Prime Minister David Thompson promised when he assumed office that he would established a Cabinet sub-committee to investigate the Immigration problem which was visibly evident in Barbados. In keeping with his promise he issued a Ministerial Statement last week which focused on a new policy to tackle the problem. The issue of immigration is one being battled all over the world, Barbados no exception. Since issuing the statement all hell has broken lose with the most pointed yet covert attack coming from Prime Minister of St. Vincent Ralph Gonzales who elected to issue his own Ministerial Statement in response.
Prime Minister David Thompson although a rookie Prime Minister is a seasoned politician, and we are confident that he will make the right moves to protect the borders of Barbados and by extension the well being of the society which Barbadians have laboured to build in a post independence era.
Prime Minister Patrick Manning had earlier requested a CARICOM Heads of Summit to discuss the global financial crisis but we
suspect that a lot of the time will be spent addressing the decision by the Barbados government to document immigrants. Already Prime Minister David Thompson can expect that Prime Minister Gonzalves et al will be frothing at the mouth come Sunday in Trinidad to attack the government of Barbados’ decision to arrest the large number of undocumented workers in Barbados. It was yesterday we read Secretary General Edwin Carrington of CARICOM suggesting that the matter will be discussed. He was at pains to point out that member countries in CARICOM had a right to make decisions with respect to sovereignty but he was concerned with how they do it. This we consider to be a most inappropriate comment even before this matter has been discussed given the obvious inference to Barbados.
For those who accuse Barbados of adopting an anti-CSME posture historical events disprove this notion. Was it not Barbados which the late Prime Minister Eugenia Charles turned to mobilize support to rescue Grenada when the New Jewel Movement imploded in 1983? Prime Minister Tom Adams responded without hesitation. What about the CARICOM Multilateral Clearing
Facility? This was an arrangement between Central Banks of the region to settle payments where the net surplus of one country could be used to offset a deficit it had with another country. Can anyone guess what happened? Barbados was left owed millions by Guyana and other countries. Not sure if the Barbados government has written the amount off. The point is Barbados remained faithful to the facility to the end while others jumped ship. Was there a furore when the OECS sub-region announced an alliance recently with Trinidad to establish a political and economic union? Wasn’t that a clear threat to the CSME movement? The current global economic crisis seems to have put that arrangement on ice for the moment.
The point is Barbados in our brief post-independence period has continued to demonstrate commitment to the ideals of CARICOM integration in the past and in the present.
Minister Maxine McClean when she had responsibility for immigration publicly acknowledged that her best estimate was that we had about thirty thousand Guyanese alone in Barbados. She indicated that the tracking system at the Immigration Department was poor and it had taken a lot of effort to determine the number of legal and illegal immigrants in Barbados.
Minister McClean’s admission is instructive because it came against a background of Mia Mottley’s refusal to address the issue when she had responsibility for Home Affairs when in government. Barbadians have always shown quiet concern at the large numbers of immigrants flowing into Barbados. BU can safely say it is what prompted us to blog about the open immigration policy of the previous government. At the same time Guyana Consul Norman Faria on several occasions when pointedly asked about the number of Guyanese immigrants who were flowing into Barbados commented to the effect that it was for the government to speak to that issue. The PEOPLE waited in vain.
For almost a decade the Owen Arthur government, the media and others in Barbados frustrated all attempts to broach concerns about the obvious open door immigration policy. Callers to the radio shows especially Voice of Barbados were unceremoniously censored, the Nation Newspaper published only soft stories about immigration. The fact that the Chief Editor Roxanne Gibbs at the Nation Newspaper is of Guyanese extraction speaks to credibility and she should be fired over how she has manipulated the Nation coverage of the immigration issue.
To our surprise the Mia Mottley led opposition has publicly opposed the government’s effort to beef up the immigration system to plug the big hole left by them. Not one BLP Member of Parliament has broken ranks on this issue. The PEOPLE will remember their actions for sure. Even if we used the argument by the BLP that if Barbados is to expand GDP it will need to increase labour capacity, how can that argument apply at this time when our economy has been forced to contract against the global economic crisis? We will not dignify David Commisong and his tribe with too much of a response. They have long ago lost credibility over the Ghanaian affair. Their actions to frustrate the government in that episode has probably resulted in a few Ghanaians still on the run in Barbados.
All across the Caribbean, Bahamas, Antigua, Trinidad, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and others have been deporting illegals but our regional journalist Rickey Singh has been silent. Barbados a tiny country attempts to secure its borders and protect the infrastructure which has made it attractive to the immigrants in the first instance and Singh and his cohorts Peter Wickhan, Annahlee Davis, David Commisong et al grab their foghorns. Funny thing, in all the countries mentioned above the opposition parties and key stakeholders have been mostly supportive of their respective governments actions. It was seen as a national issue and not one to play politics. We want to ask the Bajan Blogosphere to rally around Prime Minister as he fights the diabolical forces in our midst.
For BU the legacy of the media and the Barbados Labour Party in the last ten years will be how they created the monster which Prime Minister David Thompson has to wrestle back into the cage. To compound the problem they had a chance to make amends by supporting the government and PEOPLE of Barbados in the struggle but elected not to risk dismantling the legacy of former Prime Minister Owen Arthur.
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