Dear Editor,
MIGRATION into Guyana is admittedly going to be more and more a problem we confront, and as a result we should be thankful that the President had the foresight to establish the Department of Citizenship. In fact, it seems every day we hear about new Venezuelan refugees! The urgent work of this department is however totally undermined by the constant, unfounded attacks by the PPP/C.

How absurd is it that the opposition chief whip continues to harass the minister of citizenship about supposed Cuban and Haitian migrants that cannot be accounted for. Some Cubans and Haitians seem to be entering Guyana legitimately and then leaving without stamping their passports, which likely means they are using the “backtrack.” This is not good, of course, but how the minister is supposed to stop that given our extensive, porous borders, is beyond any common sense.

Even more than this, PPP/C MPs are making the outrageous claim that these people are being issued with ID cards so that they can vote for the coalition. If there were thousands of foreigners taking up residence locally, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs mentioned in parliament, it would immediately be obvious to Guyanese. Can you imagine Haitians, who probably don’t even speak English, turning up at polling stations and not setting off all sorts of alarms with the observers?

Allegations like these, which are so preposterous they can’t even be taken seriously, have no place in our public discourse. Next, we’ll hear there are Brazilians coming in, and when they show up at polling stations looking for Portuguese voting cards, this won’t raise any questions. If the opposition wanted to raise real concerns they should have picked an English-speaking country’s migrants. As it stands this is a joke.

Yours,
Malcolm Marshall