In March 2024, the five Caribbean states that sell citizenship signed a memorandum agreeing to stop undercutting one another: by the end of June that year, no programme would take less than US$200,000. In April 2025, the European Court of Justice told Malta that its investor-citizenship scheme — selling EU passports to people with no genuine link to the country — broke European law, and the scheme was finished. Between a price cartel and a court judgment, the citizenship-by-investment club lost its discount aisle and its flagship European member in the space of thirteen months.
What remains is a smaller, dearer, more forensic business. It still works. But it works now on terms set as much by Brussels, London and the compliance departments of international banks as by the islands themselves.
What two hundred thousand buys now
The Caribbean five — Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia — still take applications, and the memorandum's floor holds. At that price the product is visa-free mobility, and its value is set elsewhere: the EU and the UK have both signalled that visa-free access for countries selling citizenship is a privilege under review, not an entitlement. Vanuatu, outside the Caribbean club, has already lost its EU access. Applicants are, in effect, buying an asset whose most valuable feature is controlled by third parties who disapprove of the seller.
That does not make the passports worthless. It makes them instruments to be held honestly. A second citizenship that can survive scrutiny is worth the floor price; one purchased as a cheap flag for a banking file is not, because the banking file is where it will be examined first.
Due diligence decides everything
The deeper change since 2024 is not the price but the vetting. The Caribbean programmes now run mandatory interviews, share information among themselves, and treat a rejection by one as a rejection by all. Source of wealth is examined in earnest; politically exposed applicants face a harder road; the multi-layer checks that were once marketing copy are now the product itself, since the programmes' survival depends on convincing foreign governments that their passports are hard to get.
This has an implication applicants sometimes miss: the binding constraint is no longer money but biography. A clean, well-documented applicant with a boring explanation for their wealth will pass and be welcome. A complicated applicant with aggressive structures and gaps in the record will not buy their way through — the programmes cannot afford to let them, and the banks behind the programmes will not clear them in any case. The passport, in 2026, is only as good as the due diligence that underwrites it, which is precisely what the industry needed and resisted for years.
The sober alternative
The strategic response, increasingly, is to stop shopping for citizenship and start earning it. Residence-first strategies — a golden visa or an ordinary residence permit, then naturalisation on the country's real timeline — are slower by years and sturdier for exactly that reason. A passport acquired after five or more years of genuine residence, with tax returns and a life attached, survives political weather that a purchased passport does not. Nobody has yet held a parliamentary inquiry into whether you really lived somewhere.
The trade-offs are honest ones. Residence-first demands an actual life: days in country, a tax position, children in real schools. It also delivers what the purchased version cannot — a citizenship that no court can describe as a transaction. Families with the time increasingly take it; families without it pay the Caribbean floor and accept the scrutiny that now comes with the discount removed.
The club after the cartel
The direction from here is not hard to read. Prices will not fall below the floor while the memorandum holds, and the floor gives the five a shared interest in policing one another. Malta's route will not return in anything like its old form; the court has made investor citizenship inside the EU a legal impossibility rather than a policy choice. Pressure on visa-free access will continue, because it costs Brussels nothing and concentrates island minds wonderfully.
For applicants who can pass serious due diligence and want what the Caribbean honestly sells — mobility, a hedge, a plan B with palm trees — the club remains open, and it is cleaner than it has ever been. For everyone else, the market's message of the past two years matches the one governments have been sending: citizenship is drifting back from a product to a relationship. Buy a residence, live in it, and let the passport arrive the slow way. The slow way is suddenly the respectable one.
