Talk show hosts Carl Dawson and Elihu Rhymer said the importation of unemployed persons and cheap labour into the territory is one of the main reasons why the territory’s economic is not at its best.
Speaking on the radio programme ‘On the Hot seat’ Dawson said “the BVI has grown its population to more than 30,000 with the same facilities and the same mode of behavior as when the population was 20,000”.
He added: “Our services are all stretching at the seams. At the hospital they can’t find beds to put people in and a lot of it is imported. We import poverty because a lot of the people who come in when they don’t have a job, we don’t have a system where they can be accommodated, so we importing poverty and we importing unemployment. And if that is what we have done and we are now landed with it, all our social facilities have been bursting at the seam for years and its now spilling on the ground.”
He questioned how this must be dealt with when there are an increasing number of unemployed persons being imported into the country while at the same time there is 200 children coming out of school every year and they are not accommodated.
Speaking on the same programme, co-host Rhymer said: “There are people being taken into the BVI society; cheap labour is coming to the BVI and being attracted in the BVI by people in the BVI who prefer to employ that cheap level of labour rather than British Virgin Islanders.
“This is a concern we ought to begin to recognize. I am not saying this out of any prejudice at all because I like people but I also love the BVI. And I think we have to be careful because our own entrepreneurs in the BVI may be doing to our economy precisely what the big companies in the United States are doing to their economy by exporting their production needs and we may be importing the cheap labour into the BVI and then our people here who already are in great measure unskilled, those of them who may have the capacity may not be able to find anything to do and we are going to run into a problem.”
