Anyone who picked up the Trinidad & Tobago Express on Friday, April 5, 1968 would have been horrified by a front page that chronicled the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. a man who was killed, in part, because he insisted that Black people were not a problem to be managed. And yet, inside that very same front page, and featured alongside the grief of MLK’s murder, is a story about a committee of businessmen here in our own twin-island republic who had quietly reached precisely the opposite conclusion about our own people This committee had found and were reporting that we were, in fact, at a surplus and that the most efficient solution to our unemployment problem was to send five thousand of us abroad, each and every year for the then foreseeable future.
The Committee for Economic Development of Trinidad and Tobago which presented itself as a sober body of serious men devoted to applying economic principles and practices to public policy, was not, as the genteel phrasing might suggest, a civic institution of disinterested patriots. After locating a copy of that report in ur National Archives, I found that it was a body composed primarily of executives representing international business interests, multinational concerns whose primary loyalty was to their shareholders in London and New York, not to the cane cutters of Caroni or the steelband men of Laventille. And these men had decided, with the calm authority of those who have never worried about where their next meal is coming from, that the population of Trinidad and Tobago was growing too fast, that the economy was “stagnant,” and that the most sensible corrective was organised, government-mandated emigration.
The irony of this is that this esteemed brain trust did not propose to build the economy to fit the people, something that should have been easy for men of their rank and stature, but rather proposed to reduce the people to fit the economy. What’s even funnier about this, is that on that same front page, even further down lay a story about the Population Council of Trinidad and Tobago were preparing to receive a gift of oral contraceptives from “Sweden” to supply thirty thousand Trinidad and Tobago women. And I will let you make of that what you will.
But going back to the mass migration, think carefully about what that means. Five thousand citizens a year, that included fathers, mothers, teachers, engineers, nurses, all who were to be exported like any other commodity this country has ever been made to produce for someone else’s benefit. And if that logic sounds familiar, it should, as it was the same logic that had governed the Caribbean islands since the first ship arrived almost five centuries prior.
While this detail was not highlighted in the news story, through my research I also found that alongside this proposal for managed emigration, the same committee was also arguing against expanding secondary education. Their reasoning, stated with breathtaking frankness, was that there was no need for a more highly skilled workforce, because they, the businessmen who ran our economy, had no plans to create jobs that would require one. AS such, they were not building an economy that needed educated Trinidadians, but rather they were building one that needed compliant, low-skilled labour, and the migration contingency was merely an escape valve for everyone who exceeded that need.
Consider the level of cynicism of that position for a moment. You suppress education because you don’t want a skilled workforce, and then you don’t build a skilled economy because you’ve suppressed education, so when the unemployment that results from this deliberately stunted development becomes politically inconvenient, you ship the surplus people abroad. The circle is as elegant as it is merciless.
It should be noted that was all occurring at the tail end of the Windrush era, as the passage to Britain was closing, through the Immigration Act of 1968, which was enacted that same month, and incidentally, was slamming the door on Caribbean people arriving in the United Kingdom. At the same time however, across the pond America’s door was swinging wide open. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 had restructured US immigration policy, and the result, by the late 1960s and through the 1970s, was a wave of Caribbean migration to the United States unlike anything seen before. Tens of thousands of Trinidadians made that crossing, to New York, to Miami, to Hartford and to Houston. Many were exactly the kind of people this country could least afford to lose, including the educated, the ambitious, and the skilled, who had scraped and sacrificed to make it through secondary school and were now being told, implicitly and explicitly, that there was nothing here waiting for them.
Our country was contented exporting not just workers, but the very people who might one day have demanded something different and the brain drain that followed was not an accident of development. It was, at least in part, a policy outcome, and the predictable consequence of decisions made by men in boardrooms who found it more convenient to export human potential than to invest in it.
And it is because this brain drain is still being felt today that I opted to give it some level of greater attention here.
Walk through the corridors of any village in Trinidad and Tobago and you will hear about the people who left and what they might have acomplished. Moreover, if you were to ask any engineer, any lawyer, any software developer under forty whether they have considered leaving, the look on their face will betray any lingering sense of patriotism they may attempt to convey. And to this day, the most talented graduates of our schools and universities, who are able to, still set off for Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, countries that receive the full return on an educational investment made by the Trinidad and Tobago taxpayer, and give nothing back but remittances and the occasional nostalgic visit at Carnival time.
I want to be honest about something that the immigration debate in America rarely acknowledges, and that is that immigration has been extraordinarily good for the United States. Those numbers are not seriously in dispute, as immigrants and their children have founded more than forty percent of Fortune 500 companies. They disproportionately populate the ranks of doctors, scientists, engineers, and academics. The US medical system, in particular, would collapse without foreign-trained physicians. Every year, America harvests the human capital of the developing world, with those migrants contribute meaningfully to the economy and society they join, and leaving their home nations in a worse position than before.
What the American immigration debate almost never asks, is what does this cost the countries that produce these people? What does it cost Trinidad when a cardiologist trained at our University emigrates to Florida? What does it cost Jamaica when a software engineer educated at Mona takes a job in Silicon Valley? What does it cost Nigeria when a generation of its best-trained doctors leaves for Britain and Canada? The answer is not merely the salary those workers would have earned at home. The answer is compounded across decades, reflected in the patients untreated, the students untaught, the businesses unfounded, the innovations unmade, the tax revenues uncollected, and the institutional knowledge unbuilt. The answer is underdevelopment itself.
In my opinion, immigration has become a form of foreign aid in reverse, being paid by the poorest countries to the richest. The short-term benefits might be real, as the migrant earns more, and the remittances provide some cushion for the family left behind, and the receiving country gains a productive worker. I cannot not dismiss those benefits as I too have family members whose lives were materially transformed by the move to North America, and I will not be dishonest about that. But short-term benefit is not the same as long-run development and the evidence, across the Caribbean, across sub-Saharan Africa, across South Asia, is damning. Countries that have hemorrhaged their educated classes to the wealthy world have never been able to catch up, and have instead fallen fallen further behind. The gap between the developed and the developing world is not closing and in many respects it is widening, and this brain drain is one of the most significant mechanisms through which that widening occurs.
All you have to do it to compare this to the countries that found ways to retain their people. In the 1960’s South Korea was poorer than Ghana and its citizens faced extraordinary pressure to emigrate as a result. But instead, the Korean state invested ferociously in education, built industries that needed skilled workers, and created conditions under which the talented had a reason to stay and build. The result is that within a generation, there was an economic transformation that has no real parallel in the postwar world. Taiwan did something similar and so did did Singapore. And in important ways, so too did China, though not through liberal democracy, to be clear, but through a deliberate strategy of building an economy sophisticated enough to retain its most capable citizens.
None of these countries succeeded by exporting five thousand citizens a year because a committee of businessmen found them inconvenient.
I return, then, to that April morning in 1968, to those businessmen and their committee and their report. I do not think they were stupid men. I think they were rational actors pursuing their interests within a system that was designed to extract value from this land and its people rather than to build anything lasting here. They looked at five thousand Trinidadians and saw not citizens, not potential, and certainly not a future, but merely a surplus, and a burden to be relieved.
We are still living in the world built upon that logic and until we understand that the poverty and underdevelopment that have persisted in this country across generations are not the result of some inherent deficiency in our people, but are the deliberate outcome of deliberate decisions made by people who knew exactly what they were doing, we will keep sending our brightest and best abroad, keep celebrating their success in other people’s countries, and keep wondering, every election cycle, why nothing here ever seems to change.
The man on the front page of that newspaper gave his life insisting that Black people were not a problem to be solved. And we owe it to ourselves, and to him, to finally believe it.
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