Permanent Residence: What game is Gov't playing?

Those are among the questions immigration officials pose to people who wish to settle permanently in this country.

Here’s a question for government: What game are you playing?

From all outward appearances, the current Progressives-led government has no desire to institute an efficient, fair or transparent process of dealing with permanent residency applications.

Rather than implementing a just immigration system, the government appears to be focused on advancing a political objective — that is, to grant residency status to as few as possible, and to make work permits prohibitively difficult and frustrating to secure.

Through the 2013 Immigration Law, government and its boards have overlaid a confusing framework of assessments, tests and queries, tethered to a hodgepodge of government employees and/or appointees.

If government continues this hostility toward foreign nationals and businesses, they’re going to kill the economy — and the reputation — of this country.

Last November, the Compass expressed its reservations about the immigration system’s continued reliance on officials’ “discretion” in order to make life-changing decisions for other people and their families, despite government’s insistence that a primary aim of the new law was to remove personal opinions and biases from the approval process.

In order to comply with the Bill of Rights in the 2009 Constitution — specifically the mandate that every person negatively affected by an administrative action should “be given written reasons for that decision or act,” which must be “lawful, rational, proportionate and procedurally fair” — the government contrived a “Permanent Residence Points System” that grades applicants based on occupations, education, community integration, and other factors.

The supposedly straightforward process is so convoluted that, since the law took effect in October 2013, neither the Caymanian Status and Permanent Residency Board nor Immigration Department staff has considered one single new application for permanent residence filed under the new law.

Meanwhile, the residency applicants find themselves in yet another series of regulatory and legal limbos, with doubt clouding everything from future career goals to summer vacation plans.
Governor Kilpatrick, are you watching this debacle play out and its effects on the territory and its expatriate community, including U.K. nationals?

The government also hasn’t explained why the board has dwindled to only six members out of 11, the minimum number required for a quorum. Since the nearly 10 months following the May 2013 election, the PPM government has not bothered to appoint even one member to this board.

To be bipartisan, we see a parallel situation in former governments’ failure to ensure regular meetings of the Roads Assessment Committee which adjudicates how much people should be paid in exchange for the seizure of their land. The committee has met just two times in seven years. Or, over the years, successive governments have been unable even to attract quorums to hold critically important Public Accounts Committee meetings.

Such a laissez-faire, la-di-da approach to governance is incommensurate with the urgency demanded by issues that are of the utmost importance to individuals, businesses and Cayman as a whole.