The Tribune

By AVA TURNQUEST

Tribune Chief Reporter

aturnquest@tribunemedia.net

In five days the Department of Immigration is scheduled to begin enforcement exercises in Abaco under the mandate of the government’s new policy.

This is notwithstanding the physical, emotional and financial toll of the policy’s upheaval of communities in New Providence, which has been belaboured ad nauseam and rebutted with equal fervour.

Last week, Minister of Immigration and Foreign Affairs Fred Mitchell said that draft legislation to introduce the Belonger’s permit and further regularise the policy needs one more Cabinet review before it is brought to Parliament. Far from convincing cynics that the stricter immigration policy is unstained by political ambition, the policy can be aptly described as an ill-timed and poorly executed good decision.

In Marsh Harbour, the atmosphere in the Mud - and it’s dwarf twin, Pigeon Pea - is unassumingly calm. There, wooden shacks hoist each other up in hive-like clusters with planks jutting out at open ends. Supposedly, this feature aids in the discreet construction of additional structures. Traversing the bigger village, the Mud, you can see the scars of the two fires last year as singed roofs give way to swaths of banana trees and sparse crops like peas and herbs. White plastic pipes likely to contain electricity, water or sewerage, crisscross underfoot above ground and underneath the houses. Satellite dishes crowd roofs overhead.

“Even though we’re born here, we don’t get no value,” shrugs a 22-year-old resident. The young man has lived in Abaco all his life, but has a son in Nassau. He said that he applied for his Bahamian passport at 18, and has been picked up by immigration officials and released twice.

“So what you think about you? The only thing I was waiting on was for them to give me a call, I have the receipt right home. My kid right now don’t have nothing. He take his mother name, she’s a real Bahamian. I don’t want to make him be like me,” he said. “All this pain I been through I don’t want my kid to go through that.”

What is the significance of a name, the transference of a name and the denial of a name? Unfortunately much of the narrative on the new immigration policy has been focused on whether the right to citizenship is an entitlement upon birth, and not its impact on the large cross-section of people who have already applied. The policy’s defence is rooted in the critical need to document people in the country - but what about the people that have already put themselves forward to be counted and have been seemingly ignored?

The young man has been unemployed for seven months.

“It’s hard for us,” he said. “Sometimes I be thinking ‘man why us, why us?’ All of what I’ve been through here, a lot of us used to work and have papers because once you had a birth certificate you can go and look for jobs. But now once you don’t have a passport, you can’t work, you can’t do nothing. I’m hungry myself right now; you can see that I’m a hungry man right now. I don’t have a job, I have trade. I’m a captain, GPS man. I do all them things.

“I don’t know what they want us to do, go to hell or kill yourself, or walk like a joneser in the street, or rob killing. I grow up in the street but I grow up in the church at the same time. I’m not a bad person.”

The village had a low rural buzz, with chickens clucking gently as women busied themselves with various chores and men watched listlessly. There are convenience stores and dress stores, barber shops and web shops. In one store, there was a business licence framed and set high up on the wall. It was dated January, 2014. In several areas, grey ashen embers smoked lazily and unsupervised atop small trash heaps, an omen of past fires that rapidly consumed dozens of homes the previous year.

For $60 per week, you can rent one room with no running water: another single room rental - also without water - cost $130 per month.

The shanty towns are nestled under the rug right off the main fare and its population work throughout the island. The main entrance is an open lot with two large garbage receptacles and two paths that take you into either settlement. Pigeon Pea is not as congested and its paths are wider when compared to the jutting corners of structures that line the grid-like pathways of the Mud.

“A lot of people,” the young man said, “some of them go down there and they can’t take it no more. They just bring themselves to the immigration so they can get deported, because things are very hard.”

The Immigration Department recorded a 26 per cent increase in 2014 over the number of persons repatriated in 2013, according to unofficial statistics, which indicates a 30 per cent increase in the number of Haitians deported. For the period January 1 to November 30, 2014, 4,476 Haitian nationals were deported.

Recently, QCs Fred Smith and Wayne Munroe locked horns over the issue of citizenship as it related to persons born in The Bahamas to foreign parents. Mr Munroe interpreted the constitutional entitlement as only the right to apply, while Mr Smith contended that it was a right to citizenship, upon making an application.

The unaccounted toll of this hair’s-breadth difference in interpretation is the havoc wrought by the degradation of families through deportation. The deportation of young children along with their parents was carried heavily throughout international media - but what about the scores of children left behind? Those left in the care of relatives, close friends or neighbours. Those who are undocumented and still struggling to track down the identity of their parents. Where are the support services to care for and regularise these children?

“These aren’t foreign people,” said Maz Joachin, a 24-year-old artist and musician from New Providence, whose citizenship application has been suspended until he can comply with the new policy.

“That’s how the media gets away with it. They paint a picture of foreign leeches and people start to think all these negative things, but if you ever wanted to figure out what’s going here? Remember that one kid in your class whose last name was Pierre, who you have known for years, who was cool and was on the basketball team or drew, that’s a Haitian. We’ve been here.”

After spending around $1,000 to fulfil all the requirements for the citizenship application, Mr Joachin said he will now have to repeat the process to first apply for a Haitian passport, and then for a Belonger’s permit. Only then will his application for citizenship be placed back under review. He added that he was not aware his application process had been halted by the new policy until he went in to check on its progress this month, and discovered the department had a letter for him dated January 8. The letter informed him that the application he had submitted in June had been suspended.

Mr Joachin said: “They make us seem like we’re leeches but most people that I know they just want to be normal and live their life in the country, contribute. If, when I was born in Nassau and my mom was sent back to Haiti to have her child, I would have preferred that instead of growing up with all this pressure and scrutiny and always having to defend myself. It’s something I want to get past.

“I don’t feel like the government is doing the wrong thing. I just think they’re ignoring the right thing at the same time,” he said. “You can’t move forward but ignore the things that have been setting you back. You can do your policy and your new laws, that’s fine, that’s your right as a government. But the minute you start neglecting people who matter, who live here and didn’t do anything illegal, the minute you start ignoring them, that’s when you really failing the people. They live here.”

Will Abaco operations be conducted in the same style as New Providence, and if so, does the department have the capacity to process the volume of individual cases?

What will officers encounter when they descend into the maze of wooden structures that have housed families predating the country’s independence?

As we embrace the consistent enforcement of our laws, the illusory goalpost for the Utopian society, we must just as consistently ask ourselves: what about the reality?