Cayman’s permit numbers are not the disease; they are the symptom
Written by Paul Byles for Cayman Independent ‘Cayman’s permit numbers are not the disease; they are the symptom‘
Marla Dukharan’s recent special report has done Cayman a service. It lays out, with careful data, a relationship many of us sense but rarely quantify: population growth, government revenue and construction feed one another in what she calls an “incentive loop.” Her correlations are striking; a near-perfect link between government revenue and GDP, and a stronger tie between economic growth and the non-Caymanian population than the Caymanian one. It is a well-argued piece, and it deserves the debate it has started.
Employment Minister Michael Myles has pushed back on one of its central implications, that government is structurally hooked on work-permit revenue. He argues Cayman does not have a revenue challenge; it has a thriving economy with more jobs than Caymanians to fill them. On this narrow point, I think the Minister is closer to the truth, though not for the reason he emphasises.
A capacity problem, not a permit problem
This is a decent conversation but it needs to be reframed. Our reliance on work permits is not the disease. It is a symptom of something far larger and far older than the recent report implies: relentless external demand for Cayman’s services that our population has never been able to satisfy, and, if we are being brutally honest, very likely never will.
Consider the evidence hiding in plain sight. For the past 25 years, our financial services firms have employed thousands of people outside Cayman entirely. When fund administrators could not find enough accountants in Cayman, they built teams elsewhere, essentially ‘offshore of the offshore centre’. That began, arguably, as a hunt for cheaper qualified accountants. But it did not stay there.
Today, firms hire and locate work overseas not merely to shave costs and not solely in the area of accounting, but simply to get the people they need at all. The work exists whether or not the worker sits in Cayman. As an example and although there has been no formal study on this, there is very likely as many jobs created by our financial services industry outside the country as currently exist within the local financial services sector. That is not a permit problem. That is a capacity problem.
So the framing that Cayman is “over-reliant” on permits gets the causation a bit backwards. Permits keep climbing not because government is ‘addicted to the fees’, but because firms are growing and hiring far faster than a country of 90,000 people can supply talent. The gap between the labour our economy demands and what our population can provide has never been wider and every trend line says it will keep widening.
None of this makes Dukharan wrong about the consequences. She is right that this growth carries costs, and that they land hardest on Caymanians. Housing is the clearest example. A government-commissioned study found we are already short more than 3,000 homes and will need thousands more just to keep pace. In the Caribbean, our cost of living is second only to Bermuda’s. Infrastructure, roads, waste, water, is straining visibly. These pressures are real, and growth exacerbates every one of them.
But notice what that tells us. The problem is not that people are coming. The problem is that we have allowed them to come without building the housing, the roads and the systems to absorb them. That is a planning failure, not an immigration failure, and it is entirely within our power to fix.
The reality we keep avoiding
There is a deeper question underneath all of this that we keep avoiding, and it is not really about permits or revenue at all. If this is what is happening naturally, and it is, then Caymanians, already outnumbered in our own islands, will only become a smaller share of the people who live here. We have walked toward that reality for decades while refusing to say it aloud.
Skirting it guarantees we will continue to discuss this issue with more emotion and less strategically. The honest move is to accept where the demographics are clearly headed and decide, deliberately, what kind of Caymanian society we want to preserve and build within it, not bury our heads and hope the numbers reverse.
Managing growth, not slowing it
Which brings us to the hard question the Minister and Dukharan both circle: what is the balance?
The tempting answer is to slow growth. Cap it. ‘Ease off’ the permits and let the pressure release. But an economy is not a car you can simply park. When an economy stops growing it rarely stands still, it shrinks. Firms that cannot resource their work here will resource it elsewhere permanently, and the revenue, the jobs and the opportunities go with them. That scenario helps no Caymanian. It makes every problem we are worried about worse.
The genuine task, then, is not choosing between growth and restraint. It is managing growth deliberately, matching the pace of construction and infrastructure to the pace of demand, insisting that Caymanians get real pathways into the higher-wage roles this economy keeps creating, and enforcing hard against genuine discrimination while we do it. It’s also true that helping our graduates cross from the classroom into full-time work will help to close the gap from our own side.
The Minister is right that we have more jobs than people. Dukharan is right that, left unmanaged, that dynamic carries a heavy price. Both can be true. Our failure has never been welcoming the world’s demand for what Cayman offers. It has been refusing to plan honestly for a future whose shape is already clear, and to build, deliberately, the prosperous and genuinely Caymanian society that future should serve.
