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Nobody knows how Government's six-year work permit limit will work out.

Nobody knew when the policy was concocted seven years ago, nobody new when it came into effect last year, and nobody knows now.

Nobody's tried this kind of thing in Bermuda before. Nobody even knows how to measure its success or failure. Nobody is even particularly unified on exactly what its objectives are.

So the man who oversees the experiment, Home Affairs Minister Lt. Col. David Burch, is making a colossal mistake by dismissing critics in recent days.

When he says the six year policy is "here to stay", and that critics are disrespectful, it suggests he's not seriously monitoring this experiment to see how it's going. He has reached his conclusion already: The policy is good, and those who see evidence to the contrary are wasting his time.

Obviously the Government believed the six-year limit on work permits was a good idea, or they wouldn't have implemented it in the first place.

The official and only publicly stated objective of the policy is to avoid the problem of "long-term residents" - non-Bermudians who lived so long here on perpetually renewed work permits that they and their offspring had nowhere else to call home.

But there is another, larger, objective that was never stated in the policy documents. It is meant to increase Bermudian job opportunities, by cycling foreigners in and out more quickly.

This creates more frequent vacancies. It gives non-Bermudians fewer years to accumulate on-the-job experience that can keep a Bermudian job applicant out in the cold. And, more generally, it makes it a lot less convenient to hire foreigners over locals.

So has this policy been successful enough to decide that it's "here to stay"?

Nobody's been measuring, so how do we know?

Yet there are some big obvious reasons for the Government to be cautious, to measure the results of its actions as impartially it can, and to listen openly to as many opinions as it can muster.

For one, Bermuda completely depends on foreign workers, especially in our largest industries of international business. International businesses are foreign-owned and mobile.

For another, international businesses are owned by foreigners. They don't have huge loyalties to Bermuda. They can pick up and leave if it's a too much trouble to do business here.

What's more, longer-term employees are typically the ones who a company values the most, and the ones who know Bermuda and its people best.

And the six-year policy necessarily involves replacing experienced employees with less experienced ones.

These aren't frivolous fears. They are logical concerns that the results of this policy might not be what the Government intended.

The results of the six-year policy were never going to be clear cut, at any rate, because the policy is an attempt to change human behaviour - to change to change the way foreign workers look at their prospects in Bermuda, the way companies view their employees, and the way Bermudians view non-Bermudians.

And what is more unpredictable than the way humans feel?

Col. Burch doesn't need to agree with any of the many people complaining about the six-year policy.

He's perfectly entitled to believe in it as strongly as he wants to.

But he owes it to the country to take the critics seriously, to monitor the effects that the six-year policy is having, and to make changes if the bad effects outweigh the good.

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