CARICOM and The Bahamas: a Member State With No Free Movement Law At All
The Bahamas is a member of the Caribbean Community and is outside its Single Market and Economy, and the proof is a three-section Act. The Caribbean Community Act, Chapter 17, is headed An Act to enable The Bahamas to fulfil certain obligations arising under the Treaty of Chaguaramas, and the obligations it fulfils are the juridical personality, immunities and privileges of the Community as an international organisation. It defines the Treaty as the one signed on 4 July 1973 at Chaguaramas, which The Bahamas acceded to in 1983 - not the Revised Treaty of 2001 that created the CSME and the skills certificate. There is no Caribbean Community (Movement of Skilled Nationals) Act in the Bahamian statute book: the published alphabetical list of principal legislation runs straight from Caribbean Community at Chapter 17 to Caribbean Development Bank at Chapter 266. Section 20 of the Immigration Act, which lists the people entitled to land, has no Caribbean category. And a citizen of Haiti, a CARICOM member state, needs a Bahamian visa to arrive at all. The Bahamas is not a party to the full free movement arrangement that opened on 1 October 2025 between Barbados, Belize, Dominica and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
At a glance
- Caribbean Community membership
- Yes, by accession in 1983
- CSME participation
- No
- Skills certificate regime
- Not implemented in Bahamian law
- Full free movement from 1 October 2025
- Not a party
The four parties are Barbados, Belize, Dominica and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
- Treaty given effect in Bahamian law
- The Treaty of Chaguaramas signed in 1973; for immunities and privileges only
- CARICOM member states whose citizens need a Bahamian visa
- Haiti
From the Department of Immigration's visa-required table, read against the list of CARICOM member states.
Requirements
- There is no regional-treaty route into The Bahamas
- A CARICOM national enters on the same terms as anyone else: leave to land under section 22, or a permit under section 30
- A CARICOM skills certificate issued by another member state has no effect in Bahamian law
In detail
The ninth answer to where the line is drawn
Eight countries covered here give five different answers to what a CARICOM skills certificate does. Saint Lucia and Grenada divide by which form the certificate is in; Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Vincent divide by which state issued it; Barbados divides by whether its Accreditation Council has verified it; Trinidad gives verification the effect of a period the Chief Immigration Officer chooses. The Bahamas gives a sixth answer, and it is the shortest: the certificate does nothing, because no Bahamian instrument mentions it. The difference is not one of degree. In the other seven, a skilled national arrives holding a document the receiving state's own law recognises. In The Bahamas the document has no addressee - section 20 does not list the holder among those entitled to land, section 22 does not treat the certificate as satisfying any of its conditions, and section 29 does not put the holder among the five classes who may work without a permit.
How we know, rather than assume
A negative claim of this kind is worth nothing unless it rests on a closed list someone published. Three were read. The Caribbean Community Act, Chapter 17, is three sections long and we read all of it; it incorporates no treaty into domestic law and addresses only immunities. The Table of Principal Legislation by Title groups every chapter of the revised edition under subject headings, and Title XVIII, Nationality, Immigration and Passports, contains exactly four chapters: Bahamas Nationality, Immigration, Passports and Aliens Restriction. The Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation runs from Caribbean Community at Chapter 17 straight to Caribbean Development Bank at Chapter 266. Both lists are published by the Law Reform and Revision Commission as part of the Supplementary Volume to the Revised Edition and both carry LRO 1/2017, which is the publisher's state of the law at 31 December 2016. Against the possibility of a post-2016 Act we checked the Commission's own index of principal legislation by year: the Acts amending the Immigration Act since 2016 are the six we read, and none of them concerns the Caribbean Community.
Haiti, and what a visa list says about a bloc
The clearest single proof that CARICOM membership carries no entry right into The Bahamas is on the Department of Immigration's own page. Its waiver list names most member states one by one - Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago - which is itself the point: they appear as individual countries, not as a bloc. Haiti, a member state since 2002, is in the other table, the one of countries whose citizens must obtain a Bahamian visa before travelling. A Community with free movement could not produce that list.
Country-level policy
Every citation on these pages goes to laws.bahamas.gov.bs, and the question of what that site is has a statutory answer. The Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023, in force since 1 May 2023, repealed and replaced the 1975 Act of the same name. Under it the Law Reform and Revision Commissioner maintains an electronic database of the existing revised edition with amendments incorporated, and that database, made available electronically through the medium of a national information structure, shall be deemed to be an official version of the law. The Attorney-General, not the Minister, now authorises pages into the edition by Law Revision Order and appoints the day a revised edition comes into operation; and under section 28 the Government Printer may, at the Commissioner's request and with the Attorney-General's approval, print a reprint of any Act with its amendments incorporated, which is deemed an authentic copy as at the date of printing. The practical consequences are three. The chapters are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher says it stood at 31 December 2016, so every amendment since sits in a separate Act. Pages inside one chapter can carry different Law Revision Orders, and some are still at the original service of 2001. And the site itself says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street - a disclaimer flatly narrower than the statute that deems the database official.
Exceptions by origin
No exceptions recorded
Nothing we have read treats any nationality differently for this topic. The rule above applies to everyone.
What the law says
«An Act to enable The Bahamas to fulfil certain»Known to be out of date. The pages this provision is printed on are marked [Original Service 2001] in the publisher's own footer, so they have not been reprinted since the original service of the 2000 Revised Edition; the publisher's claim that the database is in force at 31 December 2016 is what the cut-off records.
The title continues: obligations arising under the Treaty of Chaguaramas. The whole Act is three sections - short title, interpretation, and the status, immunities and privileges of the Community - and it does not give the Treaty the force of law, carry it as a Schedule, or mention the movement of persons.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«the Treaty signed on the 4th July,
1973 at Chaguaramas, Trinidad»Known to be out of date. The pages this provision is printed on are marked [Original Service 2001] in the publisher's own footer, so they have not been reprinted since the original service of the 2000 Revised Edition; the publisher's claim that the database is in force at 31 December 2016 is what the cut-off records.
The definition continues by naming the governments of Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago and recording that The Bahamas acceded by instrument dated 4 July 1983. The Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas of 2001, which established the Single Market and Economy and the regime of certificates of recognition of skills qualification, is not mentioned in this Act or anywhere else in the statute book we read.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«the Community shall be deemed an Organisation within the
meaning of the International Organisations (Immunities»Known to be out of date. The pages this provision is printed on are marked [Original Service 2001] in the publisher's own footer, so they have not been reprinted since the original service of the 2000 Revised Edition; the publisher's claim that the database is in force at 31 December 2016 is what the cut-off records.
The sentence continues: and Privileges) Act and any Order that may be made under section 3(2) of that Act may contain such provisions as are requisite for the purpose of enabling The Bahamas to carry out any of its obligations relating to the immunities and privileges to be enjoyed by the Community. This is the whole of the Act's operative content.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«Nationality, Immigration and Passports 190. Bahamas Nationality 191. Immigration 192. Passports 193. Aliens Restriction»The complete list of Chapters under the subject title that would contain a free movement statute. Four chapters, and none of them is one.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«17. Caribbean Community 266. Caribbean Development Bank»Two consecutive entries in the published alphabetical list of principal legislation. In Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent the corresponding list carries a skilled nationals Act between them.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«a person shall be entitled to land or embark in The
Bahamas and shall be permitted by any Immigration
Officer so to land or embark, if he satisfies the Immigration
Officer that he comes within any of the following
categories»Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
Six categories follow: citizens, permanent residents, accredited diplomats and representatives, persons in the service of the Government, persons the Board authorises an officer to treat as entitled, and the wife and children of the last two. None is a national of a Caribbean Community state.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
Practical notes
A CARICOM national coming to work in The Bahamas needs the same work permit, the same Labour Certificate and the same newspaper advertisement as anyone else, and pays the same fee for the occupation's scale.
The Bahamas is a party to CARICOM for other purposes - the Caribbean Court of Justice in its original jurisdiction, the Community's institutions - and none of that is in issue here. What is recorded is that no Bahamian instrument gives a Community national any right of entry, residence or work.
This is a negative claim bounded by what we read: the Caribbean Community Act Chapter 17 in full, Title XVIII of the Table of Principal Legislation by Title, the letter C of the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, Parts V and VI of the Immigration Act Chapter 191, the six Acts amending that Chapter since 2016, and the Department of Immigration's two visa lists. We did not read every chapter of the statute book.
- consolidatesCaribbean Community Act, Chapter 17 of the Statute Law of The Bahamas
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
Known to be out of date. The pages of this Chapter are marked [Original Service 2001] in the publisher's own footer, so they have not been reprinted since the original service of the 2000 Revised Edition. No amending Act appears against it in the publisher's index. The pages this provision is printed on are marked [Original Service 2001] in the publisher's own footer, so they have not been reprinted since the original service of the 2000 Revised Edition; the publisher's claim that the database is in force at 31 December 2016 is what the cut-off records.
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
- consolidatesTable of Principal Legislation by Title (Supplementary Volume to the Revised Edition)
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
- consolidatesAlphabetical List of Principal Legislation (Supplementary Volume to the Revised Edition)
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
- administersBefore Your Arrival
The Bahamas Department of Immigration
About this source
The department that administers the Immigration Act Chapter 191 and decides every permit and certificate under it. It publishes a page per status - permit to reside, resident spouse, resident belonger, permanent residence, home owner resident permit, short-term and annual work permits, re-entry permit, extension of stay - each setting out the documents it asks for, and it publishes the whole Schedule to the Immigration (Fees) Regulations as a readable web page called the Immigration Fee Scale. It is also the only publisher of the Bahamian visa position: a waiver list and a visa-required table, which exist nowhere in the Act or the Regulations.
Standing: Applies the rule
Cannot be cited for: It states practice, and its practice is not always the Act. It publishes a ten-year permanent residence requirement for citizenship that the Bahamas Nationality Act does not contain; nine permanent residence eligibility categories that sections 13 to 17A do not contain; a Labour Certificate and three consecutive days of newspaper advertising that no instrument requires; and an eligibility list for the Permit to Reside that recognises only students and dependants, where its own fee schedule prices a residence permit for any person. Its fee page is a copy of a Schedule that is amended by statutory instrument almost every year, and it drifts: at 6 October 2026 it carried the 2026 Scale 1 figure but still showed $20,000 for Schedule item 5D, raised to $25,000 from 1 July 2026, and $50 for item 5B, raised to $500. It prices a BH-1B Visa at $3,000 and a BH-4S Visa at $750, neither of which appears in any instrument or on any page it publishes. Its Before Your Arrival page contradicts itself: the United Arab Emirates is named both among the countries whose citizens are waived and in the table of countries that must obtain a visa first. It must never be cited for what the law requires - only for what the Department asks for and what it charges - and where it and an instrument disagree, the instrument governs.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
- consolidatesImmigration Act, Chapter 191 of the Statute Law of The Bahamas
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source