There seems clarity now to the intent of the immigration minister after a curt statement released yesterday by his ministry. To be concise, it appears as if the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration intends to work to frustrate or bar from schools children who have no official status to be in The Bahamas.

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Immigration Fred Mitchell announced last week that all non-Bahamian students will be required to have a student permit or a passport with a residency stamp when schools open in fall 2015. The requirement, he said, will also apply to children who are born in The Bahamas to foreign parents.

The truth of the matter is that there are thousands of children in this country who have no official status to be here, or whose parents have requested status from the highly inefficient Department of Immigration and have received no answer. Most of these children are of Haitian descent. By creating standards that require children to present permits before they enter school, or by creating a policy that makes them and their parents think they must, is unsavory and a violation of international norms.

While the government of The Bahamas has a responsibility to ensure that adults residing here have legal authorization to do so, it should not pursue the course, in policy or rhetoric, announced by Mitchell.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which The Bahamas is party, speaks in Article 2 to nation-states not discriminating against children based on where they come from: "States parties shall respect and ensure the rights set forth in the present convention to each child within their jurisdiction without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child's or his or her parent's or legal guardian's race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status."

Article 28 of the convention speaks to nation-states providing access to education to "all" children. It does not say that countries should frustrate or bar certain children based on their ethnic origins. The Bahamas has up to now worked not to specifically target the children of undocumented people with punitive measures. Immigration officers, for example, do not conduct raids at schools. And the Department of Education has educated all who register.

Mitchell's proposed policy shift, creating deterrents to children being educated, is an embrace of the policies of pariah nations - those countries that engage in behaviors toward the peoples in their borders that fall outside of accepted international norms.

When asked about the rights of children during a previous interview, Director of Education Lionel Sands said the Department of Education does not concern itself with the status of the children attending government schools or the status of their parents.

"The Bahamas is a party to many international conventions and one of those conventions (Convention on the Rights of the Child) stresses that any school age child in the country should be allowed to attend school until such time as they are either repatriated to their homeland or they return," he said. "That's the reason we have any number of children in our schools who are not indigenous children, because of that particular convention."

Sands was contacted for comment back in November following the implementation of the policy requiring all non-Bahamians to have passports of their nationalities and evidence that they have permission to live and work in The Bahamas.

We hope Prime Minister Perry Christie and his Cabinet do not share Mitchell's view. We hope they stand with Sands and the other moderates on this issue. If thousands of parents are unable to send their children to school due to this new policy, or do not do so out of fear, what are these children to do? Should they stay home and be illiterate? Should they beg?

If there comes a time when the parents of undocumented children have to be returned to their homelands then these children, if they have no status and no guardians, would have to return with their parents. While they are here, however, as decent people we should grant them access to education. Not doing so is xenophobic and mean-spirited and a violation of the international order we signed up to.

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