By Leonardo Blair, Staff ReporterST. GEORGE'S, Grenada:
OUTGOING Caribbean Community (CARICOM) chairman and Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Baldwin Spencer, said that there are now fears that the introduction of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) could lead to deportees forming stronger alliances across the region.
"Our societies are fearful that the unchecked movement of criminal deportees across CARICOM borders will be an unwelcome and immediate outcome of a full fledged single market," he said in his address to the gathering at the 25th meeting of the Heads of Government yesterday.
"Some of those deportees have spent virtual lifetimes in the exporting countries," he said. "Now, as in recent years, they are being deposited in societies in which they have only the most tenuous family connections, if any at all. They enter our communities in a state of alienation. Jamaica is fortunate to have pre-empted a recent wave of hundreds of such deportees from the U.K."
Mr. Spencer explained that this fear has now become another hurdle to be overcome by the promoters of the CSME through strategic public education campaigns as this reaction to the CSME could not have been predicted by Caribbean governments.
Jamaica's Prime Minister P.J. Patterson reminded the gathering of Government heads that despite these fears, there were positive alliances to be formed with other sections of the West Indian Diaspora.
"The lobbying potential of the West Indian communities overseas is waiting to be tapped," Mr. Patterson said. "There is, therefore, need for constructive engagement between the West Indian diaspora and its CARICOM home region."
He pointed out that in a presentation made at the Distinguished Lecture Series in Brooklyn, last October, he had sought to highlight the importance of consolidating the diaspora as an integral part of the life of the Caribbean Community.
"We need to remind ourselves often enough that we are seeking to build one community recognising that there are several links in the Caribbean chain," he said. "Together we can advance concerns that are of common interest relating to trade and investment, immigration policies and security concerns arising from the nexus of the narcotics trade, gun smuggling and criminal deportees."
