It slipped my mind completely.
The day is designated by the UN to honor refuges around the globe.
My parents were refugees, and because they were educated and planted themselves in a welcoming environment, they were refugees for a short time. Before long, they entered the lower middle class, then the middle class, educating their kids in the process, and contributing to their new homeland’s prosperity.
If they hadn’t been greeted by a friendly hug, their lives would have been totally different, and tragic.
As recently announced, according to Dutch TV, Aruba has the highest number of refugees per inhabitants, every 6th inhabitant is a refugee, 20% of our country has no legal status.
Where are these people? Everywhere, many of them working, and while employers deduct premiums, we do not know for sure, if they hand the money over to DIMP on the 15th, each month. The kids go to school, here.
The Minister of Education & Sport recently held an exhibition pow-pow with the international NGOs lending assistance to that undocumented demographic. He promised at the meeting to work together with the Minister of Labor, on a joint policy, to deal with integration of immigrant children into educations.
Words are cheap.
He could of course reach an agreement with the Minister of Labor, providing he could catch the later, and nail him to the floor as he is zipping around the globe, rubbing shoulders with royalty, going on and on about futuristic projects, spewing most-bombastic solutions to hard problems in need of careful and intelligent consideration. He has a track record of bad decision making. Good luck Andy.
The non-documented demographic could help us. The F&B/Hotel and construction sectors are in dire need of working hands. The unwanted could be working and paying premiums — DIMP and SVB would be grateful.
We were told last year and again recently, that this issue of integrating the undocumented is on the front burner. We’re waiting.
Last week, a boat carrying 700 desperate refugees sank off the coat off Greece, 104 survived. We did not hear anything about it, yet the tragic accident of Ocean Gate’s, five seat, carbon, fiber and titanium submersible on a private tour of the wreckage of the Titanic, received ample press coverage and the US Coast Guard plus private entities spent about 7 million on the search.
We have selective attention, we focus on stuff that’s of interest to us — disastrous tragedies of the poor are out, spectacular tragedies of the rich, in.
We also focused this week on the beach in front of Embassy Suites. I congratulated the Minister of Natura on his fine performance as the Guardian of the Earth and he responded it was Land Aruba that took up arms.
He is right, of course. His action was more symbolic, not an effective action since he has no standing as a Minister of Nature, in a civil case,
Only a public legal entity, Land Aruba, has standing in a civil case and clearly there was no support for the minister’s action in the Council of Ministers.
The really effective action would have been to threaten to withdraw the support of Raiz, for the coalition. But that did not happen.
