A U.S. national who acquires a second citizenship in the Eastern Caribbean without moving there appears in neither set of books. The host country does not enumerate them as resident U.S. citizens — because they are not resident — and the United States does not enumerate them as emigrants, because they have not left.
The principal Caribbean citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programmes — St Kitts and Nevis (the oldest, established 1984), Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, Dominica, and Saint Lucia — together processed a meaningful U.S. applicant cohort over the 2010s and 2020s. The Vanuatu programme, in the Pacific, operates a similar pattern, as did Albania's now-closed special-route citizenship pathway for a period before its 2020 closure.
One framework, five jurisdictions
The five jurisdictions share a regional framework that is more tightly integrated than almost any other group of receiving states. All five are CARICOM members, are integrated within the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), and operate citizenship-by-investment programmes whose grants confer status both at the national level and within the CARICOM Single Market and Economy. Citizenship under any of the five programmes carries free-movement rights across participating CARICOM member states under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (2001).
They also share data-source conventions — national CBI units publishing approval-and-application statistics at varying levels of granularity, supplemented by IMF macro-economic analysis where the programmes are large enough to affect public finance — and a common structural feature: nationality-disaggregated CBI grant data is rarely published at the level of U.S. applicants specifically. (The Bahamas, which operates a parallel but distinct Annual Residency Permit framework rather than a CBI scheme, sits outside the group.)
What the units actually publish
Antigua and Barbuda's Citizenship by Investment Unit — the statutory body established by the Citizenship by Investment Act, 2013, reporting to the Office of the Prime Minister — is among the more forthcoming, publishing bi-annual performance reports submitted to Parliament with standardized counts for application volume and new citizens. Application intake increased from 685 in 2023 to 739 in 2024, with denials essentially stable at 24 and 23. The unit identifies the United States as a top-three source market — but detailed rejection counts for U.S. nationals specifically are not itemized as a distinct line item in the public bi-annual summaries.
Grenada's published series shows the lifecycle dynamics most clearly. Application intake fell from 2,297 in 2023 to 420 in 2024, then edged up to 469 in 2025 — a transition from high-volume intake to a normalized baseline following the implementation of new regional pricing standards. Citizenship issuance moved on its own timeline: 4,794 new citizens in 2023, 5,443 in 2024, 1,124 in 2025. Issuance peaked in the year intake collapsed — the structural signature of these programmes, where processing outcomes are not directly linked to same-year intake but operate on a separate operational timeline, clearing preceding inventories. The approved-real-estate route was the dominant investment channel, accounting for 1,889 of the 3,186 total applications — approximately 59 percent — received across the three-year reporting period.
Saint Lucia reports intake growth — 1,076 applications in 2023 to 1,226 in 2024 — alongside a near-tripling of denials, from 28 to 81. Citizenship issuance data is not consistently reported across periods: there is clear growth in intake and denials, but limited visibility on citizenship output.
At the other end of the spectrum, Dominica has disclosed application and passport totals through national budget addresses rather than standardized statistical releases, and currently publishes no application intake data through primary public records; no U.S.-specific data is reported. And for Saint Kitts and Nevis — the original programme — no consistent numerical data is available across intake, denials, or citizenship issuance. The data absence is itself the key finding.
Counted but invisible
The data problem these programmes create is structural. U.S. nationals who acquire host-country citizenship through investment without taking up residence are not enumerated by the host country as resident U.S. citizens — because they are not resident — and they are not enumerated by the United States as emigrants, because they have not left. They appear in neither set of books.
The Caribbean programmes' published data, where it exists at all, is typically aggregated at the level of "Total Approved Applicants" by year, without nationality breakdowns. The U.S. cohort is plausibly the largest single national group across the Caribbean CBI universe — but that cannot be verified from primary data. Our reading is that the CBI population is a counted-but-invisible category that any future global estimate of U.S. citizens abroad has to address explicitly, even if only to note that the relevant data is held by sovereign Caribbean states and is not in the public domain.