Dominica will require new citizens to set foot on the island before they receive their passports. Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit announced the change at a press conference on June 10, ending the hands-off model that has long defined the country’s Citizenship by Investment (CBI) program.
Successful applicants will now travel to Dominica in person to collect and renew their passports. Skerrit framed the trip as a way for new citizens to gain “a greater appreciation of our people, culture and developmental aspirations.”
“You will have to come to Dominica to receive and renew your passport as a citizen,” he told reporters.
Until now, the program asked nothing of its economic citizens by way of physical presence. Running since 1993, Dominica’s program imposed no visit or residency obligation before or after approval, and applicants completed the process remotely through a licensed agent and a virtual interview.
That open access was the program’s headline selling point and, more recently, its biggest liability.
He placed the decision in a regional frame, describing the tightening of Caribbean CBI programs as “a regional reality and not a Dominica problem.”
Five Caribbean states sell citizenship: Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Saint Lucia. In September 2025, the five signed an agreement creating a shared regulatory authority and a common physical-presence rule of at least 30 days within the first five years of citizenship.
Implementation slipped to mid-2026 after Saint Lucia’s December election paused the legislative work needed to bring it into force.
Dominica’s own implementing legislation is still being drafted, and Skerrit indicated the specifics, including how the visit attaches to passport collection, would arrive with the upcoming national budget.
This shift has an obvious trigger. Washington and Brussels have spent the past six months pressing Dominica over the program’s open-door design.
President Trump’s December 2025 proclamation placed partial travel restrictions on Dominican nationals, citing the absence of a residency requirement as part of the rationale.
The State Department later cut the validity of US visas for Dominicans from ten years to three months and swept the country into a January freeze on immigrant visa processing that touched 75 countries.
Brussels has gone further, warning in December that operating a CBI program “in itself” could justify suspending visa-free access and pressing Caribbean governments to wind their programs down.
Skerrit presented the reforms as a way to safeguard the program. CBI revenue has funded housing, hospitals, schools, and climate-resilient infrastructure on the island, and his government sees that income as worth protecting against the threat of lost visa-free travel.
Dominica’s neighbors moved first. Saint Kitts and Nevis announced in January that it would phase out its donation-only route in favor of “genuine-link” requirements built on physical presence, business activity, and long-term engagement, in what the head of its citizenship unit called the “most ambitious transformation” in the program’s history.
Antigua and Barbuda, which already attaches a physical-presence requirement to its program, has signaled it could raise that obligation to 90 days in response to American concerns.
Skerrit added that his government is weighing further measures “designed to deepen engagement between economic citizens and the country,” without specifying what they might involve.
Licensed agents report that applications filed before the end of June 2026 are expected to fall under the current rules, with no in-person requirement, though the government has not published a formal cutoff.
For anyone weighing a Dominican passport, the practical takeaway is that the remote, no-visit route is closing. The budget will set how many days the country expects and how the visit attaches to passport collection.
What is already clear is that Dominican citizenship will no longer be something you can buy and hold without ever arriving.
