Dear Editor,
I wonder what prompted Joel Bhagwandin’s crafty and deceptive letter (SN, October 8), which claims to enlighten us about migration. When economists and demographers use the term “migration,” they do not refer to the temporary movement of people in and out of a country. Rather, they employ the term to denote a permanent movement. In his slick letter, JB gives the impression that migration refer to both the temporary and permanent movement of people outside and inside of the country, conflating and confusing the two (temporary and permanent).
From his first and second paragraphs, it is a clear that JB is talking about the permanent movement of Guyanese from their country to live in foreign ones. However, he does not think that out-migration is really an issue anymore. That for a simple reason: “Guyana’s high GDP growth rates,” which should be a sufficiently powerful centripetal force in and of itself to keep people in Guyana and to attract foreigners to live in Guyana.
Are people still migrating to live abroad in huge numbers? That’s the proposition he wanted to test. It’s a reasonable hypo-thesis but JB resorted to “airport” data, arrivals and departures at the two international airports. The Bureau of Statistic (2016: Compendium 1) tried this approach for 2007 to 2012 and found that a mere 1,960 more persons departed than arrived during these six years. The BoS could not accept that figure because it believed that permanent out-migration was higher, explaining that its estimate “suggests a strong pattern of underreporting” (page 18).
JB pulled the BoS trick on us. His data shows that here was only one year, 2015, when departures were less than arrivals. The years from 2016 to 2023 were years when arrivals exceeded departures. In fact, “there were positive net arrivals amounting to, cumulatively for that period, 88,027 or an average of 9,781 annually.” His explanation for the excess of departures over arrivals leaves much to be desired. He gave no indication about how many people left to live abroad permanently. Instead, he left the reader with the impression that more people are coming to live in Guyana permanently than Guyanese leaving to live abroad permanently.
To be best of my knowledge, the BoS does not publish data on in- and out-migration so that it does not know how many Guyanese leave the country to live aboard permanently in any given time period. If that’s the case, then how does one know if out-migration is impacting the country’s population? The only way to shine some light on this question is to resort to what is called “implied migration.” I use this method in “Essays. Guyana: Economics, Politics and Demo-graphy,” published in 2022, to estimate the size of the Guyanese Diaspora (Guyanese living abroad permanently) from 1960 to 2018. For those interested, see Chapter 19, pages 516-549.
How did I manage that feat? By using what I called “A Beautiful Identity,” which we may write this way: population change = natural increase minus net migration. Natural increase is the number of births less the number of deaths; net migration is the difference between people coming to live permanently in Guyana and those leaving to live permanently abroad. The “formula” is called an identity because the amount on the left-hand side always equals the amount on the right-hand side. Here’s an example: 6 = 4 + 2.
Since the identity has three amounts, if we know any two of these we can always find the third. For example, suppose we have 6 = 4 + x. Then x = 2 and no more or no less = 6 – 4. Annual data on population change (the left-hand side of the “beautiful identity”) exists as does data on natural increase. Hence, annual implied net migration is simply this: population change minus natural increase. Using this method, I estimate that 681,489 Guyanese left the country to live abroad permanently during the fifty-nine years from 1960 to 2018.
Like other people, migrants do not live forever. Hence, to arrive at the net stock of migrants living abroad it is necessary to adjust the gross stock for deaths. Once this is done, the net stock of Guyanese who are living abroad in 2018 is 628,550.
For the purposes of this response, I wanted to extend the analysis for the years 2019 to 2023. At least two annual data points are needed. The website of the BoS has annual population data for the years 1992 to 2021 but not data on natural population increase and net migration. For reasons unknown to me, data on births and deaths are no longer carried on the website. Consequently, estimating net migration of these years is not possible.
JB concluded his letter by pointing out: “More importantly, this analysis of the immigration data for the period 2015-2023, has empirically disproven the implicit notion that a large number Guyanese are migrating. The data evidently shows that the reality is the inverse of that notion, wherein thousands of persons are coming to and/or returning to Guyana annually, nearly 10,000 annually, more than those who are perhaps leaving the country permanently.” As we have shown, JB did not prove what he set out to prove. His conclusion is pure concoction, pure invention, pure fiction. Why? Because data on arrivals and departures cannot prove whether or not Guyanese are leaving to live permanently abroad; his dataset in inappropriate for that purpose he set out to prove. Further, the comparison is irrelevant if comforting: fewer than 10,000 Guyanese are leaving to live aboard permanently. That, while probable, is mere speculation for he has no basis to make such a claim.
In sum, JB posits a reasonable hypothesis but uses an inappropriate dataset to test it. Hence, his conclusion is wrong and misleading. A reasonable hypothesis, inappropriate data, subtle writing and confusion: that’s the formula to silence the lesser folks who might be thinking about the 2025 general elections.
Yours truly,
Ramesh Gampat