We have xenophobes too!

I’m waiting around for my flight to Barbados right now, and I’m looking forward to a restful week (and a new passport that lets me travel through Europe visa-free after June). Fortunately for me, I am a Barbadian citizen, as apparently other CARICOM nationals are now seen as a threat by the DLP, and they are being threatened with deportation:

Illegal immigrants from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) will have six months to regularize their status in Barbados, or face deportation.

This was announced in parliament today by Prime Minister and Minister of National Security, the Hon. David Thompson.

The move follows a series of recommendations from a cabinet subcommittee on immigration, which convened in June 2008 and concluded that the current level of immigrants is unacceptably high, difficult to control and poses a significant challenge to socioeconomic development in Barbados.

If we weren’t talking about CARICOM nationals, I would applaud the amensty and the effort to get folks to regularize status. But the fact that after 30-something years of CARICOM and CSMEs and whatever else you still have Bajans kicking Vincentians and Guyanese out is just demoralizing. We can’t even welcome each other in anymore? What an embarrassment. This is almost as bad as the fishing chaos of the 90s.

And a Trini more cynical than I might point out that Trinidad has hosted many an “illegal” Bajan in the past, and perhaps Thompson and his government should be careful in that glass house over there.

In other Barbados news, this is kind of crazy, but also kind of great. I hope the powers that be have stocked up on weather derivatives.