No one needs reminding that, for a number of months now, immigration issues, especially the rollover policy, have been at the forefront of public discussion, notably on the page of Cayman Net News, with views being expressed across the entire spectrum of public sentiment.
However, such views are necessarily those of one individual at a time, without any real indication as to the preponderance of public opinion on the subject, especially as our society still to a very large extent labours under the perception that recriminations will follow any public expression of personal opinion.
Immigration is a hot topic in many countries at the moment and this week a small town in Florida made the newswires when its city council voted down a proposed ordinance that would punish employers and landlords for dealing with illegal immigrants.
The council defeated the proposal, which also would have set English as the official language of the town, by a 3-2 vote after five hours of debate. The session was moved to the community centre to make room for the 330 people who attended the meeting, but people were still turned away as the centre filled to capacity.
The mayor, who proposed the new immigration act, said he would measure public opinion before deciding whether to prepare a new version of the act for approval by the council.
Whilst we here in the Cayman Islands do no have the same issues of illegal immigration and language to contend with (at least, not on the same scale), clearly we have our own pressing and important concerns.
What we find interesting about the story is that the leader of the local government was going to take steps to gauge public opinion on the matter before revisiting the issue, although there was no indication as to how this exercise would actually be carried out.
As mentioned at the outset, one thing we are also lacking in the Cayman Islands is a clear indication of public sentiment on current issues and perhaps it is time to explore ways of remedying this state of affairs.
This would have to be done, if at all, by more than just an opinion poll, which are notoriously unreliable, sampling as they do just a small percentage of the voting public and then extrapolating the results on the basis of certain assumptions.
We have never had a referendum in the Cayman Islands, although the possibility has previously been mooted in relation to constitutional advancement in particular.
However, in our view, what we need is full and accurate measure of public opinion, encompassing not just those eligible and registered to vote in elections, but the entire adult resident population, whether Caymanians or long-term legal residents, on work permits or otherwise.
Surely, a comprehensive plebiscite of this nature would be instructive, not only to the government but the entire country.
It would not necessarily need to be conducted by the government. It could be conducted as a private enterprise, perhaps under the aegis of the Chamber of Commerce.
It would not be beyond the realms of possibility that corporate sponsors could be found to underwrite the cost. After all, there must be any number of multinational corporations doing business here that are sooner or later going to be impacted by the rollover policy and ought therefore to be more than willing to pursue any feasible avenue of assessing the totality of public opinion on the subject, so that they can make informed decisions as to their future business policies, regardless of whether or not the results of such a plebiscite would ever in fact influence government policy.
