On the front page of the Trinidad & Tobago Express of April 5th 1968, in the stories surrounding the announcement of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, there are two articles that stick out to me, and in hindsight, may be more relevant to us today than the major headline. The first is a major story declaring that “Labour is pricing itself out of jobs, says economic group” and the second is a two-paragraph blurb announcing the imminent arrival of thirty thousand contraceptive pills as a gift from Sweden to the women of this country. You see, at the time, only six years following our Independence mind you, the government of the day was already facing a crisis in regard to a population boom, which was increasing the labour pool at a drastic rate, however, not the employment opportunities that were required to satiate them.
So the question being posed to Dr. Eric WIlliams at the time was how would he manage a country with a growing unemployment rate, and his answer appeared to be two-fold, as indicated in the news articles mentioned prior. The first was to slow down the rate of births, something the British governors vehemently objected to in the mid-1950s, until 1956 when Dr. Beric Wright, an employee of Shell who had been relocated to Point Fortin, opened the first clinic offering contraceptives to women of the country. While the Catholic church and other prominent officials at the time protested the establishment of such facilities in this country, the clinic eventually grew in popularity and the concept slowly became more acceptable, to the point where a decade later, the PNM government was openly and proudly accepting foreign aid in contraceptive pills due to the overpopulation they were facing.
But it was the second article which suggested a more immediate solution to the problem at hand, and thousands of citizens were entering the job hunt with no employment readily available to them. As such, the Committee for Economic Development of Trinidad and Tobago suggested that the government find a way to expatriate five thousand working-class citizens annually to find employment in other countries at a time when T&T could not, and perhaps would not, provide them with any. This initiative eventually snowballed into the “Windrush generation” and the suffering of citizens at the hands of the British during a time when an Independent T&T was supposed to have ended the cycle of Colonial cruelty. Of course, there were those who ventured West in search of greater opportunities and ended up in the US, which had the opposite effect, wherein, the rewards were so bountiful it encouraged others to chart their future in that country, whether it be through legal channels or not.
According to statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, between 2010 and 2019, a total of 859 T&T nationals were repatriated back to this country for having overstayed their welcome in the US. If the reports that 1,200 of our citizens are now targeted for deportation from the US, this number would not only represent the single largest repatriation of people back to this country in history but would also be greater than the amount that was sent back to us for the entire prior decade. While many would point their fingers at Donald Trump and the current US administration for this action, however, I blame the PNM government stemming all the way back to the 1960s for creating the situation that is now embarrassing this nation and its citizens today.
From the very genesis of our self-governance, it is clear that the PNM has never had a solution for the development of this nation that would create sustainable employment for each and every citizen of this country, forcing our citizens to have to emigrate to find work that would be able to provide for themselves and their families. And it is only because of the desperation caused by the lack of local opportunities that has led them to occupy foreign soil illegally in search of the type of support that our own government ought to have been providing. Because something that is never brought up regarding the Windrush era was that it took place during the height of the oil boom in this country, and the expansion of the energy industry, but the failure of the PNM to capitalize and diversify the economy meant that only a select few could have capitalized on this windfall. Now, sixty years later as the oil wells take their last gasp of air, this country is in no better situation and our citizens are still forced to find employment outside of our shores, only now, the welcome mat is no longer being rolled out to them, and in fact, the doors to these countries are now being permanently closed. So what plan does the PNM have to facilitate these expatriates returning home, or the thousands more who were planning on following them in the future? ,
Dear Editor,
Ravi Balgobin Maharaj