The need for the rollover policy in the face of possibly thousands of Jamaicans becoming Caymanian was discussed at the Council of Associations’ Immigration Forum on Friday afternoon.
Chairman of the Work Permit Board David Ritch, second from left, talks about the Immigration Law at the Council of Associations Immigration Forum Friday. Also on the panel were, from left, Cabinet Minister Alden McLaughlin, Business Staffing Board Chairwoman Sophia-Ann Harris, Chief Immigration Officer Franz Manderson and Permanent Residency and Caymanian Status Board Chairman Anthony Scott. Photo: Alan Markoff |
The panel for the forum included Cabinet Minister Alden McLaughlin, Work Permit Board Chairman David Ritch, Business Staffing Board Chairwoman Sophia-Ann Harris, Chief Immigration Officer Franz Manderson and Permanent Residency and Caymanian Status Board Chairman Anthony Scott.
It was Mr. Ritch, however, who cited the most sobering warning that supported the need for the rollover policy.
‘Jamaicans make up almost half of the workforce,’ he said, noting that with more than 11,000 people out the 50,000 to 55,000 people here, Jamaicans made up a substantial segment of the population.
‘What you have is almost another country within a country.’
Mr. Ritch called the issue concerning Jamaicans very serious.
‘Call me callous, call me insensitive,’ he said. ‘This is an uncomfortable topic and no one wants to talk about it.
‘I’m going to talk about it because someone has to talk about it.’
Giving exact figures on Saturday, Mr. Ritch said that as of 22 September, there were 11,391 Jamaicans out of 24,134 foreign workers in the Cayman Islands.
In addition, many Jamaicans have already received Caymanian Status over the past five years, adding to the total number of Jamaican-born people living here.
‘There are more Jamaicans living here now than the entire population of the Cayman Islands not that long ago,’ Mr. Ritch said.
Without the rollover policy, Mr. Ritch said thousands of the Jamaicans here would stay long enough to gain security of tenure and eventually Caymanian Status. If that happened, they would then be able to bring all of their dependents from Jamaica to the Cayman Islands and then those dependents could obtain Caymanian Status too.
In a short time period, Jamaicans could out-number established Caymanians here.
Although he conceded that not all Jamaicans would want to stay in the Cayman Islands, Mr. Ritch said a large percentage of them would.
‘Those who had the toughest time from where they came will want to stay the longest,’ he said, adding that many of the Jamaicans here are labourers and that there is a shortage of those jobs in Jamaica.
Giving statistics to back up his claim on Saturday, Mr. Ritch said that 5,059 of the 7,855 foreign workers that have been in the Cayman Islands longer than eight years are Jamaican. The next closest nationality with citizens here longer than eight years was the U.K. with 482.
‘When you look at the 5,000 Jamaicans that have been here longer than eight years as a percentage of the total number that have been here that long, it is only reasonable to assume that thousands of (Jamaicans) would always stay beyond eight years,’ Mr. Ritch said, noting that they would then qualify to apply for permanent residence.
The dependents of those Jamaicans are another worry.
Of the 1,954 dependents of work permit holders in Cayman as of 22 September, Mr. Ritch said that only 269 of them were Jamaican, which points to the fact that many of the dependents of Jamaicans are still in Jamaica.
Mr. Ritch also noted that it is often the labourer class that has the most children.
If thousands of Jamaicans here on work permits – who are mostly in the labour class – gained Caymanian Status, there is no way of telling how many dependents they might then bring to Cayman.
‘It’s like a blank cheque,’ Mr. Ritch said. ‘They will bring an unknown number of children and their spouses over with them and that’s the really scary part.
‘Their children would enter the school system by the hundreds if not the thousands,’ he said, adding that the school infrastructure is already stressed by the number of children it has.
In addition, Mr. Ritch said jobs would have to be found for all of the school leavers, and if there were not enough jobs, they would become wards of the Government.
‘This is the facts of life,’ Mr. Ritch said. ‘If we are going to have an open immigration policy, then eventually we are going to have a welfare state.’
Mr. Ritch warned about the possible other consequences of having so many Jamaicans here.
‘We can’t continue to allow the workforce to be dominated by one nationality,’ he said, noting that in one construction company he knew of, 43 of 45 employees were Jamaican.
‘When you have a preponderance of one nationality in a workplace, it tends to squeeze other nationalities out,’ he said.
Mr. Ritch pointed out that it was not only Jamaicans he was concerned about.
‘Filipinos have now moved in to second place (in the number of work permits),’ he said. ‘There are now 2,049 of them in the country.’
The number of Filipino workers here has risen dramatically – by approximately 25 per cent – in just the past nine months.
‘Left alone, it wouldn’t be long before (the number of Filipinos here) reached 3,000,’ he said. ‘The number of Filipinos is starting to become a concern to me.’
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