The Minister of Immigration and National Insurance, the Hon. Alfred Sears addressed complaints about the process of obtaining work permits in the country.
Sears told reporters on Monday, “we’ve been meeting on a weekly basis over the past almost four weeks and we have constituted the Immigration Board which I chair. And we’re meeting this afternoon, we’re meeting every week and when we meet we’re completing the agenda. So when an agenda is prepared the commitment is to complete that agenda for that week and so far we are on target.”
The Immigration Minister also spoke to plans to clear the backlog of work permit applications. “Time is being made to ensure that those applications that those applications are processed and we can get as quick a response. The challenge we have in Immigration is that we have such a vast backlog. And, speaking very frankly, the challenge is that when the Department of Immigration went online, which was about 2015-2016, it was prospective. So we have hundreds and thousands of applications which are in storage and the commitment is to digitize those historical records which are still live so that they can be online and people are not told they cannot find their file online.”
