MINISTER of Foreign Affairs and Immigration Fred Mitchell announced yesterday that the government is considering opening a resident Honorary Consul in Chicago to help enhance the relationship between the Bahamas and the people of that city.

Addressing the Illinois House of Representatives yesterday, Minister Mitchell said the state of Illinois has a special historical and social resonance with the African Diaspora globally and with the Bahamas as well.

“I am here to seek to expand ties with this area. To seek to learn more about the area and to ask you to learn more about us: the cultural heritage which we both share and the trade and commercial opportunities which exist and can be expanded,” he said.

“Thousands of Bahamians have received their tertiary level education in this state. There are some 333 people who listed themselves as being of Bahamian descent in this state and in the 2010 census; some $10,000,000 of business was done from the Bahamas in this state in the year 2010.

“Clearly, this can be expanded. We do over a billion dollars of business with Florida each year. The base is there and to show you what I mean, in 2005, 40,000 people visited the Bahamas from this area, compare that to just 33,000 last year,” he said.

Mr Mitchell added that the Bahamas maintains regional and hemispheric superiority in the area of financial services – with one of the longest established international financial services sector in the Americas – and remains a high quality destination for wealth management and a hub for capital investment.

In the area of cultural impact, the minister noted how the founder of the Bahamas Dance Theatre, Shirley Hall Bass, one of the Bahamas’ cultural and artistic treasures, was a native of Chicago, Illinois before moving to the Bahamas at the apex of her professional dancing career.

“Throughout her career, she consistently used her craft and capacity as director to foster an understanding between her two loves, the United States and the Bahamas, with the creation of the Foreign Cultural Exchange in 1968, when 58 young Bahamian ambassadors travelled to Chicago.

“These are the types of linkages, not just economically but also socially and culturally, that we wish to develop and expand with this great state.”

As for the Honorary Consul, Mr Mitchell told the Illinois representatives that the government of the Bahamas has asked Michael Fountain, a Chicagoan with Bahamian roots, if this is something he would consider. He noted that this would of course be subject to US government approvals at the Federal level, for which he asked for the House’s support.

“We think Mr Fountain would do an excellent job. As we celebrate today the deepening of the friendship and collaboration between our two governments and peoples, I wish to close with words of motivation from a son of your soil, President Lincoln: ‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.

“As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up [both our] nation’s wounds’.”