By *Guevara Leacock
On A View from the Outside this week, we turn our attention to Washington’s new immigration rules and what they mean for the Vincentian family, with the view being that the United States is quietly closing a door our families have walked through for a century, and it is closing at the very moment we can least afford it.
Do you know a Vincentian waiting on a US visa? A mother waiting to join her daughter in Brooklyn, a son in Boston filing papers for his parents, a young person hoping to study at an American university?
Of course you do. Almost every family across St. Vincent and the Grenadines has somebody in that queue, because migration is how Vincentian families have always sought to improve their socio-economic situation.
Panama, Curacao, England during the Windrush years, Brooklyn and Toronto are just some of the popular destinations. When work at home was scarce, the answer was a ticket out, a job abroad, remittances and barrels at Christmas. We do not usually call this economic policy but we on A View from the Outside say migration has been St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ most successful ‘economic policy’.
On Jan. 21, the US State Department indefinitely paused the issuance of immigrant visas, the visas that lead to a green card, for applicants from 75 countries. St. Vincent and the Grenadines is on that list. So are Barbados, The Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Lucia.
The stated reason is something called public charge risk, which is the claim that people from these countries are likely to end up depending on the US welfare system for support. Applications can still be filed and interviews still attended, but no visa will be issued until Washington completes a review, and no end date has been published for that review.
That pause is only one layer. A presidential proclamation, which took effect on the Jan. 1, placed Haiti under full entry restrictions and placed partial restrictions on our OECS neighbours Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica, covering tourist, student and exchange visas.
Certain visitor visa applicants from designated countries must now lodge a bond of US$5,000, US$10,000 or US$15,000 before they travel, money they forfeit if they overstay. US$15,000 is roughly EC$40,000. Imagine being asked to lodge EC$40,000 for the privilege of having a holiday, attending a wedding or a funeral in New York.
Grenada was added to that programme in April, and recent reports indicate four Caribbean nations have now been placed on a permanent bond requirement reaching US$20,000. On top of all this, new student visa appointments have been halted at some embassies pending expanded vetting. Washington has signed agreements with several governments in our region to accept deportees who are not even their own citizens, reportedly paying out at least US$44 million under such arrangements.
Why should ordinary Vincentians, you, be concerned about this? Consider the arithmetic – our resident population is just about 100,000 and, on the last census, has fallen by roughly 11% over 24 years.
As of 2020, some 55,000 Vincentian-born people were living abroad, a diaspora of just about half the size of the population at home. The money they send back is worth approximately 6.7% of everything St. Vincent and the Grenadines produces in a year.
Believe it or not, remittances are the most accessible money in our economy. They arrive directly into households. They pass through no ministry and no procurement process, and they go up, not down, when times get hard.
Let us take a closer look at which visas have been frozen. The categories caught by the January pause are overwhelmingly family-sponsored ones, the very mechanism by which Vincentian migration has always worked. One relative bringing the next and the remittances flowing back along the same chain. Freeze that mechanism and you are not simply delaying individual journeys; you are interrupting the meals, money to buy school supplies and the general survival of hundreds of Vincentian households at once.
To be fair, the US would say this is a pause and not a ban, that the review may yet conclude in our favour, and they would not be wrong. But for a family seven years deep in a sponsorship queue, the difference between an indefinite pause and a ban is academic. The queue does not know it is only paused. Neither does the child waiting in it.
The timing is the cruellest part. The war in the Gulf has pushed oil prices some 20% to 25% above last year’s average, and Vincentians are currently experiencing the horrors of this in every VINLEC bill that comes into the household.
The government promises fiscal consolidation, which in plain language means less public money, not more. This is precisely the moment when the overseas safety valve matters most, and precisely the moment when the US government is tightening it.
If young Vincentians cannot leave and the state cannot spend, the pressure must go somewhere. History suggests it goes into unemployment and into crime. Crime as we know is currently spiralling out of control in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
There is also a matter of principle at stake, and it connects directly to what we discussed last week on Emancipation Day. The governments faring best under these new rules are the ones making themselves useful to Washington, including by accepting other countries’ deportees in exchange for payment and relief.
The temptation for a cash-strapped treasury like St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ is understandable. However, a region that has spent a decade building the moral case for reparatory justice cannot hire itself out as the machinery of mass deportation and expect that case to survive. Sovereignty purchased at that price is not sovereignty. Furthermore, sovereignty should never be sold.
We on A View from the Outside suggest three things for our government to consider. First, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should publish, in plain language, exactly which visa categories are affected for Vincentians and update that guidance as Washington moves, so Vincentian families are guided by facts rather than rumour.
Second, plan for Vincentian returnees. If these restrictions widen, deportations will likely rise. The prison population of St. Vincent and the Grenadines has just fallen to a four-year low, an achievement we should not squander.
Third, diversifying the pathways. Canada and the United Kingdom remain comparatively open, and CARICOM free movement is maturing. A small state like St. Vincent and the Grenadines should never allow one large foreign state to hold the only key to its safety valve.
Let us be clear about one thing. There is no published evidence that Vincentian immigrants are a burden on the US taxpayer. A defining feature of the Vincentian diaspora is that it works hard and sends money and other resources home.
We are on Washington’s lists because we are small, because we are poor, and because we are diplomatically inexpensive to offend. The US has every sovereign right to decide who enters it, but the vulnerability these lists expose is ours, not theirs. A country that balances its books by exporting its people will always be at the mercy of other people’s politics. The lasting answer is a society and an economy that Vincentians, especially young Vincentians, do not feel the need to leave.
So this weekend, check on your relatives in the US VISA queue and ask those who represent you these difficult questions. Every year at this time we watch the hurricane forecast because our geography demands it. We on A View from the Outside say we must now watch Washington’s VISA lists with the same care, because our demography demands it.
*Guevara Leacock is a barrister at law of Lincoln’s Inn in England and an attorney at law in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He has a keen interest in history and politics and is a social commentator.
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