Haitians Supporting Own Economy:

By Quincy Parker -
Nassau, Bahamas:



Every year, Haitian immigrants living outside that storied but impoverished nation send as much as $100 million home, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

In fact, since 1997, World Bank figures show that remittances from Haitians living abroad have accounted for nearly $1 billion infused into the Haitian economy. The World Bank is an international agency that acts as a source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world.

The money supports thousands of families and, according to the IOM, provides "an important infusion of capital into the Haitian economy."

The Bahamas is now a member of the IOM, also an international body, this one concerned mainly with "maximising the positive relationship between migration and development."

In January, the IOM launched a project in Haiti aimed at helping that country’s government "provide support and protection to Haitian migrants" working in neighbouring countries.

"The project will provide technical support to the government on the formulation of bilateral labour migration agreements with neighbouring countries that are host to significant and growing numbers of Haitian labour migrants," IOM says.

Maureen Achieng, the chief of the IOM mission in Haiti, told The Bahama Journal that the $78,000 project will take seven months to complete.

"The Bahamas is an important country of destination for Haitians, and is figuring in the discussion of current Haitian labour migration trends," said Ms. Achieng.

"I expect that The Bahamas will be a country that the government of Haiti may at a later stage want to sign bilateral labour migration accords with."

The aims of the project, Ms. Achieng said, are to review the current trends; look at previous bilateral agreements, particularly with the Dominican Republic, as models; and finally to propose a model bilateral labour migration agreement that the Haitian government could use as a guide for discussions with "interested countries of destination."

The IOM notes a particular affinity for the Bahamas among Haitian economic migrants.

In an article published in July 2005, Gerard Pascua of the IOM writes that "Haitian immigrants by far constitute the largest migrant community in the Bahamas, with a distinct linguistic, cultural, and social tradition." He said that the comparative wealth and accessibility of the Bahamas act as "a pull factor for the destitute migrants from Haiti."

"As an archipelago…spread out over an area of 100,000 square miles of ocean, The Bahamas faces difficult challenges in monitoring and regulating migrant flows. Given the limited territorial size of The Bahamas, even relatively small numbers of Haitian migrants can have a disproportionate impact."

"In the case of the Bahamas, its proximity to Haiti and its strong economy has made it a favoured destination of Haitian migrants," IOM said in January, referencing a recent study conducted in conjunction with the College of the Bahamas that pegged the number of Haitians in the Bahamas at 30,000 to 60,000.

Also among the aims of the Haiti-IOM project are recommendations for clear conditions of contracting Haitian labour to foreign countries, pre-departure briefings for those labourers, support in the countries of destination through a trained "labour attaché" and post-return support.

The Bahamas is not the only country to struggle with "significant" numbers of Haitian migrants. The IOM estimates that there are about 500,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic, not including Dominicans of Haitian origin.

The IOM says that a trend of economic migration fueled by unemployment and underemployment in Haiti has been exacerbated in recent times by political instability and what the international agency terms "devastating environmental degredation."

The IOM estimates that one million Haitians left that country between 1957 and 1982, and says that during the 1950s and ‘60s, many were urban middle and upper-class opponents of the government of Francois Duvalier.

However, IOM says that "in the 1970s an increasing number of rural and lower-class urban Haitian left the country, many through irregular means, in search of better economic opportunities."

The World Bank lists Haiti as "the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the most disadvantaged in the world, as social, economic and environmental indicators reveal."

According to the World Bank statistics, 65 percent of the Haitian population lives below the poverty line, and the average life expectancy is 53 years.

The World Bank said: "Despite a remarkable history as the first and only slave colony to gain national independence, and the second free republic in the Western Hemisphere after the United States, Haiti’s path to development and democracy has been hampered by political instability.

The early 1990s were marked by a military overthrow of the democratically elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide and a subsequent international embargo that sought to restore constitutional rule. During this period, activity in the textile and export-oriented assembly industries — responsible for over three-quarters of export earnings and a significant share of jobs — virtually ceased, tax collection and expenditure control systems collapsed, and maintenance of economic and social infrastructure was all but abandoned."

Ms. Achieng said this week that the project seeks to help the Haitian government "better manage labour migration flows for the benefit of the labour migrants themselves, but also for the receiving countries so as to ensure the flows are well-managed and are not in any way disruptive to host societies."

Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Immigration, Thelma Beneby told The Journal that an announcement regarding a new Bahamas immigration policy is expected to be made in a short time.

25 March 2006