Last week, my friend and colleague Mark Nestmann wrote about a proposed form that may soon become necessary to complete in order to obtain a U.S. passport. You must disclose a great deal of extremely personal information on this form, including details of religious rites performed at your birth (e.g., circumcision).
I have personal experience that completing such a privacy-invasive application is unheard of here in the Caribbean. As a citizen of the Commonwealth of Dominica, I am issued a 32 page passport booklet with a validity of 10 years.
The application form is straightforward and simple. There is no requirement to disclose a taxpayer identification number as a condition of obtaining or renewing the passport. Nor is the application vetted before the court system. This stands in direct contrast to the process of applying for a U.S. passport, where the application is presented to numerous federal agencies, including the IRS, before your passport is renewed.
However, there are some significant differences between an application for a Dominican passport and a U.S. passport. In Dominica, you must affix postage revenue stamps to your application, purchased from the government. There is also a requirement for a recommender—a prominent citizen, such as a minister of religion, managing director of a company, a judge, a high ranking police officer, etc.—to countersign the application. This is an old rule left over from the British colonial times in effect in most English speaking Caribbean countries. While I was puzzled as to the function of the recommender, I found it easy to obtain the required signature.
In 2007, I renewed my Dominican passport, without difficulty. After I provided the necessary documents, I submitted my request to the Immigration Office in Roseau. After some weeks, my passport was renewed and ready to be collected.
You can obtain citizenship-for-life and a passport from the Commonwealth of Dominica for a total cost starting around $100,000. This is the least expensive economic citizenship program in the world, and the Dominican passport provides visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to approximately 90 countries.
The government of Dominica has designated The Nestmann Group, Ltd. as an officially approved provider for economic citizenship.
(P.T. Freeman is a pseudonym for a friend and business associate who is a former U.S. citizen.)
Copyright (c) 2011 by Mark Nestmann
(An earlier version of this post was published by The Sovereign Society, https://banyanhill.com/)
