By Horace Palacio:
Walk into almost any resort from San Pedro to Placencia and study the building like an economist.
On the ground floor, Belizeans everywhere. Carrying the trays. Cleaning the rooms. Guarding the gate. Driving the shuttle. Smiling the smile that tourism brochures sell.
Now take the stairs. The general manager, the accountant, the marketing director, the dive operation, the real estate office next door. Listen to the accents. Increasingly, the upstairs of the Belizean economy speaks with a foreign voice, while the ground floor speaks Kriol.
Belizeans have noticed. The resentment is real, it is growing, and today I want to handle it honestly, because this subject is usually treated with either silence or gasoline, and it deserves neither. It deserves the truth, which has two halves.
Start with what the law already says, because most Belizeans have never been told. On paper, this country protects its workers fiercely. Before any employer can hire a foreigner, the law requires them to prove that no qualified Belizean is available, including evidence that the position was advertised locally at least three times without success. The permit costs thousands yearly, ties the foreigner to one job with one employer, and must be renewed. On paper, every expat upstairs is standing there only because no Belizean could be found.
On paper.
Now the first half of the truth, the half that demands enforcement. Everyone in this economy knows the theatre. The advertisement written so narrowly no local could qualify. The three ads run quietly in the wrong places, box ticked, search performed, permit granted. Connections greasing what scrutiny should be guarding. Where that theatre plays, a Belizean is being lawfully robbed with paperwork, and the fix is the same medicine this column prescribes for everything, sunlight. Here is a question you cannot easily answer today. How many work permits did Belize issue last year, for which job titles, in which industries? You cannot find out. That opacity is not an accident, it is a shelter. So, demand one, publish the register. Every year, every permit, every job title, every sector, on a public page. Let the country see exactly which jobs are going over our heads, and let every fake local search be performed in daylight, where fakery gets expensive.
But now the second half of the truth, and this is the half that stings, because it points the finger back at us.
Sometimes the advertisement runs honestly. Three times, in the right places, in good faith. And no qualified Belizean applies. Not because Belizeans are less capable, never that, but because the job requires hospitality management systems, or dive instructor certification, or digital marketing, or hotel accounting, or IT infrastructure, and somewhere along the line, nobody built the Belizean who holds those papers. The employer is not lying. The pipeline is empty.
And here is the reframe that should change how this whole country sees the issue. That work permit register I just demanded, whatever its length, is secretly the most honest education report card Belize possesses. Every single permit on it names, in black and white, a skill this nation needed and failed to grow in its own children. Read the register as a curriculum written in our failures. It does not say foreigners are taking jobs. It says, line by line, here is exactly what your schools are not producing.
Because let us audit the pipeline without flinching. Our headline unemployment sits near two percent, astonishingly low, which tells you the fight was never about jobs in general. Belizeans are working. The fight is about which jobs. And the ladder to the upstairs jobs is broken at a specific rung. We have opened the schoolhouse doors wider than ever, and credit where due, free secondary education now reaches 95 percent of government secondary students, a genuine achievement this column has praised. But a secondary certificate gets a Belizean to the front door of the hotel, not to the manager’s office. The rung between the diploma and the profession, the technical certification, the trade papers, the specialized degree, the industry credential, that rung is where our system goes thin, and it is precisely the rung the expat arrives already holding. I documented it in the BPO fight, a national upskilling program that began with fifty trainees in an industry of eighteen thousand. We are not losing the upstairs jobs at the interview. We are losing them years earlier, in classrooms that certify attendance and not capability, in a system still teaching for a century that has ended.
So here is the plan, and notice it never once requires hating a foreigner.
One, publish the register, as I said, and enforce the local search honestly, real advertisements, real review, real consequences for theatre.
Two, attach an understudy clause to every skilled permit. This is standard practice in serious countries. If a business genuinely cannot find a Belizean accountant or dive master or hotel manager, fine, hire abroad, and simultaneously commit, in the permit itself, to training a named Belizean understudy, with renewal of the permit tied to demonstrated progress. Every expat upstairs becomes a teacher whose graduation gift to Belize is his own replacement. The foreigner stops being a ceiling and becomes a ladder.
Three, aim the education system directly at the register. If the permits say we import accountants, hospitality managers, IT technicians and certified instructors, then those, precisely those, become the scholarship priorities, the ITVET programs, the University of Belize offerings, the employer partnerships. Stop training generically and start training against the actual list of what we import. And knock down the cost wall, because the certifications that unlock the upstairs must not be priced like luxuries.
Four, and this one belongs to us, the mirror. When the course opens, fill it. When the certification is offered, finish it. This column has said it before and will keep saying it, nobody cares about our reasons, and the upstairs job will not wait while we explain. The day the training exists and the seats sit empty, the argument moves out of government’s hands and into ours.
Let me close by protecting this argument from the poison that usually kills it. The foreign builder who arrives, invests, and creates jobs for Belizeans remains welcome through the front gate, I wrote that column and I stand on it. The Mennonite farms feed us, the immigrant shopkeepers built our towns. And even the expat employee upstairs is rarely a villain, he simply applied for a job and won it. The failure was never the man who climbed the stairs.
The failure is the country that never built the staircase for its own.
So do not burn the bridge the expat walked across, Belize. Build the school that makes the bridge unnecessary. The goal was never fewer foreigners by decree.
It is more ready Belizeans by design, until the day the manager’s office, the dive shop, and the accountant’s desk are ours, not because we banned the competition.
Because we beat it.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
The post The upstairs jobs, why expats keep winning them and how Belizeans take them back appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Horace Palacio: Walk into almost any resort from San Pedro to Placencia and study the building like an economist. On the ground floor, Belizeans everywhere. Carrying the trays. Cleaning the rooms. Guarding the gate. Driving the shuttle. Smiling the smile that tourism brochures sell. Now take the stairs. The general manager, the accountant, the
The post The upstairs jobs, why expats keep winning them and how Belizeans take them back appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
