Franz Manderson responds to immigration complaints

Chief Immigration Officer
Franz Manderson

by Brian Buckley

Monday, August 23, 2004

Chief Immigration Officer Franz Manderson addressed many of the complaints made about his Department when he was the guest speaker at the Cayman Islands Society for Human Resources Professionals (CISHRP) Annual General Meeting last Wednesday at the Hyatt Regency
During his speech, Mr Manderson expressed confidence in new measures afoot at the Immigration Department that will lead to higher customer satisfaction and greater efficiency. “Looking over the audience, I see many of our biggest customers,” he said. “You know all too well what the biggest complaints about immigration are.”

Mr Manderson focused on five legitimate complaints and his plans for addressing them. The first concerned the common complaint of businesses that feel that they cannot get anyone at the Immigration Department to answer the phone. The department’s website was meant to tackle this problem, along with special call-in days, but complaints continue.

In order to cease asking the department’s workers to perform dual roles, Mr Manderson said: “What we propose is the establishment of a call-centre which will be manned by trained operators whose only duty will be to answer your calls. These operators will be closely supervised to ensure quality of service.”

To further address this complaint, the department hopes to increase the capabilities of its website so that not just corporate clients, but also personal employers will be able to check the status of their work permit applications.

Another complaint Mr Manderson addressed was the long lines at the public counter. He said that former CIO Gerry Maguire is conducting a review of this matter, and that he had passed on a set of recommendations to Mr Maguire which included providing seating, partitioning the counter to ensure privacy, introducing a number system, establishing satellite offices in other districts, and relocating the supervisor so as to observe the public counter.

The Immigration Department’s third biggest complaint according to Mr Manderson is that work permits take too long to process. “We all now realize that we cannot continue the processing of increasing number of work permits with the same systems that have been in place for over a decade,” he said.

The new Immigration Law enables the Chief Immigration Officer to issue work permits up to 180 days, as opposed to the previous limit of 90 days. As a result, because the old systems are still in place, what once took five to seven days has now become a two-week process. “This is unacceptable to us,” Mr Manderson said, and promised to remove the impediments.

The fourth complaint mentioned brought laughter from the audience. In Mr Manderson’s words, that complaint goes something like ‘I call the Immigration Department and speak to three different people and get three different answers.’ The department has decided to introduce an intranet service which will contain an information bank which staff will have quick access to when dealing with customer queries.

The final element of his remarks highlighted efforts to increase the staffing levels in the enforcement section to deal with rising immigration crime, retraining officers at the airport to improve the detection of undesirable visitors, and designing customer service courses for the department’s staff.

Before fielding questions, Mr Manderson warned that there would still be some difficulties. “We cannot wave a magic wand,” he said. “We face budget and space constraints, along with various crisis situations involving national security that will always take priority.”

During the question and answer session that followed his address, Mr Manderson shared that at the current time the Government of the Cayman Islands is attempting to divide their computer hardware. He said this is so all the hardware is not in the administration building in case of an accident, and that the process has slowed down efforts to improve the Immigration Department’s website at this time.

One questioner asked to ascertain the number of children an employee can bring to live in the Cayman Islands. Mr Manderson stated that the Immigration Board is currently trying to develop real criteria so that the person coming for employment can make the decision that is best.

For example, he mentioned if someone were coming to the Cayman Islands to work on a $200 per week salary, bringing children would most likely not meet the Board’s criteria when it is announced. The separation of families falls under article 8 of the United Nations Human Rights Convention and Mr Manderson stated that these issues are not always easy to sort out. He mentioned the new Complaints Commissioner will be scrutinizing the Department’s work.

He also told the audience that the Board is reminding people earlier than ever that there are time limits to their length of stay in the Cayman Islands and that the word ‘Status’ is no longer used but rather, ‘the right to be Caymanian’.

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