The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune

The Prime Minister and the Attorney-General have made it clear that any “amnesty period” after Dorian has ended and that Government will now rigidly enforce laws requiring repatriation of undocumented immigrants, or else lock them up. That’s fine as a legal principle, but realistically how will it be executed?

This is not a question of a few dozen foreigners employed without work permits, or over-staying their visitors’ period.

Clearly, although they are not named, Haitians are the target, primarily the several thousand who left the Abaco shanty towns and are now housed in New Providence shelters or elsewhere in The Bahamas.

What method of repatriation does Government propose? The Haitian government will take no meaningful steps to cooperate, and could close its airports to flights from the Bahamas, and even blockade the few marine landing points As has been ably described elsewhere, the Haitian authorities much prefer that its citizens remain in Bahamas, USA, or Dominican Republic and remit their earnings home, rather than return and add to the abysmal unemployment.

And I doubt that many Haitians will voluntarily make the move – I have certainly never met one. Perhaps the current news does not percolate to Nassau. (Does our press ever send reporters?) An on-the-spot team from the New York Times recently reported that conditions in Haiti have descended to a level of anarchy never seen before. In the days of Doc and Baby Duvalier, their Ton-Ton Macoute would shoot any troublemaker. These days the poor simply suffer starvation or murder by armed gangs that wander unlit streets where the few police fear to patrol.

Is this the sordid scene to which our humane, well-organised immigration authorities expect to deport thousands of bitterly objecting Haitians? Or else build a vastly expanded detention centre to hold them all?

I admit that I have no answers. But I hate to see our Government make grandiloquent promises that look good politically but have no realistic chance of enforcement. They will just back-fire and make our leaders look like foolish hypocrites.

RICHARD COULSON

Nassau,

October 21. 2019