600 More Status

Thursday, August 19, 2004

The Caymanian Status and Permanent Residency Board is close to releasing the names of 600 people to whom it will grant Caymanian Status under the 2004 quota, according to Board Chairman Billy Reid.

“The results will be announced by the end of the month at the latest,” said Mr Reid.

The 600 new Caymanian Status recipients join the more than 3,150 people who received Status last year, 2,850 of them by a special action by the Cabinet.

This next group of Status recipients, however, will have all been vetted by the Caymanian Status and Permanent Residency Board, a new Statutory Board that came into being after the passing of the Immigration Law 2003.

Mr Reid indicated that the process of selecting the 600 Status recipients was very difficult, given the approximately 1,200 applications, and the many non-Caymanians who have lived here over 10 years. “Some of the applications came from people who have been here nearly 30 years,” said Mr Reid.

Making the task more complicated was the fact that prior to 1994, Immigration records were not computerised, necessitating a painstaking process of going through old hard copy files. “We had to meticulously go over the files and applications,” said Mr Reid.

Since so many people qualified under the 10-year residency requirement, Mr Reid said his Board concentrated primarily on those who were here at least 12 years.

The new Status grants will bring the number of people who have received Status in the past year to more than 3,750. Adding dependents of the grantees, which average approximately 1.5 people per Status grant, over 9,000 new citizens will have been added to the Cayman Islands in twelve months.

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