The Deportee Dilemma

Sep 27, 2010 Editorial

In the newspaper business it is rather trite to point out that it is the unusual that usually makes the news: dog bites man – ho-hum; man bites dog – news!! After more than a decade of anguished complaints by Caribbean leaders about criminal deportees from the developed countries – mainly the US, Canada and the UK – one particularly gruesome crime by a deportee made the headlines across the USA.
The AP article screamed, “Caribbean crime wave linked to US deportations: – The crime was horrifying enough — a nightclub owner, hacked to death with a machete, was found buried in pieces. But what really outraged people was that the accused killer had been deported from the U.S. to his native Grenada as a convicted felon.”
President Jagdeo has been one of the Caribbean leaders that has been in the forefront of criticising the practice which began in earnest after the US passed legislation in 1996, to deport individuals that were either residents or illegals, convicted of offences ranging from murder to shoplifting as well as low-level drug infractions back to their country of origin.
The number of deportees from the US has been climbing steadily upwards since the program was initiated in 1996. Statistics released last year by their Department of Homeland Security revealed that the number of criminal deportees sent back to the Caribbean between the decade of 1999 and 2008 totalled 50,589 – that is an average of 5,000 annually.
Guyana’s average was 1,728, which if the circumstances were reversed, would be like the US having to absorb 840,000 convicts every year. Last year Minister Rohee revealed that in the decade 1996-2007, criminal deportees from all sources to Guyana averaged 245 annually. The Caribbean’s complaints are not hard to understand.
On one hand, the developed countries, with their magnificent infrastructure and institutions drain this underdeveloped region of most of its skilled manpower – doctors, nurses, etc – but have no compunction in dumping criminals here that in most instances were inducted into a life of crime by their culture.
To compound the irony, the criminals are only deported after they have served their sentences in US jails – that is, after they have graduated from some of the best criminal training institutions in the world.
While some studies have shown that just over half of the deportees may be simply individuals that have committed some violation or other of their immigration status, the remainder inevitably contain some hard-core criminal types of various stripes – especially connected to drug trafficking.
These criminals have introduced into formerly very peaceful, backwater societies, the mind boggling violent modus operandi that pervades the criminal fraternity of the US.
It is certainly not a coincidence that the upsurge in Caribbean deportees from the US since 1996 has been tracked by a corresponding rise in drug crimes in these countries. The US and the other developed countries are simply exporting their problems into countries with the least capabilities of dealing with them.
After direct complaints at the highest levels, first with Bush then Obama and with their second tier leaders such as Secretary of State Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, there has been some response in the last two years. But it has not really dealt with the structural contradictions of a country’s environment creating criminals and then dumping them into countries that are in no way responsible.
Last year the US assigned $3 million to fund a pilot program managed by the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration to help reintegrate deportees in Guyana, Haiti and the Bahamas. The Ministry of Home Affairs should announce to the nation, how the program has fared.
In the meantime, it would appear that the US does not take the Caribbean’s complaint seriously. In the AP’s report quoted above, it was revealed: “U.S. officials say privately that the deportations cannot be blamed for the increase in violent crime, but declined to discuss the issue on the record, saying the U.S. does not want to hurt relations with Caribbean governments with which it cooperates on other issues.”

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The Deportee Dilemma

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