Migrant limbo

IT’S NOT a good time to be a migrant.

All over the world, politics has been poisoned. Foreigners are being blamed for unemployment, for crime, for poor healthcare, for everything.

Of course, xenophobia has always existed.

But America’s choice to re-elect Donald Trump on November 5 has added a veneer of legitimacy to the dog whistle of “the other”; the idea that the most marginal groups are responsible for the most massive problems.

Venezuelans here have long felt this.

Still, on November 6, they woke to find the world had become a different place and, as a result, TT a different country.

To wit: Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s latest contribution to immigration “policy.”

On November 26, the former PM issued the following threat: “If the Venezuelan migrant community do not get their act in order and desist from engaging in criminal conduct, begin assisting the TTPS in identifying Venezuelan criminals and integrate peacefully into our society, my incoming government will take aggressive action against all illegal Venezuelan migrants and deport every one of them to their homeland by any means necessary.”

Referring to a pensioner’s murder, but without providing details or saying how nationalities and legal statuses could have been ascertained, the senior counsel further asserted, “Every day for the last year, there were reports of violent crimes being committed by illegal Venezuelan migrants against our citizens.”

It was her version of the Republican Party’s weaponisation of the case of Laken Riley.

And it resembled Mr Trump’s “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” claim, in which a burden was placed on others to disprove a gross generalisation.

Whatever the statistics say, it is against reason and humanity to advance a position in which Peter pays for Paul and Paul pays for all; to ignore the many Venezuelans who have themselves been murdered or trafficked in these shores; and to sidestep the sometimes fatal impact of deportations and interdictions at sea, in which even babies have died.

“By any means necessary” – an echo of Nicholas Maduro’s Essequibo referendum language – is not a phrase a democratic leader should warm to, either.

It is completely rich to vilify Spanish-speaking people for not “assisting” the police when not even locals feel safe doing so while police officers charged with misconduct daily walk free.

Will a UNC administration deport nationals too?

As for her message to “the Venezuelan migrant community,” does Ms Persad-Bissessar, 72, here also refer to those who came before the year 2019, over the centuries bringing with them things like Christmas-time parang and pastelles?

Ironically, many Venezuelans who have fled Nicolas Maduro want to go home.

However, if Ms Persad-Bissessar wishes to send them packing unceremoniously, she must also accept the consequences when Mr Trump does the same to our nationals in the US.

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