And yesterday immigration also dominated the debate in the Senate. We were at the meeting but couldn't provide you with any clips in last night's news due to the quite engaging press conference held by the Minister of Immigration Godwin Hulse.
But, as we told you a raft of new legislation reforming passport, visa and nationality requirements was passed. It was carried by the government but the opposition and the social partners thought it didn't go far enough. Here are just two of the many deficiencies they pointed to:...
Senator Mark Lizarraga
"The new section 10-1D states that any person who has not been convicted of a criminal offence in any country with a sentence of 12 months or more that this person may apply to the director of immigration and nationality services for permanent residency. Mr. President, I ask the question how do we propose to verify this. We can't even tell if our birth certificates are genuine. We question the very validity of our passport and nationality documents. How do we propose to verify if a person has a criminal record on this world? This bill falls short of saying how."
Senator Lisa Shoman
"Let me get this straight; you are going to sit at the visa vetting committee and be allowed to recommend persons for visas? No man, at the very least this law has to include a provision that none of these people on the visa vetting committee should be able to recommend anybody for visas. In fact I am going to go further, I don't think a single member of the national assembly should be allowed to recommend anybody for a visa and I mean all of us here and everybody in the House of Representatives because to me there is too much avenue for mischief, for corruption, for mistake and for conflict of interest."
Senator Godwin Hulse
"The only way to fix it is to move forward collectively to what we are trying to do; a whole re-organization of the department is taking place. I am telling you, you will not any longer have the department structured the way it currently is. Again for efficiency and effectiveness and trying to get over this issue, but at the end of the day what we are trying to do is reside all of this in the people of Belize - all of us are in it together. If you see... a man writes me and tell me he sees when somebody paid somebody to get a document, but refuses to tell me who the person is, refuses to give me his name, refuses to give me the number of the immigration officer - so what's the point of the information - to act on ghost? If you want to stand tall and you think it's such a serious offence, you stand tall and be called because I certainly would do it."
The new regulations are expected to go into effect in January.
