Another Labour Day:
Bahama Journal Editorial -
Nassau, Bahamas:

Another Labour Day has come, and as usual it will signify little more than another holiday for this nation’s tens of thousands of workers.

Some will use the occasion to get some deserved rest and respite from their toils. Sadly, Labour Day will be for some others little more than another excuse for frolic.

Tragically some of this nation’s working poor will find themselves mired in confusion and dispute concerning the outcome of the general elections recently held.

This is all so very sad.

Sadder still is that like their counterparts elsewhere in the region and throughout the world, Bahamians have their share of xenophobia. In the Bahamian case, this fear of foreigners sometimes takes the form of Negrophobia.

This is cause for serious concern on the part of the hundreds of thousands of people whose forbears hail directly from Africa, itself the birthplace of mankind.

All of us are emigrants from the Mother Land.

We would have liked to see a Labour Day that was true to the memory and example of some of this nation’s champions of labour.

This would include some fond reference to the late Sir Randol Francis Fawkes and the towering part he played in those years when struggle and sacrifice meant so very much for the labouring masses.

Reference would also be made to the great and towering role played by others like the late Sir Milo Butler and the Rt. Hon. Sir Lynden O. Pindling.

A moment should also be dedicated to those unknown masses of working people whose struggles and privations now under gird the work of their children, those Bahamians who now see and call themselves ‘inheritors and successors’ to these islands, rocks and cays known as the Bahamas.

As Bahamians celebrate Labour Day, some of them might pause long enough to reflect on the fact that some of the men and women whose sweated toil is bound up in the building of the Bahamas just happen to be here from somewhere else.

Some of these people came here by boat, others by plane. But regardless of status or mode of arrival, they have made their contribution to the orderly growth and development of the Bahamas.

Our people - particularly those professing Christianity - would be well advised to take note of this fact, thereby putting themselves in a position to speak honestly and truthfully concerning this matter.

No one wins when practically everyone seems to be so heated up and annoyed by the idea that - as a people - we owe undocumented immigrants so very much.

We are absolutely convinced that some of these people have - quite literally speaking - earned a right to live and work in The Bahamas.

Unlike some who trumpet their negative views concerning most of these undocumented migrants, we do not agree with the proposition that they constitute an elemental force somewhat akin to some "mighty wave threatening to overwhelm us, washing away our cultural, social and national identities."

This is little more than over-wrought hyperbole, itself taken to an even greater height of what seems to us an extreme exaggeration.

With the right mind and imbued with the right spirit, Bahamians can find a way to work things out with their Haitian, Jamaican and other Caribbean brothers and sisters.

There is no need for fear.

To hear some Bahamians talk about the so-called influx of undocumented migrants from the Republic of Haiti raises specters of a Bahamas that is about to disappear under a flood of poor black humanity sweeping northward.

This is fear based upon little else but fear.

As a consequence, some immigrant labor - particularly the undocumented Haitian - is despised and ambivalently received.

While we cannot and will not ever condone law breaking on the part of anyone, the time has come for Bahamians to recognize that there is a need for the role such labour can and does play in a Bahamas that is on the move.

The authorities should undertake a broad-based survey of the extent to which these people contribute to the orderly growth and development of The Bahamas.

Such a review would begin with a statement of the obvious, which is that the economy is already operating at a level where new blood is desperately needed.

31 May 2007