Studying in The Bahamas: the Same Permit as Everyone Else, at a Tenth of the Price

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

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

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 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