Estimates are that there are somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 Haitians living in The Bahamas. There is no yardstick to accurately determine how many of them are here illegally, but the number is believed to be astronomical.
This being the case, clearly the aggressive exercise currently being carried out at the behest of the new Minister of Immigration, Shane Gibson, to round-up as many illegal immigrants as possible, at best, is a good public relations exercise to get the message across to those who are here illegally that The Bahamas now has a Minister of Immigration who has put resolving the illegal immigration problem at the top of his agenda.
This certainly is a conclusion that can be drawn from the results of the recent round-ups that have been conducted. Several weeks ago, raids in Eleuthera, Exuma and Ragged Island resulted in 394 Haitian nationals being taken into custody, but out of that number, only 140 were found to be here illegally. Then, last Friday in Grand Bahama, Immigration authorities staged a surprise pre-dawn raid, taking into custody 97 persons, 70 of whom were transported to New Providence.
The latest round-up took place in Abaco on Tuesday, when Immigration officials and local police stationed themselves at the dock in Marsh Harbour and took 32 persons into custody as they disembarked from ferries bringing them back from their jobs in Guana Cay and Hope Town. After they had been processed, 23 were discovered to be in The Bahamas illegally.
Given the total number of illegal immigrants snared in these three round-ups, at this rate ﾗ even if raids were held on a daily basis ﾗ only a small percentage of those persons who are here illegally will be apprehended. Therefore, given this fact, the success of these round-ups certainly should be weighed against the appalling manner in which they were conducted.
To be sure, it should have been expected that some innocent persons will be detained. In the Grand Bahama raid, for example, those rounded up included two individuals that Immigration authorities later determined were Bahamians, albeit of Haitian descent. Certainly, there appears to be a good case here for legal action against the Immigration Department, as human rights activist Fred Smith, a noted attorney, is reported to be considering.
Rather than resort to what Mr. Smth has likened to “Gestapo tactics,” why isn’t the Immigration Department, or whichever arm of the Government deals with such matters, targeting those persons who employ illegal immigrants and deal with them to the full extent of the law. Surely, if no one employs these illegal immigrants, the word will soon spread in Haiti that the grass in not that much greener for them in The Bahamas than it is in their homeland.
The bottom line is there simply has got to be a more humane way to address this problem than arousing human beings, including little children, from their beds in the early hours of the morning and herding them off to a processing centre. Sounds rather animalistic, doesn’t it?
Editorial, The Freeport News
