There is an increasing and long term problem of children being born in the Turks and Caicos Islands to parents who are not Turks and Caicos Islanders and those children who may have not been born in the Islands but have been here all of their lives. While recognizing this as a problem our country has struggle to keep up with these occurrences and has no doubt failed to create a viable solution. A number of these children have now past through all levels of our education system and benefited tremendously from our education and healthcare system, the latter, most time at the cost of tax payers. As the Turks and Caicos Islands continues to be affected by under population and a growing pressure to increase our franchise or in more layman’s terms create more permanent residences and Turks and Caicos Islanders, we must seek sensible ways in which to fill our needs that will allow these children to be fully assimilated with the results being a true benefit to our country.
The simple fact of the matter is that the children are here and they are not going anywhere. With this in mind, on August 8th 2014 I as Deputy Leader of the Peoples Democratic Movement submitted a Private Member’s Motion to the House of Assembly with the sole purpose of addressing this issue.
I hope that the discussion will ignite solutions. We must address these issues head on and once and for all seek to implement recommendations made since 2004 by the people of this country in this critical area.
