By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

THE Chamber of Commerce is urging the government to ease immigration policy restrictions so private sector businesses can efficiently secure the services of foreign talent.

Chamber CEO Edison Sumners said the Chamber has offered to help the Immigration Department to improve its record keeping and application processing capacities, noting that improved services would end much of the concerns the private sector has about the “new” immigration policies.

Mr Sumner and chamber chairman Gowen Bowe stressed that they support efforts to empower Bahamians and to fix this country’s illegal immigration issues.

However, business people have expressed concerns about the challenges the policies are having on their ability to secure foreign talent when local talent is unavailable, they said.

In particular, Mr Bowe said the Chamber wants the government to distinguish between skilled workers and unskilled workers who apply for permits in such a way that the application process of skilled workers can be expedited.

Otherwise, the new immigration policies have created a demand that is “clouding the system” and making it difficult for skilled foreign workers to be hired in a timely manner, he said. 

Mr Sumner lamented that local talent is not always available to perform key jobs.

“The issue with regards to importing talent and skilled people into the country should be a little more flexible,” he said after a Rotary Club of East Nassau meeting on Friday. “If companies need to import certain people to work in their organisations because the skill set those people have cannot be found locally, the government should be a little more lenient and flexible with their approach to this to allow us to bring people in.

“We fully support the Bahamianisation policies. We also support the fact that we should be developing as much talent as we can in the country. We understand that there are times when the talent and skill set that you are looking for are not available so in those cases we would like to see an easing of restrictions and the process for bringing people in for specific periods of time.

“We also want to ensure that with the immigration policy, we are able to promote education and skill sets so that it would make it more appealing for local business to be able to find local talent rather than having to search for it outside the country.

“The problem is we are not developing the skills of our people fast enough. We’re still trudging along with this D average in high school and graduating people from high school who really should not be graduating. We want to ensure we put some resources behind strengthening the academics of those coming out of schools so that it makes them more attractive to local employers.”

Mr Sumner said all of the recent immigration policy measures pose challenges to private sector business people.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a difficulty. It’s just a bit more challenging to get some things done. This is the position of the private sector and we’ve had on occasion in the past to meet with the minister of immigration and to sit with him. We’ve expressed these concerns before and what we are looking at now is to remain fully engaged in the process.

“We understand that a lot of the policies really aren’t new; they are just now being enforced. I know (the minister) is looking to enforce the law and we’re saying that yes we support Bahamianisation, but let’s also examine this on a case-by-case basis and be able to fast-track certain applications for approvals.

“We’ve proposed before to help them clean up their record-keeping system because their records are really in a bit of a shambles and we’ve proposed to provide them with a bit of assistance from the private sector side to clean up their records which would make the processing time for applications move a lot faster because part of the problem has been that you can’t get to approve the applications because they’re under files.”

Foreign Affairs and Immigration Minister Fred Mitchell said recently that the government is considering raising the fees for work permits. Mr Sumner said the chamber has no problem with this.

“There is no difficulty with the fees. The government needs to raise revenue. People need to bring them in and if you need to bring talent in you must be able to afford the fees that need to be applied. I guess it’s also another measure government is putting in place to make sure we tap into local talent as much as possible.”

He emphasised that private sector businessmen would like to hire more Bahamians. “The private sector guys would really prefer to hire local people, but if you can’t find them you got to get it from outside. It’s always eminently more expensive to bring talent in than to hire local people. You have to pay work permit fees, residency fees, travel fees and salaries and other benefits and amenities that local people are not going to be getting so if we can, we rather hire local people anyway, but sometimes we have to go outside.”

As for the government’s move to enforce the policy that mandates that children of non-nationals have a school permit, Mr Bowe said he supports this, noting that the children of skilled workers usually have a school permit.