Hadi Mezawi has never set foot on the Caribbean
island of Dominica, has never seen
its rainforests or black-sand beaches. But he's one of its newest citizens.
Without leaving his home in the United Arab
Emirates, the Palestinian man recently received a brand new Dominican passport
after sending a roughly $100,000 contribution to the tropical nation half a
world away.
"At the start I was a little worried that
it might be a fraud, but the process turned out to be quite smooth and simple.
Now, I am a Dominican," said Mezawi, who like many Palestinians had not
been recognized as a citizen of any country. That passport will help with
travel for his job with a Brazilian food processing company, he said by
telephone from Dubai.
Turmoil in
the Middle East and North Africa has led to a surge of interest in programs
that let investors buy citizenship or residence in countries around the
world in return for a healthy contribution or investment. Most are seeking a
second passport for hassle-free travel or a ready escape hatch in case things
get worse at home.
Nowhere is it easier or faster than in the
minuscule Eastern Caribbean nations of Dominica and St. Kitts & Nevis.
It's such a
booming business that a Dubai-based company is building a 4-square-mile
(10-square-kilometer) community in St. Kitts where investors can buy
property and citizenship at the same time. In its first phase, some 375
shareholders will get citizenship by investing $400,000 each in the project,
which is expected to include a 200-room hotel and a mega-yacht marina. Others
will get passports for buying one of 50 condominium units.
"The more they fight over there, the more
political problems there are, the more applications we get here," said
Victor Doche, managing director of another company that offers four condominium
projects where approved buyers are granted citizenship in St. Kitts, which is
less than twice the size of Washington D.C.
It's
impossible to say how many people have used the cash for citizenship programs.
Officials in both countries declined to respond when asked by The Associated
Press.
"Why do I have to speak on that?" said
Levi Peter, Dominica's attorney general. "I have no explanation to give to
AP."
But Bernard Wiltshire, a former Dominica
attorney general, said there were already around 3,000 economic citizens when
he left government about a decade ago. The country now has roughly 73,000
inhabitants in all.
"Investor visa" or citizenship
programs are offered by many nations, including the United States, Canada,
Britain and Austria. But the Caribbean countries offer a fast path to
citizenship at a very low cost. The whole process, including background checks,
can take as little as 90 days in St. Kitts. And there's no need to ever live on
the islands, or even visit.
A foreigner can qualify for citizenship in St.
Kitts with a $250,000 donation to a fund for retired sugar workers or with a
minimum real estate investment of $400,000. The minimum contribution in
Dominica is $100,000.
By contrast, a U.S. program allows visas for a
$1 million investment in a U.S. business employing at least 10 people or $500,000
in designated economically depressed areas. The investor can apply for
permanent residence in two years, and seek citizenship after five more. Demand
in Canada is so great that the country stopped accepting new applications in
July.
A Dominica passport holder can travel without a visa to more than
50 countries, while a St. Kitts passport provides visa-free travel to 139
countries, including all of the European Union. That's a big deal to people in
countries from which travel is restricted or whose passports are treated with
suspicion.
Critics say the programs undermine the integrity
of national passports and have security risks. While there are no known cases
of terrorists using the programs, experts say that's a possibility with many
visa arrangements anywhere.
"No level of scrutiny can completely
guarantee that terrorists will not make use of these programs, just as
background checks cannot eliminate the risk that dangerous individuals will not
enter the country (the U.S.) on tourist visas, as students or as
refugees," said Madeleine Sumption, a senior policy analyst at the
Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.
Canada imposed visa requirements on Dominica
citizens a decade ago after complaining that suspected criminals had used
island passports. And in 2010, Britain said it was considering visa
requirements for Dominicans, prompting the island to review its 20-year-old
economic citizenship program. Dominica never publicly released the results of
its review and Britain took no action.
St. Kitts closed its program to Iranians in
December 2011, shortly after Iranian students stormed the British Embassy in
Tehran. Iranians had earlier been a major source of applicants, according to
Doche.
Some locals worry the programs could get out of
hand if conditions worsen abroad.
"There could be a flood of people with our
passports relocating here," said Dominica's Wiltshire. "What are we
going to do then? Really, this program must be halted. It's dangerous to us and
dangerous for our neighbors."
St. Kitts
opposition leader Mark Brantley said the citizenship
program was
bringing much needed revenue to the debt-swamped islands, but he said there
should be better oversight and public accounting. "We do not see that
sufficient controls are currently in place to ensure that bad people, for want
of better language, do not get access to our citizenship," he said.
It's not just economic refugees who are
interested in the programs.
American Neil Strauss wrote of securing
citizenship in St. Kitts in his 2009 book on survivalist preparedness,
"Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life."
"The same way we have a backup drive for
our computer in case the hard drive explodes, I just felt like I wanted a
backup citizenship in case the same thing happened to my country," Strauss
said during a phone call from his home in Los Angeles. Like most economic
citizens of St. Kitts, he rents out his island property.
In Dubai,
Mezawi said he keeps meeting fellow Dominica passport holders, mostly people of
Iranian and Palestinian background.
"After the Arab Spring, it's become more
difficult for us to really travel around the world, even in the Arab
region," he said. "But being a citizen of Dominica, it is much, much
better for us."
David
McFadden on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dmcfadd
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