The Tribune

AT A time when local business owners need all the encouragement they can get to expand and create jobs, Immigration has announced a clampdown on work permits with its minister admitting that the department is so behind the times in both staff and equipment that it is unable to meet the needs of the business community.

Pressed at a Bahamas Chamber of Commerce Employers Confederation (BCCEC) luncheon Thursday, Immigration Minister Fred Mitchell admitted that a “20 working days” timeframe for a response on work permit applications was not possible under the current system.

Mr Mitchell said what was needed was a “drastic increase in investment in equipment and manpower to accomplish” what Chamber members wanted.

We suggest that Mr Mitchell starts upgrading right from the front door — the telephone answering service, for example. The switchboard takes so long to pick up one’s call that frustration sets in before business can be transacted. Frustration builds as the answering service in the department to which one has been transferred acknowledges your presence, but makes the surprise announcement that while indeed it is a voicemail service, it is terribly sorry, but it can’t take a voice message. So, the business person is left with an unanswered question. A question that might not get answered for several days.

Talking to The Tribune’s business editor after the luncheon, Mr Chester Cooper, BCCEC’s chairman, expressed disappointment. Mr Mitchell had been invited as guest speaker to the Chamber’s luncheon to shed “light on the government’s recent pronouncement on work permits and the Bahamas’ immigration policy”.

Although a “lively and informative discussion” was anticipated, according to Mr Cooper government did not appear to have moved on the “business community’s key concern — a transparent work permit approval process and a timeline by which an approval or rejection would be submitted”.

Only business persons understand the frustration of not being able to close a contract ­— that could be lost — because it has to await an Immigration decision. Mr Cooper said that a solution to this was vital to a company’s planning and strategic development.

We know that Immigration has always had administrative problems, admittedly the workload is heavy. However, we do not want to slip back to the Pindling days, the shadows of which seem now to be stalking us.

The fact that Immigration cannot give a timeline on issuing permits “remains the concern of the business community”, said Mr Cooper. “That is the key. We want to be able to plan when making applications. We had asked the Minister to work towards a 20-day timeline for approval or not.

“We believe in Bahamians first,” said Mr Cooper, “but we also believe in a transparent, efficient process for the processing of work permits.”

However, Mr Mitchell is so concerned about fulfilling an impossible dream — providing 10,000 jobs promised by the PLP if it won the government — that it would seem that a decision has been made to tighten the noose on the business community until that promise has been fulfilled.

Although it was pointed out to him that 99 per cent of the workforce of Bahamian business is made up of Bahamians, Mr Mitchell would have none of it.

The government, said Mr Mitchell, cannot sit idly by when the unemployment rate for under-25-year-olds in the Bahamas is around 30 per cent.

“We have to take a stand,” said Mr Mitchell, especially as such a problem breeds a potential social problem. Mr Mitchell said he had met Bahamians aged 23 and 25 who had “never held a 9-5 job in their lives”. And he added for emphasis: “That cannot continue.”

It would be interesting to know how refusing a businessman’s permit for a skilled professional is going to help fill a job for someone who has never held a job in his life and probably has no skills to do so.

However, we can assure Mr Mitchell of one thing. If he pursues this senseless path, as businesses cut back or move on, he will have so many unemployed knocking on his door that he will not know which window to jump out of to escape their wrath.

Unreasonable decisions on needed permits is not the answer to an election promise that when the PLP made it they should have known it could not be fulfilled.