economy requires and may always require capable staffing from overseas.

That is not to demean Bermudians because Bermuda has done a quite remarkable job of producing talented and well educated people capable of undertaking difficult jobs and doing them well. It is to say that no place as small as Bermuda could hope to produce enough people with the required skills to staff the complex and competitive businesses in Bermuda today. The important phrase is "required skills'' because there are Bermudians, even highly placed Bermudians, who believe that Bermudians should have any job they apply for simply because they are Bermudian.

The complaints about foreign workers continue seemingly without recognition of the fact that the businesses which require permit workers all contribute substantially to Bermuda's high and much envied standard of living. There was a large influx of non-Bermudian workers beginning about 50 years ago in the years after the Second World War. If Bermuda had decided not to accept outside workers then we would today still be a sleepy resort with a great many poor people and very few of the amenities we now enjoy.

But that was not the first time Bermuda looked overseas for talent and labour which could not be supplied locally. A prime example is the large number of people from Britain and from the West Indies who came here to construct and staff the Dockyard and other British Government projects from the early 1800s until after the Second World War. Many white Bermudians are descended from British Dockyard people and many black Bermudians are descended from West Indians brought to work at the Dockyard and not from Bermudian-held slaves.

At the time, the complaints about these people were very similar to those we hear about non-Bermudian workers today. And complaining about foreigners coming in and taking jobs, and prejudice against them, is certainly not unique to Bermuda. It went on in Britain when large numbers of West Indians emigrated there in the 1950s. It is aimed at Mexicans in the United States today. It was true of the great wave of European immigrants who passed through Ellis Island into the United States. But countries change and adjust and are often much stronger and more varied as a result. "New blood'' can be an advantage.

Yet there are people who cannot understand the contribution which has been made to Bermuda by people who were not born here but came from a wide range of countries. The fact is that every Bermudian would be financially poorer and less enriched without the contributions made to Bermuda by people who chose Bermuda.