At the beginning of 2023, I penned a column on Sunday, January 15, titled, “Guyana, the country with the world’s largest diaspora.” Please Google it for its contents. This glaring fact was reported by the reliable Forbes magazine. The media house informed the world that 36.4 percent of people born in this land live in other countries.

Forbes stated that per capita, Guyana tops the entire world for sending migrants to other countries. When that announcement hit Guyana in 2023, I thought that psychic wholesomeness would have prevailed and the nationality that goes by the name Guyanese would have shown more sympathy for people coming to Guyana in search of a better life.

Let’s digress for a second and make a philosophical point. The essential reason for living is to be happy. People come into the world not just to live or exist but to be happy, to want a state of mind and physical things that would make them happy. That quest expands when we become parents. We want our children’s lives to be satisfactory ones where they can enjoy happiness.

In a forthcoming column, I will look at the total absurdity of China, India, and the EU, among other large nations, imposing a visa requirement on Guyana. If your purpose in life is to be happy, why would a Guyanese seek life’s comforts by being an illegal resident in India or China?

What is the point of this digression? It is to emphasise the psychic destruction of some Guyanese who are so psychologically destroyed that they are incapable of understanding the purpose of life. Guyana has sent more people to other countries because those Guyanese wanted to live a life of mental and economic comfort.

In 2023, I experienced some of the most terrible moments in my life when people of prominence, whose essential family members are citizens of other countries, told me that too many foreigners are coming to Guyana.

Each time they said that to me, I instantly recall two names; philosopher Arthur Koestler claimed that Homo sapiens species is inherently flawed so that humans cannot allow for the existence of other humans. And E.O. Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, who asserted that there is a xenophobia gene in Homo sapiens.

If I name the types of people in this country who told me we should stop foreigners from coming into Guyana, I can assure you that, though I am no medical doctor, I know you will get apoplexy right away. This prominent and powerfully placed guest on the Freddie Kissoon-Gildarie Show openly announced that Guyana should make it harder for foreigners to get citizenship.

Now brace yourself for psychic indecency. After the programme, we stood by his car, and when we were talking about family, he told us that one daughter lives in the US and his son doesn’t like Guyana; he is an accountant in Canada. So two of his children went to seek happiness in other lands, but Guyana must stop foreigners seeking happiness in our country.

Here is a fact that will give you a heart attack, so maybe you should stop reading this article at this point. Every Guyanese that I have spoken with who is against the influx of foreigners has essential family members abroad.

Here are the words of trade unionist Lincoln Lewis: “Unplanned immigration brings with it consequences such as stress on the education and health services, housing overrun, the creation of slums, and our resources exploited by others willing to undersell their labour. We also face a crisis of submerging our culture further.

This threat comes from others who do not speak our language and share a common culture… we also face a crisis of submerging our culture… we are facing a pending catastrophe, which we must seek to avoid at all cost.”

Mr. Lewis is the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress and sits with the Catholic Bishop of Guyana under the leadership of an organisation called the Civil Society Forum.

Mr. Christopher Ram interviewed Lewis on my denunciation of what Lewis wrote (See my column of Tuesday, April 9, 2019, “Is Lincoln Lewis the Black version of White fascism?”) There was no rejection of the xenophobic ranting of Lewis in the interview, but with a smile, Mr. Ram, in relation to me, said to Lewis: “But he is your friend nuh.”

In 2023, the Government of Guyana was pellucid. It will not stop Venezuelans from coming to Guyana to seek a better life. It was one of the salutary moments of the government, but it was not met with any praise. Maybe Koestler and Wilson were banging on target.