One nationality filed 23% of every application Henley & Partners processed in 2024 — the largest client group at the world's biggest investment-migration firm. Not Chinese buyers, not Russians — Americans. US applications grew more than 1,000% between 2019 and 2024, then roughly doubled again in 2025. I've watched this from both sides of the desk: I acquired my own second citizenship in 2022, and I now spend my days helping families do the same from my office at the Four Seasons Resort Nevis, where Americans have become the single largest group of families walking through the door. The holders of what was long the world's most powerful passport have become the world's most determined buyers of second ones.
The short answer
Americans became the world's #1 cohort for second citizenship and residency because the things a US passport used to guarantee — mobility, predictability, political stability — no longer feel guaranteed, while American wealth has never been larger. The surge is bipartisan (it spiked in 2020 and again after the 2024 election), overwhelmingly domestic (only about 7% of US applications come from Americans already living abroad), and driven by an insurance mindset rather than emigration or tax escape. And Americans buy differently from every other nationality: nearly half choose European residence programs like Portugal and Greece, while more than a quarter head to Latin America and the Caribbean, where five citizenship programs deliver a second passport in months from US$200,000.
How big is the American surge, actually?
Bigger than the headlines suggest — and still accelerating.
In 2018, Americans were roughly 5% of the applications Henley & Partners handled worldwide. In late 2020, the firm reported a 235% year-on-year spike in enquiries from US citizens. By 2024, US nationals were 23% of everything Henley processed — the largest single nationality.
The post-election numbers show this isn't a tantrum that fades. Henley's USA Wealth Report 2025 recorded a 183% jump in enquiries from US nationals in Q1 2025 versus Q1 2024 — and a further 39% rise over Q4 2024, the election quarter itself. Demand that keeps climbing after the emotional peak is structural, and Henley's June 2026 Private Wealth Migration Report confirmed it: American applications roughly doubled in 2025 and remain elevated in 2026.
The backdrop is the largest wealth migration on record — Henley's 2025 report projected a record 142,000 millionaire relocations for 2025 and forecast 165,000 for 2026, though the firm's 2026 edition dropped headline migration counts in favor of a wealth-mobility framework — and the US sits on both sides of the ledger: still the world's largest wealth creator by Henley's own scoring, and simultaneously the largest source of applicants anywhere.
Then there's the trigger my industry talks about constantly: the US passport itself has slipped down the rankings. The American passport sat at No. 1 on the Henley Passport Index as recently as 2014, then spent a decade sliding — and in October 2025 it fell out of the top ten for the first time in the index's twenty-year history, landing twelfth, tied with Malaysia. By mid-2026 it had clawed back only to the bottom rung of the top ten, and the ranking moves with every twice-yearly update. The exact number matters less than the direction: the moment the ranking started sliding, the psychological monopoly broke.
One number reframes the story: per Henley's Private Wealth Migration Report 2026, only about 7% of American applications come from US citizens already abroad; 93% are filed from inside the United States, by people who aren't going anywhere — yet. This isn't an exodus. It's the largest optionality purchase this industry has seen.
What's actually driving it — politics, taxes, or something else?
Politics, yes — but in both directions, which is the detail most coverage misses. Henley recorded that 235% spike in American enquiries in 2020, at the end of the first Trump administration. The next wave came after the November 2024 election: Google searches for "move to Canada" hit a 12-month peak the very week of the vote. When demand spikes under both parties, the driver isn't an administration — it's the realization that your entire life, from mobility to banking to family security, is concentrated in a single jurisdiction whose direction you don't control.
The breadth is what convinces me it's durable. A spring 2025 Harris Poll found almost half of all Americans — and about two-thirds of Gen Z and millennials — would like dual citizenship. YouGov polling shows 7% of Americans already hold one (roughly 25 million people, likely an undercount), and only 21% think dual citizenship is bad for the country. The stigma is gone. Freedom of travel ranks first among stated motivations, with about a quarter citing security and stability.
Henley's own executives describe what Americans are buying as a hedge on mobility — insurance against geopolitical risk — and that matches every conversation I have. I frame it like any insurance policy: a known premium today against an unknown world tomorrow, and you hope the claim never comes. Mine has cost me nothing in regret since 2022 and bought me a great deal of sleep.
What it is not — and I say this on every call — is a tax play. The US taxes citizens on worldwide income wherever they live, and a second passport changes none of it. I've written separately on why second citizenship for Americans is insurance, not a tax strategy; the genuine levers are residence-based planning and, for investment income, Puerto Rico's Act 60 — a domestic move, not a foreign passport.
The renunciation numbers prove it. In 2025, roughly 4,900 people appeared on the IRS quarterly expatriation lists — the highest total since the 2020 record of 6,705, and those lists are widely considered undercounts. Under 5,000 renunciations against hundreds of thousands exploring second citizenship: this cohort is adding options, not surrendering the blue passport.
What do Americans buy — and how is it different from everyone else?
Almost every other major nationality in this industry is buying mobility — an Indian, Turkish or Filipino applicant is typically solving for visa-free travel their home passport doesn't provide. Americans already hold a top-tier passport, so, as Henley's commentary notes, they're buying something else entirely: optionality. It shows in what they choose.
Nearly half of American applications go to European residence programs; more than a quarter to Latin America and the Caribbean. Within the residence world:
- Portugal. Americans became the number-one nationality for Golden Visa approvals in 2025 — the first time any country displaced China — and represent over 30% of approvals, up from around 5% five years earlier, per AIMA-derived program statistics. The route today is a €500,000 fund investment (the real estate option was abolished in October 2023). Two caveats: processing backlogs run 12–24 months, and under Portugal's nationality-law reform in force since May 2026, the wait for citizenship is now ten years for Americans (seven for EU/CPLP nationals), counted from residence-permit issuance — putting the realistic golden-visa path at roughly 9–13 years, not five.
- Greece. Top of Henley's residence-program index in 2025 after displacing Portugal — though thresholds in prime zones have climbed to €800,000.
- New Zealand. After the April 2025 relaunch of the Active Investor Plus visa, applications rose roughly fivefold in the first year — Immigration New Zealand counted 730 applications covering some 2,390 people by May 2026 — and Americans are the largest source of applications by a wide margin.
Meanwhile, doors have been closing. Spain abolished its Golden Visa outright in April 2025 — a domestic housing-policy decision, not an EU mandate. Malta's citizenship program, ranked the world's best for ten straight years, was struck down by the EU Court of Justice in April 2025 — the court held that the acquisition of citizenship cannot be reduced to a mere commercial transaction — and Malta abolished the investment route that July. Citizenship for sale inside the EU is finished; European residence survives.
Which is exactly why the signature American structure is a stack: a European residence permit for lifestyle and a foothold on the continent, paired with a Caribbean citizenship for speed, whole-family coverage, and an actual second passport in hand within months rather than a decade.
And in a twist I'd have bet against five years ago, the United States joined the sellers' table in the same cycle its citizens became the world's top buyers. The Trump Gold Card — created by executive order in September 2025 and launched that December — offers expedited immigrant visas for a $1 million gift ($2 million if corporate-sponsored) plus a $15,000 fee; the $5 million figure still in circulation belongs to a proposed Platinum Card that requires congressional action. Even Washington now treats residence as a product.
How much of this demand comes to the Caribbean — and what does it cost?
More than a quarter of American applications head to Latin America and the Caribbean, and within the five Caribbean citizenship-by-investment programs, Americans have moved to the top of the applicant tables. In Antigua & Barbuda, Americans were 26% of all CBI applications in 2025 — the leading nationality — and program figures reported by Newsweek in 2026 put the American share of new applications at roughly half, a figure I treat as directional until full-year numbers land. It matches the files on my desk at the Four Seasons Resort Nevis, where my team is based: we guided more than 100 families through citizenship and residency in 2025 and closed over US$75 million in transactions in 18 months.
Here is the price of entry at the time of writing — minimum qualifying contributions, before due-diligence and processing fees.
- Dominica — US$200,000 donation; real estate from US$200,000
- Antigua & Barbuda — US$230,000 donation, or US$260,000 via the University fund covering a family of six; real estate from US$300,000
- Grenada — US$235,000 donation; real estate from US$350,000 sole ownership (US$270,000 per share on a qualifying two-buyer co-purchase)
- St. Lucia — US$240,000 donation; real estate from US$300,000
- St Kitts & Nevis — US$250,000 donation; approved-development real estate from US$325,000, or US$600,000 for a private single-family home with a seven-year hold
The US$200,000 floor under all of this dates to a March 2024 Memorandum of Agreement among four of the islands (St. Lucia signed on in June 2024) that set a common minimum from July 1, 2024 — roughly doubling the cheapest entry points overnight. It's often misreported as an EU or US mandate; it was a voluntary regional pact, though adopted under sustained pressure from both. What Americans get for the money: whole-family citizenship in roughly four to nine months, visa-free access in the range of 140–150+ destinations, and — on Henley's 2025 index — the strongest formal citizenship-by-investment programs still open to applicants: Grenada third globally (behind only unattainable Malta and Austria's discretionary route), Antigua fourth, St Kitts and St. Lucia joint fifth. The program comparison lays them out side by side.
The honest caveat: Brussels is aiming at the product
I'd rather you hear this from me than from a headline after you've wired funds. On December 30, 2025, the EU's revised Visa Suspension Mechanism entered into force. Granting citizenship with no genuine link to the country is now an explicit legal ground for suspending a state's visa-free Schengen access, and the thresholds that trigger review were cut from 50% to 30%. The European Commission's December 2025 visa report went further, framing tighter vetting as an interim step toward discontinuation of such programs. As I write, no Caribbean state has lost EU visa-free access — but the legal machinery now exists, and pretending otherwise would be malpractice.
My advice hasn't changed, because I've never sold these programs on Schengen counts. If visa-free Europe is your entire reason for wanting a passport, buy European residence instead — that's precisely why the American stacking pattern makes sense. Buy Caribbean citizenship for what a vote in Brussels cannot suspend: a lifetime second nationality for your whole family, the right to live and work in the Eastern Caribbean, and the option to be somewhere else — legally, permanently — if you ever need it.
What I tell American clients before they start
Three things, every time. First, size it like insurance, because that's what it is: a known premium against an unknown future, not an investment that needs to perform. Second, settle the residence question before the passport question — residence programs and citizenship programs solve different problems, and plenty of families need one, not both. Third, build in lead time: files take months to process, and the last five years of program changes — the 2024 price floor included — have all moved costs upward, never down.
I went through this as a client first: I left Canada for the Caribbean in 2020, acquired my second citizenship in 2022, and have since worked with more than 500 clients through St. Kitts & Nevis Sotheby's International Realty on some version of the same decision. The Americans arriving now aren't fleeing. They're doing what wealthy families have always done with concentrated risk: diversifying it — this time at the level of the passport itself.
Key takeaways
- Americans are the world's #1 investment-migration cohort: 23% of all Henley & Partners applications in 2024 (over 1,000% growth on 2019), roughly doubling again in 2025.
- The surge is bipartisan and domestic: demand spiked in 2020 and again after the 2024 election, and about 93% of US applicants file from inside the United States. It's insurance, not emigration.
- Americans buy optionality, not mobility: already holding a top-tier passport, they stack European or New Zealand residence with fast Caribbean citizenship.
- The Caribbean's five programs start at US$200,000 and deliver in roughly four to nine months; Americans are now the top applicant nationality in Antigua & Barbuda and rising across the region.
- The live risk is EU pressure: since December 2025, running a no-genuine-link citizenship program is formal grounds for Schengen suspension — so buy the passport for its durable benefits, not its visa-free count.
Frequently asked questions
Why are so many Americans getting second citizenships? Insurance and optionality. Demand spikes around US elections in both political directions, and a 2025 Harris Poll found almost half of Americans would like dual citizenship. Most applicants keep living in the US — only about 7% apply from abroad — and are buying a legal Plan B, not emigrating.
Do Americans have to give up their US passport to get a second citizenship? No. The US permits dual citizenship, and all five Caribbean CBI countries allow it. Renunciation is a separate and rare decision — under 5,000 people appeared on the IRS expatriation lists in 2025, against hundreds of thousands of Americans exploring a second citizenship.
What is the cheapest citizenship by investment for an American family? Dominica's US$200,000 donation is the current entry point across the five Caribbean programs, and Antigua & Barbuda's US$260,000 University fund option covers a family of up to six — often the best per-person value for larger families. Every headline figure carries due-diligence and processing fees on top.
Does a second passport reduce an American's taxes? No. The US taxes citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they live or what other passports they hold, so a second citizenship changes nothing about federal tax. The genuine levers are residence-based planning and, for some investors, Puerto Rico's Act 60 — a domestic move, not a foreign passport.
