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Pinoy Abroad

Racist graffiti in Bermuda tell Pinoys to move out


Residents in Bermuda in the North Atlantic Ocean are under discriminative fire after crude and derogatory messages were found scrawled across public places earlier this month. Hamilton Mayor Charles Gosling was “very disturbed" when he found out about the anti-Filipino graffiti throughout the country’s capital, according to a report by the Royal Gazette, Bermuda’s news agency. “I really think it’s a national issue," Gosling said. “Obviously as a citizen of the island, I am very disturbed." Some of the messages from the graffiti read: “Indies and Filipinos get out," “No cheap labor," and “Get out, cheap labor."

Photo taken by Glenn Tucker of The Royal Gazette in Bermuda show some graffiti telling Filipinos to get out of Bermuda.
The newspaper’s reporter Conor Doyle and photographer Glenn Tucker wrote stories and took photos of these graffiti. It was found everywhere: at a bus stop near a grocery store, near a substation, and near the railway in an area called Paget, where a number of Filipinos reside. Dale Bulter, a member of the Bermudan parliament who’s married to a Filipina, thinks these graffiti are uncalled for. “My personal involvement with the Filipinos is that they bend over backwards to respect Bermuda’s laws, and when they are not sure they will ask. Their main interest is to provide the service they were hired for," Butler said. The former cabinet minister said he thought anti-Filipino feeling in Bermuda arose partly from their growing population and the perception that Filipinos were succeeding at the expense of Bermudans. Lisa Lister of Bermuda’s Human Rights Commission was quoted by The Royal Gazette as saying that: “It is illegal to display, publish or post any discriminatory sign, symbol or notice against any person or persons based on the grounds as set out in Section 2(2) of the Human Rights Act, 1981, which includes a person’s race, place of origin, color, or ethnic or national origins". Filipino groups in the island — Association of Filipinos in Bermuda and The Club 2000 — think the graffiti are likely the work of one culprit. “In most cases like this it is a disgruntled individual who has asked out a Filipino worker and been turned down, because she is not interested in a relationship," the groups said. An estimated 1,145 Filipinos are in Bermuda, including some 1,044 temporary migrant workers, according to 2009 stock estimates of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas. The incident is not the first time Filipinos took a hit from the people of Bermuda. In April 2010, Bermuda immigration minister David Burch issued new visa requirements for citizens of Panama, Dominican Republic, and the Philippines as a measure to prevent “sham marriages." “When Bermudan men arrive at the L.F. Wade International Airport to collect their spouses, often they cannot communicate with them as they do not speak each others’ respective language," Burch was quoted in a report in Barrio Siete, a website for Filipino immigrants. — OFW Journalism Consortium
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