Immigrants

“An immigrant is a person who has come to a country that is not their own in order to live there permanently” – Cambridge Dictionary

In essence immigration is the movement of people from one country to another. The people who move to a new country are called immigrants and historically have faced a number of challenges when settling into a new home.

“No one leaves home unless home is in the mouth of a shark” – Warsan Shire (British writer and poet born in Kenya of Somalis parents)

Sometimes however, “home” ceases being home and other pastures seem greener.  For whatever reasons, immigrants are just ordinary, average people and, like all others, include the “good”, the “bad” and the “ugly” with the good being the silent majority and the radical, fanatics or “rotten apples” a tiny minority.  Unfortunately, the more civilised we have become the less able our societies seem to be able to deal with those “rotten apples”. In less civilised societies those who cannot conform to that society’s norms, rules and regulations must be harshly dealt with for the sake of the survival of the “whole”.

The “bleeding hearts” and their parasites in our modern societies have, for all intents and purposes, granted “rights” to people who have forfeited those “rights”.  In doing so, they take away the rights of the good citizens, like the right to peace, security, lack of fear, et al.

It is in this context, that the problems with immigrants to any country can escalate unexpectedly.  Such immigrants have “rights” but with those “rights” come responsibilities, which are especially significant for a guest in other peoples’ country.  In the same way that it is unacceptable to be a guest in another’s house, yet still want to move around their furniture.  As such, an immigrant continues to be a guest until they become like their host and are said to have been assimilated.  The vast majority of immigrants achieve this status.  The problem is the “rotten apples” that don’t.

The statistics show, for example, that by 1980, 88 per cent of the West Indian “Windrush” immigrants to the United Kingdom (UK) had been documented.  It was the remaining 12 per cent who got caught up in the illegal immigrant rush that have been used by some with “axes to grind” to create a misleading furore.  I have also seen a highly skilled and talented Barbadian being “put through the hoops” to prove that he could speak English, although he possessed certificates from Oxford and Cambridge in English Language and English Literature, in order to get his UK papers.  At the same time, others, living in an enclave that most English residents are afraid to enter, cannot speak English after more than 20 years in the UK.

Problems with a minority of immigrants to Europe and the UK are creating a widespread “groundswell” of suppressed anger in their communities, which is building, because those who need to be dealing with those “rotten apples” have failed to do so.   When you suppress anger like that, it becomes an explosion waiting to happen, as we have already seen.  At the same time, it is pointless to refer to the non-violent approaches of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King.  Such a non-violent approach can only be successful when there is somebody listening.  The liberal/socialist authorities in Europe and the UK are not listening to their people and it is convenient, facile, misleading and moronic to brand those who are expressing their anger in frustration as “far right”.

Unless those immigrants to Europe and the UK who are not conforming to their host society’s norms are dealt with the situation will deteriorate further and could even lead to civil war in which all immigrants, including the good ones, are likely to suffer.  It is these immigrant problems that relate with our situation in Barbados.

“Barbados is sitting on an aging time bomb” – Hon Mia Mottley (Prime Minister of Barbados)

“An aging population refers to a phenomenon in which the median age of the population in a region or country rises significantly when compared to the total population. This is caused by a declining birth rate or rising life expectancy”

“Better health, increased child survival and lower fertility all mean that the global population is no longer young for the first time in history. The aging population is growing much faster than the total population in almost all regions around the world. Aging is seen as a triumph of development as it indicates the presence of medical advances and better health care, sanitation, education, nutrition and economic well-being. There are, however, challenges at the individual, family and societal levels relating to a rising aging population although these can be addressed with the right policies in place” – www:reference.com

Unfortunately, it seems that in Barbados the emigration by many of its young people, especially the better educated males, seeking employment and other improved prospects not available in Barbados, is a well-guarded secret, which has added to our “aging” problem.  That emigration secret is being ‘swept under a rug”, possibly because it reflects negatively on our leaders who want to continue doing nothing about it.

Such emigration is also promoted by our biased education system, which discriminates against our boy children and promotes the academic achievements of the girls, which result in an imbalance of female graduates to males at approximately 4 to 1 over the last 30+ years.  One only has to visit any large private business or government office in Barbados and search for a male employee.  It is like “looking for a needle in a haystack” but that pendulum has still “not swung enough” and is a fallacy or “it is our turn now”!  At the same time, it results in a significant and costly brain drain with the brightest and best trained achievers leaving our shores – not to mention that some of our male youths are killing each other.

It is in this context that some are thinking immigration is the solution to Barbados shrinking population and aging demographic.  Unfortunately, such a solution can create more problems than those that it sets out to solve.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

“It isn’t that they cannot find the solution. It is that they cannot see the problem.” – GK Chesterton

Round and round we go….

Peter Webster is a retired Portfolio Manager of the Caribbean Development Bank and a former Senior Agricultural Officer in the Ministry of Agriculture.