Dear Editor,
Reference is made to Dr. Ramesh Gampat’s letter in the October 9th edition of the Stabroek News captioned, “data on arrivals and departures cannot prove whether or not Guyanese are leaving permanently abroad”. Dr. Gampat wrote, “I wonder what prompted Joel Bhagwandin’s crafty and deceptive letter, which claims to enlighten us about migration.” Dr. Gampat was referring to part I of my essay about “migration”, framed within the context of, “to what extent are Guyanese migrating currently, compared to the level of mass migration in the 1980s and 1990s”. By the time this response hits the media, part II was already published in sections of the media, thus, I need not regurgitate the contents of part II. However, I would like to address Dr. Gampat’s argument on the subject, especially since he did not have the benefit of part II to consider in his response, and more so, whether his response would have been warranted.
In part I, it was explained that to reasonably ascertain whether or not the level of migration occurring in the “current situational context” of the country is higher or lower than the level of mass migration that occurred in the 1980s-90s, an answer can be extrapolated from the arrivals and departures dataset for the two international airports. The difference between these two numbers (arrivals and departures) is equal to the net arrival or net departure rate. It is important to highlight that I never said that this is equal to the net migration rate. The net migration rate is a different metric and concept altogether, but in the absence of the net migration rate dataset, the net arrival/departure metric was used to extrapolate.
Of note, extrapolation does not necessarily lead to a concretized empirically based conclusion owing to the limitations of this technique. This is how extrapolatory technique works in research and analysis. It is a technique employed when there is limited and/or the absence of precise and more granular dataset (s) needed for research and analysis purposes. Simply put, it is a technique using “known data” to understand, ascertain or predict the “unknown” data. Therefore, by employing this technique and acknowledging its limitations, the findings derived therefrom would always be subject to debate and varying interpretations, which is completely understood and perfectly in order.
With that in mind, Dr. Gampat asserted that the net arrivals dataset was inappropriate to derive the conclusion I arrived at. Yet, interestingly, Dr. Gampat may have contradicted one of his own, old academic work on the very subject of migration. In his self-published book titled “Essays, Guyana: Economics, Politics and Demography”, he utilized the same metric to make the same conclusion, but he did so incorrectly, in that, he conflated the two concepts. On page 531 of the said book, he presented the arrival and departure data from the two international airports for the period 2000-2018. He then subtracted the arrival data from the departure data, of which the result he referred to as the net migration rate for Guyana. But this was incorrect. The net migration rate is not the difference between arrivals and departures, rather it is derived from the difference between the total number of emigrants and immigrants. Further, the only credible and authoritative database that contains this data is the World Bank/ United Nations’ net migration rates.
Worthy of note, in part II, I was able to locate the World Bank’s net migration rates’ database, which showed that in the case of Guyana, over the period 1966-2023, the net migration rate observed in 2023, was six times lower than in the 1980s-90s period. This means that the net migration rate has been declining over the years, which is a positive signal for the country.
Sincerely,
Joel Bhagwandin
