Changes coming to restrict status grants, says minister

| 30/10/2024 | 14 Comments
Minister Dwayne Seymour on Radio Cayman on Monday

(CNS): The minister responsible for immigration, Dwayne Seymour, has said the Cayman Islands Government is working on a number of amendments to legislation that Caymanians had been asking for relating to the pace of growth and “people walking onto our shores and getting status”. He said, “None of us are happy about the pace of that.”

The border control minister said the country had made mistakes in the past and there were things to fix, such as immigration, which is a “main concern”. However, he said this was taking time because the ministries were swamped, and there were “not enough bodies to do everything”.

Appearing on Radio Cayman’s For The Record with Orrett Connor on Monday, Seymour said that changes were coming to address the pace at which people were being granted permanent residency and status.

Seymour said that the growth over the last few decades had become quite stressful as Caymanians were not prepared for the opportunities brought by the “mass exodus [sic] of people coming to our country”, though it was clear he meant mass influx. “It is a mental health situation when a country grows this fast.”

He said that “most Caymanians are on the same page” about the growth, which he described as “quite scary”, and that it was clear the pace of status and PR grants had to be slowed down. He said the government had found some mechanisms it could use, though he didn’t go into detail about what those were.

Seymour implied that the focus would be on reducing the number of people getting status by making it much more difficult to qualify, putting an annual cap on grants or stopping status grants completely other than through family or marriage connections.

It already takes a minimum of 16 years of continuous residency for a person who arrives in the Cayman Islands as a work permit holder with no ties of descent or marriage to get Caymanian status, and then only if they meet all of the qualifying criteria. However, getting status through marriage can be much quicker, and twice as many people now achieve status through this route than those getting status through residency.

“We are working on a lot but… when you are working on a lot… sometimes you have got to pick which one you are going to move forward with because you can’t get it all done at one time,” he said.

Seymour has been labour minister since March 2023, except for one month after he resigned from the PACT Cabinet. He returned to the ministry in the UPM administration after Panton was ousted from office.

He and his predecessor, Chris Saunders, have been pressured through the courts and by Cabinet colleagues over the last three and a half years. However, despite promises to deal with the issues surrounding labour and immigration, as well as reviews and reports, there has been no significant change.

Seymour, who owns a security and baggage handling business that employs a significant number of permit holders on minimum wage, has failed to raise the minimum wage, which many believe would slow down the influx of foreign labour. The minister, who clearly has a conflict of interest, rejected the Minimum Wage Advisory Committee’s recommendations that it should be increased from the current $6 per hour to $8.75, with room for even more in the business community.

In July this year, he announced there would be a do-over of the process and that he wanted the committee to look at different rates for different sectors. In the meantime, he announced that in July next year, tourism workers would get an increase to just $7 per hour and that employers would no longer be able to use gratuities to supplement wages.

When Connor asked the minister about the situation with the minimum wage on Monday, he appeared to accept that all the issues were connected and said he had plans to implement a minimum wage. Ignoring his own role in stalling the rollout of the national pay hike, he said, “We should have had an increase in the minimum wage a long time ago… and I am doing my best to ensure it happens and is approved under this government.”

Seymour added that he would return to the show this week with his ministry team when he would address the minimum wage question.

See Minister Seymour’s appearance on FTR on Radio Cayman’s YouTube channel below:


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Category: Policy, Politics

Comments (14)

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  1. Anonymous says:

    The Board has the power to restrict criteria to make it much more selective to ever qualify for PR. That’s really all they can do, but they might want to check with employers and their staff retention goals and hiring costs before fiddling with those dials. Naturalisation as BOTC comes after applying beyond 10 years, and CI Status after 15. Those folks have legitimately been contributing and investing as specified to our own exacting requirements for a big chunk of their adult lives, and at that point, unless they’ve fouled their own record somewhere, we don’t have a UNHR leg to stand on to refuse them. They are already on that track. It would be nice if we were more careful with our spending and benefits giveaways so it wouldn’t matter who’s Caymanian. Immigration might consider reading the inbound flight manifests and adding a couple more Caymanian Immigration lanes at the airport to help prioritize those who are truly our own, returning home after a long travel day. The Caymanian line is sometimes much longer than the tourist one! It shouldn’t be that way. We need to admit when we have easy things wrong, and fix them. It might be time to change the monarch pictures, for example.

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  2. Anonymous says:

    Election time that’s why.

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  3. Over so many people says:

    focus on bot letting
    people here on permits too not just those getting status.. we are FULL!

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  4. Anonymous says:

    First thing is that the minimum investment required for “residency by investment” needs to change from $2.5M to $10M. That $2.5M number hasn’t changed in 14 years! So you can come buy a nice house now and get residency.

    Easy peasy change.

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  5. Anonymous says:

    populist waffle….you’ll do nothin’.

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  6. Anonymous says:

    In my opinion, the bigger problem is the large volume of disposable minimum wage foreign workers brought here and being treated badly by employers. Just the sheer volume of people here on WPs not the relative few that are becoming Caymanian. We have a bulk immigration problem.

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    • Anonymous says:

      Agreed. They don’t want to do the dirty work of actually going through the list of WP holders and seeing if that person has gainful employment. They don’t want to fine employers that have WP holders with no jobs. They need to license all rental accommodations and make sure they are to code. We could easily remove 5,000 workers on permits.

  7. Anonymous says:

    So we on permits will come, work at the jobs Caymanians don’t want, make lives and contribute, build the buildings, clean the toilets, guard and keep you safe as you sleep and then you’ll throw us out as we come to rollover?

    Cayman kind indeed.

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  8. Anonymous says:

    Dwane, quite scary the pace of status grants and PR need to be slowed down? The daily pace and I mean literally every single day of Work Permit approvals need to be slowed down! The numbers don’t lie, what Island you living in bro?

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  9. Anonymous says:

    we need to cap how many work permits are granted per year. no more than 10% of any nationality unless they are British is allowed.

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  10. Anonymous says:

    Lawsuits coming, say persons eligible for status grants.

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