Larry Burchall believes Government must scrap term limits or risk seeing Bermudians eventually struggle to replace themselves.The political commentator made his claim during a discussion organised by Pembroke Parish Council last night, where he said international business, ‘with the full support of Government’ had been importing ‘foreigners into our bedrooms’ for the past 10 years.Calling term limits ‘unnecessary’, Mr Burchall said they were ‘damaging Bermuda’s ability to regenerate its economy’ and said they should be ‘done away with completely’.Linking the regeneration of the economy to that of the population, Mr Burchall pointed to figures that suggested the number of born Bermudians had only increased by 4,500 between 1991 and 2000.“Somewhere around the year 1990, born Bermudians started disappearing,” he said at the meeting at Pembroke Sunday School. “The only reason there are Bermudians to date is because of the granting of status.“With the full support of the Government they are importing foreigners into our bedrooms. We’ve been granting them status [and] that’s the only reason there are more Bermudians today than there were ten years ago,” he said.“Between 1991 and 2010 Bermuda’s population of Bermudians only went up by about 4,500 people. We had an economy that was growing by one percent a year and in 2011 we have 26,180, fewer people working.”While he said there was an element of truth to the fact that foreigners would ‘come here, stay here, and shut down jobs for Bermudians’, he also insisted that it should be put into context where the population of the Island was concerned.“There is a big element of truth in that but put into context. What is not growing? Us. There won’t be 55 or 60,000 Bermudians in the future. We’re going to have a the devil’s own job to keep the 51,000 Bermudians,” he said.“We are probably now in negative growth rates, in other words as time passes there will actually be fewer of us unless we grant status to foreigners. We are not replacing ourselves, therefore there will not be an increasing number of Bermudians by birth.”Even given all that, Mr Burchall doesn’t believe that a shortage of Bermudians workers is necessarily the problem. Rather a lack of skill sets is what is most troubling.“There’s no shortage, skill sets is the problem,” he said. “In the big picture, even though our children come back every year from college, they are not coming back in sufficient numbers to increase the number of Bermudians in the workplace.“They step off the plane, but for everyone coming down the ramp there’s another one going up the ramp so there’s no gain.”He also criticised Government for what he saw as an inconsistent approach to waiving term limits, and suggested that the rule was being broken 70 percent of the time anyway.“The Government has been waiving term limits in about 70 percent of all the cases,” he said. “They haven’t been issuing a blanket rule, they’ve been saying to seven out of every ten people who come to apply for an extension ‘yes, you can have an extension’.“So when a rule is broken 70 percent of the time is it really a rule? Why have it? In a world of choice, they [international business] have got wide choices. They could say ‘that looks like a problem, we’ll look somewhere else’,” he said.Progressive Labour Party candidate Walton Brown disagreed with Mr Burchall’s assessment of the situation and said it was imperative for Government to find the right balance.“In this country Bermudians should always come first, Bermuda is the only country where Bermudians should come first,” Mr Brown said. “We need a humanitarian work permit policy.“Its incorrect to say that we have a declining population. Between 2000 and 2010 there was a net increase in the resident population and yes the Bermuda birth rate may well be declining, but Bermuda has been a country that has grown since 1609 by having people come here.“We’ve always grown our population organically and through immigration policy and so to just focus on the birth rate is inappropriate. We have to focus on the resident population and the resident population has not gone down.”Also at the meeting were: Richard Winchell, the Association of Bermuda International Companies Executive Director; Shawn Cockwell, the One Bermuda Alliance MP; and Chris Furbert, Bermuda Industrial Union president.Mr Winchell said that removing the term limit policy would enable international business to retain staff, without ‘damaging the interests and aspirations of Bermudians’.Mr Crockwell meanwhile expressed the belief that current immigration controls would be sufficient if enforced properly by the Department of Immigration. He also pointed out that as a country, Bermuda was not pushing the next generation of workers into the areas where they would find most employment.“We’re not pushing our young people to become underwriters or in actuarial fields,” he said. “We have Bermudians going off and getting degrees in areas that are not marketable for the type of industry that we have in Bermuda and that’s a problem,” he said.Mr Furbert preferred to target his ire elsewhere, and focused on the small group of employers “who continue to think that they can fly under the radar” when it comes to manipulating the policy.“They [businesses] change the way the work permit application is written to basically tailor make it for a non-Bermudian and that creates a challenge,” he said. “Recognising that we don’t have enough Bermudians to fill 35,000 jobs, why do we have 3,000 Bermudians unemployed?“That’s the $64,000 question that needs to be answered and I believe its because of a small handful of employers who believe Bermudians should not be able to work in their workplace.“They keep saying they want Bermudians, I can tell you they still change the goalposts and rewrite the permit to make sure a qualified Bermudian cannot take the position. We’ve heard the stories.”