We treat the island next door like a foreign country that might turn us away, and it is one of the most expensive habits a Caribbean founder keeps. The truth is nearer, and kinder, than most of us were ever taught. You carry rights across this region that you have probably never once used. Let me lay them out plainly, the way this column always tries to.
You already have the right to walk in
Start with the thing every CARICOM national owns and too few of us use. Following a 2007 decision of our Heads of Government, and confirmed by the Caribbean Court of Justice in the 2013 Shanique Myrie case, every CARICOM national has a right of entry to any member state and an automatic stay of six months on arrival. Not a visa you apply for. A right. An immigration officer can only refuse you in narrow cases, an undesirable person, or someone genuinely likely to become a charge on the state, and the court was blunt that this Community right sits above ordinary domestic law. Check how far your own passport reaches before you travel, but within CARICOM the door is legally held open for you. That single fact alone would save a great many founders a great many sleepless weeks.
The market got bigger on 1 October 2025
Here is what most founders missed while it was passing through the newspapers. On 1 October 2025, four member states, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, switched on full free movement among themselves. A national of any of the four can now go to any of the others to live, work and remain indefinitely, with access to primary health care and to public schooling for their children. The rest of the region has committed to follow. This is the closest thing the Caribbean has ever built to the way a European moves inside the European Union, and it happened quietly, in our own lifetime. (Source: the CARICOM Secretariat.)
The tools were built for a business like yours
Free movement is not only about people. The CSME, the CARICOM Single Market and Economy, hands you three instruments most people never think to claim:
- Free movement of skills. If you fall into one of the approved categories, a CARICOM Skills Certificate lets you take up work in another member state without a separate work permit. The list of categories has widened over the years and keeps widening.
- The right of establishment. You may set up a business in another member state and be treated, in law, as one of its own nationals rather than as a foreign investor. For an exporter, that is the difference between visiting a market and holding a beachhead in it.
- Free movement of goods, services and capital. You can sell across the region without every border treating your product as a stranger.
For a founder these are not abstractions. They are the reason a Guyanese maker can put her sauce on a Barbadian shelf as a regional producer, not a foreign importer begging for shelf space.
Why I keep pushing this
Because we spend fortunes and years chasing markets that make us beg at their counters, while a market of roughly sixteen million people, our own Community, sits right beside us with the gate already unlocked. I am not going to pretend it is frictionless. Implementation is uneven, and the paperwork can still frustrate a patient saint. But the right is real, it is growing, and it costs you no US visa and no US airport to use it.
If Africa was the corridor I wrote about last time, the Caribbean is the corridor under your own feet. You can search regional fares now, every route filtered so it never touches the United States, or write to me with the island you have been treating as foreign, and let us work out what your passport already lets you do.