Newsday columnist awaits TT citizenship after 30 years

Newsday columnist Debbie Jacob has lived and worked in Trinidad and Tobago for more than 30 years.

She has been unsuccessfully applying for TT citizenship for almost the same length of time.

Since moving to TT in 1984 from Seattle, Washington, Jacob has worked as a feature writer or columnist for all three daily newspapers. She came to Trinidad to "see if there really was a place like the one featured in VS Naipaul's novel Miguel Street," and fell in love with the country.

She founded the Middle and High School English department at the International School of Port of Spain in 1995, and eventually became head librarian there.

She's had several fiction and non-fiction books published, including Wishing for Wings, which tells the story of Jacob's work with teenage boys imprisoned for violent armed robbery and murder at the Youth Training Centre (YTC).

Her Wishing for Wings Foundation sponsors skill-based programmes at the Port of Spain Prison, and she was instrumental in the Prison Debate Programme, which began in 2018. She was awarded the Express Individual of the Year for 2019.

For years she has given part of her time to working in TT’s prisons, teaching English and writing, and is an advocate for restorative justice and prison reform – work that has been commended in Parliament by National Security Minister Stuart Young.

And yet every time she tries to get TT citizenship she has to jump through a series of hoops.

Jacob said she has visited the National Security Ministry and Immigration Division multiple times over the years since her first application, and has been told her file has been lost. She was asked to provide her birth, marriage and divorce certificates and other documentation, which she provided. She would go back every few years to see what was happening, with the same results.

The TTConnect website claims the time from submission of a completed application to an interview, where the chief immigration officer determines if an applicant qualifies for citizenship, may take "up to six months."

Jacob was eventually told to reapply and last did so in 2017, at which point she was told her original file had been found.

She provided additional documentation which was requested.

She said she was asked for proof that she had not left the country for more than a year over the last 30 years.

“I said to them, 'You have copies of all my passports with all the stamps of when I came and left the country, and you have the paper with all my NIS statements where I’ve worked and paid NIS every month for the last 30 years.'

"They said it wasn’t good enough, I have to go and get an affidavit (swearing) that I hadn’t left the country.

"When I came back a few days later, they were on strike.”

Jacob said a new requirement for acquiring citizenship over the last year is that the applicant must have a TT national ID card. When she went to apply for the card, as a non-Commonwealth citizen resident in TT for over five years, she was asked for marriage and divorce documents from the US, as well as the file number of her citizenship application, to prove she had applied for citizenship.

“How am I supposed to produce a file number for a file they say is lost? I don’t know how to get that.

"That’s where I was when covid19 happened. Every time you go it’s something. They lose the file; you produce everything; they ask for something else. It’s so degrading.”

She said when she posted about her plight on social media, she was told many similar stories about lost files.

“I don’t understand how you can work in the public service and tell people you lost their files.

"Where are these files? Why are we functioning in the middle ages? These things should be computerised.

"I got my American passport stamped for years as a permanent resident. The immigration people told me their system said there was a file but they can’t find it.

"I don’t think they should be able to get away with these things. They just make up things as they go.

"It’s definitely given me the feeling they just don’t plan to give me citizenship, no matter what I do.”

Attempts to reach the Immigration Division and the Minister of National Security have not yielded results.

Jacob has also encountered similar problems with the National Insurance Board. She turned 65 two years ago and was shuffled back and forth with documents for another year. She was told in June this year that her application had been approved, but is yet to receive any payments.