A U.S. investor who buys a Grenadian or St Kitts passport without moving to the island lands in a statistical blind spot. The new country doesn't count them as a resident American, because they don't live there. The United States doesn't count them as an emigrant, because they never left. They show up in neither set of books, and demand from wealthy Americans buying backup passports has climbed for years.
Five Caribbean programs drive most of that flow. St Kitts and Nevis, the oldest, opened in 1984. Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, Dominica and Saint Lucia followed, and together they've processed a meaningful U.S. applicant pool through the 2010s and 2020s. Vanuatu, in the Pacific, runs the same model.
What none of them produces is a clean count of how many Americans now hold one of these passports.
One framework, five programs
The five sit inside a tighter regional structure than almost any other group of receiving states. All are members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, and each runs a citizenship-by-investment program whose grants carry status at the national level and inside the CARICOM Single Market and Economy.
A passport from any of the five confers free movement across participating CARICOM states under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, signed in 2001.
They share reporting habits too. National units publish approval and application counts at uneven levels of detail, and the International Monetary Fund adds analysis where a program is large enough to move public finances.
The common gap is nationality. Grant data broken out for U.S. applicants specifically is rarely published. The Bahamas sits outside the group, running an annual residency-permit framework rather than a citizenship scheme.
What the citizenship units publish
Antigua and Barbuda's Citizenship by Investment Unit, created by the 2013 Citizenship by Investment Act and reporting to the Office of the Prime Minister, is among the more forthcoming. It files biannual performance reports to Parliament with standardized counts. Intake rose from 685 applications in 2023 to 739 in 2024, and denials held near flat at 24 and 23.
The unit names the United States as the second-largest source market, though it doesn't itemize U.S. rejections as a separate line.
Grenada's series shows the lifecycle most clearly
Intake fell from 2,297 in 2023 to 420 in 2024, then edged up to 469 in 2025 as new regional pricing took hold. Citizenship issuance ran on its own clock: 4,794 new citizens in 2023, 5,443 in 2024 and 1,124 in 2025. Issuance peaked the year intake collapsed.
That's the structural signature of these programs, where output clears a backlog rather than tracking same-year demand. The approved real-estate route dominated, at 1,889 of 3,186 applications across the three years, about 59%. AER's own reporting puts the U.S. share at roughly 27 applications a year, a slice the aggregate totals never surface.
Saint Lucia reports growth on both ends: intake from 1,076 in 2023 to 1,226 in 2024, and denials nearly tripling, from 28 to 81. Citizenship output isn't reported consistently, so the intake and rejection trend is visible while the grant count is not.
Where the numbers go dark
Dominica has disclosed application and passport totals through national budget addresses rather than statistical releases, publishes no current intake data through primary records, and reports nothing U.S.-specific.
Its program has separately drawn restrictions from the European Union and the United States. St Kitts and Nevis, the program that started the model, offers no consistent figures at all across intake, denials or issuance. The absence is the finding.
Why does the U.S. cohort vanish from both ledgers?
The problem is structural, not incidental. A resident count captures people where they live, and an emigration count captures people who leave. The CBI buyer does neither: acquires a citizenship, keeps the U.S. address. Host-country data, where it exists, aggregates to "total approved applicants" by year with no nationality split.
The U.S. group is plausibly the largest single national cohort across the Caribbean programs, and that can't be confirmed from primary data.
For anyone trying to size the American population abroad, the CBI cohort is a category that has to be named even when it can't be counted. The numbers exist. They sit with sovereign Caribbean states, and they aren't public.
