The Fruits of Disdain

May 19, 2009 Editorial

The David Thompson Government of Barbados, elected on a “Barbadian First” jobs platform has decided to “remove” illegal immigrants from other CARICOM countries, immigrants who reside in its territory.
This list does not include illegal immigrants from say, the US or Europe – just from fellow members of CARICOM.

Barbados, as a sovereign nation, is of course free to proceed on such a move but we wonder what it signals for our regional integration movement that Barbados had pioneered.
The Prime Minister did not deign to make public any survey on the numbers or breakdown of CARICOM illegals in his country or any study to show the deleterious effects that these immigrants have had, or might have, on Barbados.

He simply announced laconically “current levels of immigration were unacceptably high and posed economic and social challenges to the island”.
In contradistinction, T&T has a much higher number of illegals, including Barbadians, but has not taken the draconian measures adopted by Barbados. From anecdotal evidence while Barbadian illegals originate from many CARICOM jurisdictions, Guyanese and St Vincentians dominate their ranks.

Last year in our Editorial “Bajans’ Disdain for Guyanese”, in the wake of the murder of a Guyanese national, we asserted, “it is a fact that anti-Guyanese sentiments are on the rise in Barbados”. A documentary, “On the map” situated this antipathy within a context of the miserable conditions of migrants on the whole, in the island. The Thompson administration pandered to this sentiment in its campaign that catapulted it to power in January 2008. The PM had contemptuously dismissed these immigrants as originating from countries “used to under classes” and accustomed to “substandard conditions”.

He very quickly established a panel to make recommendations on the issue and the results ought not to be surprising to anyone. Illegals who have been residing in Barbados before January 1, 1998, have verified employment and fulfil various other stringent criteria may apply by December 1, for regularisation, which is not automatic.
June 1to December 1, 2009 is supposed to be an “amnesty” but already the dehumanisation of illegals has intensified; open season has been declared on them in public and anyone suspected or fingered for being illegal can be literally “rounded up” and kept in a holding pen before being shipped back to his or her homeland.

Most insidiously, since many Guyanese in Barbados are of Indian descent and can be easily distinguished from the average Barbadian, we have received and published reports of racial profiling that has resulted in the homes of Indo-Guyanese being raided indiscriminately at nights. We have seen these programmes in action before in the world – German Nazis who targeted Jews come to mind.
The Prime Minister of St Vincent, Ralph Gonsalves, has responded germanely: “It is sad to note that in the 21st Century…some political leaders, are stoking chauvinistic fires which are latent in our Caribbean societies…This outpouring of a malignant xenophobia… must be stopped, if not, CARICOM would shortly be rent asunder…”

As we have done before, we would remind the government of Barbados that it must not forget history – especially that of the country. In an expression that is common to our region, including Barbados, “Time longer than twine”. One of the reasons of the Barbados success in the present is that its citizens have been permitted to emigrate – mostly illegally in the last few decades to the US.

Apart from defusing a population explosion, these immigrants sent back huge volumes of remittances that were invested into the economy. Closer at home, as their opposition leader noted, more than half of Barbados’s exports are to fellow CARICOM members and a fifth of their tourists from those same countries. Would they be able to withstand a boycott from other Caricom members?

The Heads of Government of CARICOM will be meeting in T&T this coming weekend. We hope that Prime Minister Thompson will be informed in no uncertain terms by other leaders that the way he has gone about dealing with what could be a legitimate issue is not befitting a country that has been in the forefront of preaching regional unity.
Either we hang together or we hang separately.