In December last year the opposition asked in Parliament that the Minister of Home Affairs give a breakdown of the number of Venezuelan migrants in each region. His response was that there were 1,348 in Region Nine; 10,671 in Region One; 3,255 in Region Two; 1,114 in Region Three; 1,215 in Region Four; 2,099 in Region Seven; and 80 in Region Eight. Minister Robeson Benn went on to say that no data had been recorded for Region Ten as Venezuelans didn’t live there.
While there has been no recent update on the figures what can be said is that in the intervening ten months Venezuelan migrants have moved into Linden, and as we reported last week are living there in squalid conditions. Some residents have expressed their disquiet as the immigrants have set up makeshift camps and are clearly in need of help.
There are also safety issues involved one resident telling this newspaper, “It’s not safe; remember these people are hungry, they are desperate … We’ve had a few break-ins in the past two months, which is unusual for this area. Since they came, it started happening, and its only foodstuff that’s missing.” Another told us, “People are uncomfortable because anyone with face tattoos is thought to represent or have ties to criminal elements … Whether this is true or not, the silence from the government only fuels our fears. We see Venezuelans everywhere, and no one seems to be doing anything about it.”
Some of the Venezuelans have found work in the local sawmills where they have constructed makeshift living quarters. One woman who resides at one of the sawmills told us that everything was “okay” with them, and that they worked hard. Not everyone is quite so tolerant, however, since we were given to understand that the sawmills used to hire local people, but they were now employing Venezuelans who would often work for lower wages. “Local workers are being displaced because they can’t compete with the lower wages,” one resident said.
The Venezuelans themselves, of course, are in a dire situation just doing the best they can to survive in a strange country which is not Spanish-speaking. The challenge of communicating with the locals just aggravates their situation. Local people are not unsympathetic to their difficulties, but pointed out that no one, such as government social workers, was helping the migrants, and that their children were not enrolled in school. “We already don’t have things in place to deal with our current number of residents,” said one.
And this is the problem. The local government lacks the resources both human and material to take on the great needs of the Venezuelans, and the government did not even seem to know they were there. Mayor Sharma Solomon acknowledged that “we can’t even take care of what’s going on here, much less with new people … what is going to make things worse is that we now have people coming into the region vying for the resources that we ourselves are trying to make do with.”
After this newspaper contacted Minister of Foreign Affairs Hugh Todd about the situation in Linden, he undertook to take action in conjunction with the local authorities. Exactly what measures he has authorised or discussions he has had, if any, in relation to the issue have not yet been made public.
He is the chair of a Multi-Agency Coordinating Committee assigned to address the influx of migrants from Venezuela, and the last time it met was on March 8th this year. Various agencies are committed to combining resources to provide services for the most vulnerable in areas such as healthcare, education, labour, sanitation, shelter, food and clothing. At that time the Minister had urged the Committee to organise an outreach activity in Region One, which has the largest number of Venezuelan migrants for the obvious reason it is so close to the western border.
If there has been any outreach since then it has not come to public notice. In any case, there does not appear to be any mechanism currently in place for ongoing monitoring of the migrant situation, or if there is, again, it has been operating under the radar. At the very least there should be some department in the bureaucracy not necessarily at Takuba Lodge to which local authorities can report if new migrant communities appear in their area, as in the case of Linden, or where totals have increased in regions where there are already substantial numbers. There are too sometimes group movements into this country needing specialised attention, such as the case of the Warraus in Region One.
Guyana is too small a country population-wise and its bureaucratic structures are too limited and imperfect to be able to cope easily with a large influx of migrants. In particular, local authorities are in no position to address the arrival of a significant number of Venezuelans into their communities; that is something which only the central government can take on, and even it will often need international assistance.
Where that is concerned, earlier this year Minister Todd informed Parliament that the administration had had assistance from many Common-wealth delegations. There was the example two years ago of the Canadians in Region Seven, for example, who were behind a project to provide training and support to migrants and local residents to improve their socio-economic situation.
In another example, a unit set up in the Ministry of Education for migrant support collaborated with various UN agencies such as Unicef, Unesco and the High Commissioner for Refugees. Most recently this year on September 26 representatives from the International Organisation for Migration and the ILO met with Minister of Labour Joseph Hamilton to discuss the urgent need for support systems for Venezuelan migrants. The Minister, it was reported, committed the government to focusing on training, development and integration.
As an aside, it might be noted that the matter of integration has been raised as well by Minister Todd and his Ministry more than once, when they have stated that the long-term aim is to integrate the migrants into Guyanese society. This has been understandably challenged by the opposition on the grounds that in this particular instance the migrants are coming from a country which claims two-thirds of our land, and where they have been taught in school and indoctrinated as adults that Essequibo was stolen from Venezuela.
The opposition has a point. The government has a duty to meet the needs of the Venezuelans on humanitarian grounds and under international law, but not to harbour an objective in the longer term to integrate them. They are, in any case, for the most part economic migrants, who would return if conditions changed in their homeland. Integration, if it is desirable in the future, can wait the evolution of events; it should not be an objective for the present time.
But to return to numbers: As things stand at present the public does not know how many Venezuelans are in the country, and probably the government is not clear on the matter either since it did not know about the Linden migrants, even though many of them have been there since June-July, and some of them before that. The last time figures were supplied at the end of last year the estimates for the overall number of migrants was around 40,000, comprising Venezuelan nationals, Guyanese Venezuelans who had lived in the neighbouring country for several decades, as well as other nationals who had been living there.
This did not correspond to Immigration records which provided a figure of 20,000, but this was because a distinction had been made between those who had been born in Guyana but had lived in Venezuela for a long time and those who had not been born here.
Clearly the figures require updating, but in addition to that the government needs to know about the movement of migrants and which of them might be in urgent need of assistance, or are placing pressure on a local community. Only local authorities can supply that information, and while they probably can’t be relied on to provide accurate statistics, they can give information about new migrants or the challenging conditions those and/or existing ones face.
It is worth repeating that there should be some clearly identified office to which local authorities can report if there are problems with migrants, or if there is an influx of newcomers. They will not be in a position to help without central government assistance, but they can provide basic data to the central authorities so these can then investigate and take appropriate action.