“Haiti supposedly has an unemployment rate of 70 percent,” he noted. “We have under 10 percent. They have supposedly a dollar per day per person on an average. The reality is those figures are wrong.”
Dr. Newry, who was the special guest on the radio Love 97 programme, “Issues of the Day” on Tuesday, added, “The reality is that from the U.S. alone you have $1.2 billion sent by relatives to people in Haiti. Now you got to take that into account because they spend that money in the stores and on [other] things.
“From The Bahamas with its relatively small Haitian population, we have $7 million to $10 million going back to Haiti every year. Those are realities, but when you look at the figures about unemployment, you say ﾑa dollar a day.ﾒ The fact is they donﾒt get a dollar a day. Itﾒs closer to $2 a day.”
Asked by the showﾒs host, Wendall Jones, whether people in the Caribbean have an obligation to assist Haiti in its national development and the building of its economy to reduce illegal immigration, Dr. Newry said, “Yes”.
He explained that it is in the economic interest of The Bahamas to assist Haiti.
“This is no charity weﾒre talking about here,” Dr. Newry said. “If you help Haiti (you help yourself).”
Dr. Newry said he has met with officials of the Chamber of Commerce in an effort to encourage Bahamians to see the value of investing in Haiti.
The ambassador also said it is “disastrous” for Bahamians to want to stay out of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) because they think they have nothing to trade.
“We should be the most outward looking people in the Caribbean,” Dr. Newry added. “We should be like the Americans are in the world.”
Putting forward an argument he continues to push, the ambassador said that Bahamians ought to be investing in Haiti and ought to offer services like construction.
He also said that he was working to get Haitians who are doing well financially to visit The Bahamas as tourists, but Dr. Newry said he hasnﾒt had much luck in that regard.
“They donﾒt come because of the impression that some people give that they would not be well treated,” he said.
The ambassador also said it is difficult for any Haitian to get a tourist visa for The Bahamas “because of the degree of questionable, fraudulent visas that people have gotten. They can even get a fraudulent visa from over in the Dominican Republic.”
Dr. Newry explained that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an attempt to reduce the number of fraudulent visas looks “in a draconian, a very severe way” at how visas are issued to people coming out of Haiti.
But Dr. Newry said of all the countries “on earth” The Bahamas has been the most accommodating in terms of integrating Haitians.
While on the show, he also faced a series of criticisms from some callers who insisted that he was being “anti-Bahamian” in his approach to the Haitian situation, but Dr. Newry dismissed such suggestions as non-sense, saying the interests of the Bahamian people were his priority.
By: Candia Dames, The Bahama Journal
