These days, much more than during any other period in our post-independence history, there is, with good reason, a deliberate focus on the role which Guyanese in the diaspora can play in the country’s development. It is not as if this issue has not ever arisen before, but it had always seemed to be part of a standard diet of political jargon about the role of Guyanese in the diaspora which had its origins in rhetoric rather than realism. Frankly, no government had ever created a well thought out administrative infrastructure designed to actively encourage and facilitate re-migrants, so that those who returned home came because they had lived out their younger years somewhere in North America or Europe and had done sufficiently materially well (or not done well, as the case may be) to be able live the rest of their lives in better than bearable circumstances in Guyana.
We had always sold re-migration as a product of nostalgia. The problem was that among Guyanese