Hinkson praises Welcome Stamp

Minister of Home Affairs Edmund Hinkson has said the Barbados Welcome Stamp initiative, aimed at getting people from across the world to come to Barbados and work for up to a year, is completely above-board and not a lure for crime.

Responding to Leader of the Opposition Joseph Atherley who claimed that the venture might attract criminals, Hinkson said: “We have arrangements with regional institutions that will enable us to have an idea of who is coming into the island, for example, we know who has been deported, and we are not going to go the route of citizenship by investment as other CARICOM member states have done, because in the time it would take to do the necessary research to manage that, the ship would already have sunk.”

Speaking in the House of Assembly during debate on the legislation to enforce the scheme, Hinkson noted that some 80 per cent of the households in his constituency have been dislocated from their jobs in tourism over the last three-and-a-half months since the COVID-19 pandemic and that the other St. James constituencies have been in a similar predicament.

Hinkson noted that CARICOM citizens were also welcome to take part in the initiative and spoke to the measure as a likely boost to immigration and Barbados’ flagging population level.

He said: “We are looking to increase our population by 100,000 people over a period of time, and we are looking to bring a platform to Cabinet and Parliament to seek new rules to manage this. Barbados cannot afford to be a ‘closed society’; we cannot continue to accept one to two per cent growth in our economy every year with a declining population.

“We need a 2.1 per cent growth in our demography as we are in a situation where people are having fewer children and are living longer, so we are short on people of working age.”

He said the visa process will be managed online, and that the idea behind the venture was that the people coming in would be doing the jobs they did or running the businesses they owned in their home countries in Barbados, not taking Barbadian jobs. He also said there was more than enough accommodation to host them based on their needs and budgets.

Responding to a claim made by the Opposition Leader, a Pentecostal church bishop, that the scheme would welcome people who may be involved in same-sex relationships, the home affairs minister said: “Nothing in this legislation undermines our Family Law Act, which still recognises marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

“Barbados has always welcomed tourists of all kinds; we have never stopped people from coming in because they may be in a same-sex marriage. Primarily this bill is about tourism and has nothing to do with family laws.”