The island can do more to attract Bermudian emigrants back home but needs to understand why they are leaving in the first place, according to an Opposition senator.

Dwayne Robinson said that Bermuda was facing a “population crisis” of declining numbers but research and other data-collecting methods could help arrest the problem.

Mr Robinson pointed to the UK’s 2021 census, which showed that more than 5,880 residents in England had been born in Bermuda.

During yesterday’s sitting of the Upper House, Mr Robinson said: “That is something that should trigger us to want to do more robust research and polling of our people who are leaving and those who are at risk of leaving.

“For us to say we have an 8,000 hole in our working population and we aren’t really polling who is leaving, that 8,000 number could balloon if let’s say another 2,000 Bermudians move away in the next two years.

“I think we need to be more robust in our tracking of Bermudians who are departing and see if we can get some communication and more connection with the diaspora.

“The more data we can collect on our people who are overseas and working with jurisdictions to see how many Bermudians are in Canada, are in the UK, are in America, we can cater our repatriation efforts to them.

“We don’t really know why they left. This is an issue that is talked about frequently in the community, but we don’t really have the specifics as to why people are moving away — we’re assuming.

“It would help if we knew how many of our people are overseas and what percentage of them are students, what percentage of them are retirees, and that would help our repatriation efforts. We could be targeting students with repatriation efforts and job placement efforts to bring them back after they’ve finished their degrees.”

Mr Robinson praised the Government for finally acknowledging that the island needed to boost its population significantly in the next five years.

He also said that he did not want to turn the issue into a political football.

He said: “We have a very serious population crisis and it’s not something that has happened overnight. It’s not laid at the feet of the particular administration right now, it’s something that has tracked back and been progressing for a long time.

“I think it needs to stay at the forefront of our minds because it affects everything from entrepreneurship to the local economy.

“To me, this transcends politics or any particular party, it’s the future of our island, the future of our children.

“If we continue to politicise it and dig our heels in watch this problem persist, I believe we may reach a point, as the Minister of the Economy and Labour has already stated, that is unsustainable.

“Government is attempting to do a lot of the heavy lifting but it’s not going to benefit the island if we’re not working towards a goal that is backed by numbers and things that actually exist.

“It’s just little things that the Government could be doing to not only look to reform immigration to bring other people here but also focus on emigration so that we know where our people are and where we can draw from.

“Right now when they go away, they rarely have any connection to Bermuda.

“To the Government’s credit, they have accepted that we have a population crisis, but there’s no way we can address that if we aren’t even sure how many people are leaving.”