That only 35.6 per cent of the registered voters in Monday’s election were born on the Dutch side (see Friday paper) could be viewed as reason for concern.
Some speak of an immigrant or transient society with insufficient native roots and a few have even used the term “genocide by substitution” to describe people from elsewhere becoming the majority.
However, there are several factors that should be weighed. Many voters originally from Aruba (1,632) and Curaçao (1,999) are in fact descendants of St. Maarten people who had moved there to work mainly at the oil refineries. Moreover, the three islands were all part of the same country called Netherlands Antilles until 1986 and the latter two up to 10-10-10.
Then there are 1,142 from the European part of the Kingdom who can’t rightly be considered “foreign” either, never mind Sabans and Statians. The same could be said –although not legally – about an unknown number of the 1,720 French voters listed as born in Guadeloupe who are really from the northern half of the island.
Voters from other well-represented places such as the Dominican Republic (1,456), St. Kitts and Nevis (935), Dominica (851), Haiti (577), India (458), the US (456), Anguilla (433), Guyana (365) and Jamaica (254) were also required to have at least five years of uninterrupted residence to pass a naturalisation exam and get the citizenship allowing them to go to the polls. To say they lack local ties would therefore not do them justice.
One can hardly dispute that “The Friendly Island” has a relatively large number of expatriates, but that is to a certain extent due to the nature of its tourism economy and the speed at which it developed, creating the need to import workers from abroad. However, there is little reason to doubt that most of those eligible to cast a ballot on February 26 very much care about what is – after all – now their community too.
