Dominica’s program of selling citizenship goes back to the 1990s. But the program — mushrooming in size just before Hurricane Maria struck — has since outgrown the entire domestic tax base, becoming the primary source of national revenue. With citizenship money, Dominica has funded everything from new medical clinics to rent-free residential complexes for people whose homes were destroyed by the hurricane.

Francine Baron, a former Dominican foreign minister who helped lead the resiliency work, calls the citizenship money a “savior.”

“This program means a lot to us,” said Irving McIntyre, Dominica’s finance minister. “We realized we had to get a self-dependent form of financing” to deal with climate change.

But while such a move might seem liberating, it has sparked concerns — both in foreign capitals and at home — about transparency, security risks and whether a small country should be using such a strategy to attract money. Even after the government recently doubled the price, to a minimum of $200,000, it remains one of the most affordable citizenship options in the world. Few recipients choose to live in Dominica, a palm- and fern-covered island of 71,000 people that, beyond its capital, resembles a Jurassic Park movie set.

The main prize is the visa-free access to other countries — particularly in Europe — as well as easier access to the global banking system. Dominican officials say they have little choice but to lean on the program.

The storm had flattened the economy. The damage was estimated at more than twice the gross domestic product. The country’s prime minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, appeared days later at the United Nations, vowing that Dominica would remake itself better than ever, and never relive the experience of Maria. It soon drew up an ambitious — but expensive — plan with the target of preventing deaths and major economic losses from any extreme event.

Dominican officials note that climate change, driven by the emissions of wealthier nations, is leading to more intense and frequent hurricanes. And while that imperils all Caribbean countries, few are more naturally threatened than Dominica, where craggy topography, etched by 365 rivers, makes it prone to landslides.

Dominica, in its own climate assessments, projects that investments in sturdier houses, sloped roads and higher bridges will save the country substantial money in the long run. Along with other vulnerable nations, it has asked the developed world for easier access to grants, climate funding and low-interest loans.

But the United Nations says funding for climate adaptation — preparing in advance for the ravages of climate change — is a fraction of what is needed. How to pay for climate-related damage and ways to avert them is a flash point in global climate talks, often pitting wealthier nations — which have generated the most carbon pollution — against developing ones.

Dominica has filled the gap by using the passport money to address its most urgent needs — most notably housing. So far, Dominica has funded 2,000 homes in more than a half-dozen spots across the island that it describes as more “resilient” than those that stood before. The people living in these residential complexes tend to have stories of barely surviving. They saw walls topple. Refrigerators shake free and tumble into bedrooms. Diplomas and photos sail into the sky.

When the rain stopped, they were homeless.

Jammaline John, 47, who remembers putting her children into floor-level cupboards to protect them from falling debris, said her family lived in the aftermath for two years in the cellar of a relative.

Then she was offered a new concrete three-bedroom townhouse about a half-mile from the water.

“I’m so grateful,” John said.

She said she hoped to never live elsewhere, and pointed to a hilltop — her old neighborhood.

“There are still people living up there,” she said, “in damaged homes.”

Security fears

While plenty of nations offer residency to big investors, only a dozen or so countries go so far as to make citizenship itself — and in turn, passports — available for sale.

These countries tend to be small, with economies prone to shocks. And their programs have often been born out of hardship. St. Kitts, another Caribbean nation, pioneered the idea in the 1980s as its sugar industry faltered. Dominica — which sits between Guadeloupe and Martinique in the arc of islands forming the eastern Caribbean — followed in the 1990s, seeking a new revenue source when a trade dispute destroyed its banana production.

With small countries, “it doesn’t take a lot of money to move the needle,” said Kristin Surak, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of “The Golden Passport,” a book about the global citizenship trade. “They don’t have a lot of options.”

The programs find an increasingly vast market among members of the Global South’s rich business class, who can face visa restrictions in traveling to the West. Obtaining a different passport is a way around the hurdles. The main condition of new citizenship, typically, is some kind of payment: either financing government-approved real estate projects or donating to the national coffers.

“If you’re a Pakistani and have to travel for your job — ‘Oh, we have a meeting next week in France’ — you’re never going to make it,” Surak said.

Though it has just three flights weekly to the U.S. mainland, Dominica has become an epicenter in this global citizenship trade.

The agents who help wealthy clients obtain Dominican passports operate out of offices in Dubai, Berlin and Beijing. They have websites in Arabic and Mandarin. One of the agencies, Arton Capital, ranks the world’s dozen or so citizenship programs based on their cost, the simplicity of the process, and the travel ease that comes with the passport. Dominica is tied for the best rank, with Grenada. Demand for Dominican passports soared after 2015, when the country gained visa-free access to the European Union.

A year before that change, according to Dominican budget documents, the country had earned $8.5 million from the program.

In the years since, the program has generated an average of $140 million a year.

“This is the soft power of a passport: Where can it take you?” said Armand Arton, president of Arton Capital. “Dominica constantly has a high number of applicants.”

But scrutiny has followed that growth.

The European Union has criticized the programs in Dominica and in several other Caribbean countries for their low rejection rates, while raising questions about the “thoroughness of the screening” and warning about security risks.

Last year, Britain revoked visa-free access to Dominican passport holders, even though Dominica was once a British colony. Britain cited the citizenship programs in both Dominica and Vanuatu — which also faced new restrictions — for “clear and evident abuse.”

Under pressure from the United States, Dominica and other Caribbean countries made several changes to their programs over the past few years, banning Russians and Belarusians and pledging not to accept applications from people already rejected elsewhere.

But last year, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an international investigative journalism nonprofit, said that Dominica had issued passports to oligarchs as well as “officials from repressive regimes.” In interviews with The Washington Post, two of Dominica’s highest-ranked opposition politicians, Lennox Linton and Thomson Fontaine, described a program that they said operated with little oversight or transparency. Linton, the president of the centrist United Workers Party, said that the passport money had been “significant in helping us back on our feet” after the hurricane. But he said that the passport revenue accounted for in the treasury was less than it should have been, given the number of passports sold. Linton, who shared a draft affidavit with The Post, said he plans to soon file a lawsuit accusing the government of hiding money overseas and keeping it off the books.

Skerrit’s office declined to comment on the accusations.

But Skerrit, who has been prime minister since 2004, said in a speech earlier this year that the country is going “the extra mile in ensuring that we maintain the high governance principles.”

In a brochure for would-be investors, Dominica highlights the simplicity and efficiency of the program.

Dominica has also specifically tried to sweeten its pitch by emphasizing that investors’ money can be used to contribute to resilience. In the brochure, in between panoramic photos of verdant mountains, Dominica touts the chance to be at the “forefront” of the fight against climate change, and “assist in the development of sustainable and robust industries and infrastructure.”

“This is an exclusive opportunity,” the brochure says.

Broken promises

One of the advocates for the citizenship program is a bureaucrat named Sam Carrette. He’s 67, and says he would have been retired by now had it not been for a national “rescue mission.” As head of the government’s climate-resilience unit, Carrette doesn’t deal directly with passports. But he does try to get money elsewhere. Places where it has been too slow to come.

“So … tedious,” he said, drawing out the words.

In the days after the hurricane — when Carrette, with a damaged home, was living out of his office — nations pledged $1 billion to Dominica in urgent relief. Half of it never materialized. Carrette had worked after Maria to draw up a detailed, point-by-point resiliency plan, but the stressful part was trying to find ways to make the plan actually happen.

To secure one tranche of climate funding, Carrette has been exchanging paperwork for five years.

For another, a group leading the project has needed to hire multiple consultants.

One internationally financed project took so long to materialize that its ambition was eaten away by inflation.

“We do get some support,” he said, “but it is not enough.”

Nations like Dominica fall into a crack in the international support system. They are too small to pay for their own needs. But they are not destitute enough to meet the United Nations’ low-income definition, which unlocks easier access to grants and low-interest loans. As a result, countries in this middle ground have often taken on towering debt. They forgo spending on education and health to make interest payments. They risk default. A joint letter signed by three Caribbean leaders after this summer’s Hurricane Beryl noted that small island nations faced “insupportable” debt, not because of reckless spending, but because of the “elevated cost of repeated rebuilding after intensifying climate-related shocks.”

“This insidious cycle is really putting countries on the cliff,” said Kevin Gallagher, the director of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center and a member of an International Monetary Fund task force on climate and development. “We’re seeing more and more countries go backward.”

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley has led a high-profile push to transform the global system of lending and development finance, saying it is failing vulnerable countries. She has raised the idea of debt cancellation for nations dealing with climate shocks.

Even with the passport help, Dominica has taken out numerous loans, including from the Caribbean Development Bank, as well as from foreign governments like China. But McIntyre, the finance minister, said that the passport revenue has prevented debt levels from being even higher. The country’s current debt load is estimated at around 100 percent of its GDP, according to the IMF.

In his office, Carrette has a copy of Dominica’s original resilience blueprint, which lays out an extraordinary set of targets for the country to reach by 2030. Dominica, by then, should have 90 percent of its housing stock rebuilt. It should have the capacity to restore power after three days of any event. Every community should have supplies on hand so that it can survive independently for up to 15 days after any event.

Some aspects of the plan don’t cost much, but for the whole package — the roads, the bridges, the homes — the estimated price tag is between $3 billion and $3.6 billion.

Dominica, Carrette says, may not have enough money to make its vision happen on time.

“We are clear where we want to go,” Carrette said.

Even if the plan is delayed, he said, “we are plowing ahead.”

A system under stress

But as the country has become more reliant on citizenship money, it faces a new risk that goes beyond anything climate-related. It gets so much money from the program that Dominica would be economically devastated if applications were to drop — say, because Europe were to impose visa requirements on Dominican passport holders. In a June report on the country, the IMF noted that “international scrutiny” of citizenship programs “threatens the viability of flows.”

Already, there are signs of a system under stress.

Several people familiar with the government’s operations told The Post that Dominica over the past several months has struggled to collect money from the transactions. They said that the processing of payments has been slowed by Bank of America. The use of a U.S. bank is necessary because the transactions take place in U.S. dollars, people familiar with the program said.

Fontaine, the opposition leader, who worked previously as an economist at the IMF, said that Bank of America has been facing pressure to more closely scrutinize transactions, slowing the funds.

“The problem is recent,” he said. “It’s getting more serious now.”

McIntyre, the finance minister, confirmed that Dominica is facing an issue with Bank of America and said officials are “dealing with it.”

A Bank of America spokeswoman, in a statement, declined to talk about banking relationships with other countries but said that citizenship-related transactions are still being processed.

The issues manifest at a construction site The Post visited one Wednesday afternoon — a planned town that is part of the resiliency project. The project was supposed to be finished by now, said Lawson Emmanuel, 44, a construction worker. But instead, it was stalling.

Emmanuel hadn’t been paid for six weeks, he said. Dozens of other construction workers had been pulled off the job. Tall grasses were consuming the yards of nearly finished houses. One of the subcontractor managers handling the site, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk, expressed frustration over his sense that Western powers were interfering with the cash flow.

“You’ve already built your cities,” he said. “Let us have ours.”

Sitting atop some scaffolding, Emmanuel described how he hoped the project might one day look: There’d be a church with the pews filled. Some shops would form a small main drag. Dozens of homes would host hurricane victims. And residents would have access to a community building — the spot where Emmanuel was installing rebar. It could hold weddings. Host the town council.