Even as reports increase about Guyanese being sent home from Barbados as part of that island’s efforts to clamp down on undocumented Caricom nationals, there has been no report of “earth shattering” numbers returning home.
In a brief telephone interview with Stabroek News yesterday, Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee said had there been an unusual number of persons coming back, he would have been alerted to this by the relevant authorities.
Rohee said there may be a constant trickle of persons returning from the island.
Several persons with whom this newspaper spoke in Barbados during a visit there and two persons who were willing to recount their experiences of being apprehended by immigration authorities said raids of their homes at very early morning hours resulted in their arrests.
Despite media reports about these experiences, Caricom Secretary-General Edwin Carrington at a media clinic in preparation for the 30th Heads of Government Meeting to be held here from July 2 to 5, told reporters that there was no confirmed information that the raids were indeed occurring.
When pressed by reporters on the issue, he said the last word on the matter was the assurance which Barbados Prime Minister David Thompson gave to President Bharrat Jagdeo that he had not heard of any raids being carried out on the homes of Guyanese.
Meanwhile, Caricom has not yet made mention of putting any mechanism in place for persons with such experiences to report to staff there.
In the meantime, Thompson has been quoted in Barbados media reports as saying that the reaction by some Caribbean governments to his administration’s new immigration policy was “hurting the regional integration process more than the policy itself”.
The Caribbean Media Corporation quoted him as saying on Wednesday last: “There seems to be a mad rush now for everybody to say something new. I have announced a domestic immigration policy that is not a matter for other Caribbean prime ministers to comment on.”
President Jagdeo and St Vincent Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves are the only two regional leaders who have since expressed concern about the new policy which is bound to hurt their countrymen the most.
Thompson has argued that the immigration matter was one his country had a right to pursue.
“It is a sovereign matter which our Parliament and our policy directives base the objectives on,” he said. “Therefore, to have a scenario where everybody is seeking to say something seems to me to be doing more to damage the objectives of Caricom than anything else,” reports also quoted him as saying.