe Wants Answers on Passport Sales by Thursday. Who Pays If They Say No?

For decades, the islands set the price and the buyers paid it. Five Eastern Caribbean countries sold their citizenship to strangers, and the money built airports, rebuilt towns after hurricanes and kept budgets afloat. Now the bill has come back the other way, and it is addressed to people who never bought anything. By Thursday, November 12, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis and St Lucia must tell Brussels whether they will close their citizenship-by-investment programs by June 2028. St Lucia says its reply is already in. The reply is not itself a cutoff, and nothing changes at the border on Thursday. But if the answers fall short, a European law adopted last year lets the EU suspend visa-free travel to the Schengen area for designated categories of travelers for 12 months, and if the investor-citizenship problem persists, a further 24-month stage can cover all of a country's nationals, with exceptions the law spells out. By Antigua Prime Minister Gaston Browne's own account of the talks, not any published EU timetable, a suspension could be announced in January and bite by March or April. About 107,000 people have bought these passports, by the European Commission's own count. People who could pay for citizenship are generally better placed to absorb a visa. A student in St George's, a nurse in Roseau, a green-card holder in Lauderhill who still travels on an island passport: none of them bought anything, and few of them can absorb the cost as easily.