Cases involving illegal immigration usually slide by without attracting much public attention, but that was not so last week. On Monday, fourteen Venezuelans pleaded guilty to charges of entering Guyana illegally and were sentenced by Chief Magistrate Ann McLennan to fines of $10,000 each or six days in jail if they could not pay, following which they were to be deported.
The Venezuelans – nine men and five women – were granted an opportunity to address the court, and as we reported on Tuesday, they each said through an interpreter that they had left their families to come to Guyana in search of work, so they could earn money to buy food and clothing to take back home. According to the report, one of the women broke down in tears as she related that all she wanted to do was provide for her children, and that coming to Guyana was her only option. One of the men told the court that he thought it was alright to come to Guyana to seek employment, because there are so many Guyanese freely travelling over to Venezuela to work.
What the woman had to say in particular, struck a chord with Guyanese across the age divide, since they could immediately relate to the need to feed children, but for the older generation there was an especial poignancy to her words. They recalled a period in this country’s history when Guyanese traders and migrants could be found all over the region as a consequence of economic difficulties at home. In particular, they travelled in substantial numbers to Venezuela where many of them remain until this day.
The public entered into the discussion through the letter columns in the press, and the prevailing view appeared to be that the fourteen Venezuelans were economic refugees and that Guyana should show more sympathy. As background, it should perhaps be mentioned that Venezuela’s food situation is worse than Guyana’s was in the Burnham period. Our neighbour’s food production capacity has been subject to serious attrition as a consequence of mistaken policies, corruption and maladministration, and the country has become almost entirely dependent on imports to feed its population. With the dramatic decline in the oil revenues which maintain the economy, Venezuela is no longer in a position to import what is necessary to meet the needs of its people. Whatever the hardships caused by the ban on flour and other imported foodstuffs in Burnham’s Guyana, and they were not minor, there was always locally grown produce available in Guyana’s markets. Consumers in the nation to our west are not so fortunate.
That said, the first thing to be noted is that Magistrate McLennan did not have the power to exercise discretion in the case of the fourteen Venezuelans; she had to apply the law, which she dutifully did. If in circumstances such as this the law is to be waived, then it would have to be changed at the parliamentary level first. Any Guyanese of means who felt great sympathy for the Venezuelans’ plight could always have paid their fines and sent them back with foodstuffs, although no doubt that is not something which could be entertained on a regular basis.
The thing is, the fourteen did not present themselves to an immigration officer before entering the country. The reason, presumably, is that they did not have any money, and without funds they would not have been allowed to stay. Had they come with money with the intention of making purchases in Parika or wherever, there probably would not have been a problem; they could have reported to immigration and would have been afforded entry to buy food and whatever else they wanted. After all, no one minds if they are coming to spend money here. When the border between Venezuela and Colombia was opened for two successive weekends, for example, thousands of Venezuelans streamed across to stock up on necessities, and then streamed back again.
The problem in the present case is that the fourteen needed to work first in order to earn sufficient wherewithal to enable them to buy goods to take home. This is what has been happening in Trinidad; Venezuelans have been arriving in some numbers, work for a period, and then return home with various goods. Guyana’s rules about foreigners working locally are stricter than they used to be following amendments to the law introduced by the previous administration. It is the company employing such a worker which has to make the application and justify their hiring, in addition to which the fees are comparatively steep. So if, for the sake of argument, therefore, the Government of Guyana decided on humanitarian grounds to allow Vene-zuelans to come and seek temporary work here (assuming such is available), they would have to make special legal provision for a different kind of process.
Of course on the Cuyuni and Wenamu Rivers the Venezuelans have been intruding for years, and some of them became involved in gold mining on our side. None of them, one can reasonably presume, ever presented themselves at Eteringbang to be processed by immigration. This is quite apart from the various hostile actions by the Venezuelan military along that stretch of border.
Then there is the matter of all those Guyanese in Venezuela. It is true that many of them were there illegally, particularly those who went into the gold industry (it attracted Amerindians, among others, from Region Eight, for example, in the ʼ90s). However, it has also to be mentioned that there have been periods in the past when Venezuelan presidents have announced that any Guyanese who could demonstrate they were born in Essequibo was entitled to Venezuelan citizenship. Exactly how the authorities to the west applied these ‘rules’ is not really known, but in any case there is a certain lack of clarity about the status of many Guyanese there. Nevertheless, President Hugo Chávez fast-tracked the voter registration of immigrants whom the opposition claimed were not entitled to vote. One assumes they included Guyanese.
As mentioned earlier, the argument being promulgated by sympathetic letter-writers is that Venezuelans such as the fourteen who were fined, should be regarded as economic refugees and treated accordingly. They are not, of course, economic refugees ‒ or refugees at all ‒ in the normal sense; unlike the Africans trying to get into Europe, for example, they are not true migrants seeking to settle down here. All they are looking for is temporary employment in order to return to Venezuela, and if Trinidad is anything to go by, their stay would be relatively brief. Guyana, however, is a less complex economy than Trinidad, which on account of its oil industry has some kind of an industrial base and can maybe better accommodate a certain number of short-stay workers. Exactly where such people would find employment here is less clear, unless they were prepared to dig drains or something of that kind. Furthermore, the women in particular, could become targets for exploitation of the worst kind.
The official response to date from President David Granger down has been that as long as the Venezuelans come here legally, there is no problem. Hard as it may seem that is probably the only rational approach. The situation would change if turbulence in the Venezuelan body politic were to produce a rash of people attempting to cross into Guyana; in view of the spurious Venezuelan claim in relation to our land space, they would present a challenge of an altogether different character. However, they would be refugees in the more ordinary sense of that term.
