Costly migrant policy

JUSTICE Carol Gobin’s award of $2.4 million in damages to Venezuelan migrants who were illegally detained after entering this country unlawfully in 2020 presents two striking ironies.

First, the ruling upends the main premise of the Government’s migration policy. That premise has always been, ostensibly, the need to reduce economic burden.

Justice Gobin’s award makes clear the State’s management of this issue doesn’t necessarily leave the treasury better off.

The ruling party’s migration strategy has been a study in contradiction from day one.

We have a “policy.” But it is made up of non-binding commitments and unentrenched treaties. Migrants have been granted “amnesty.” But the basic terms of their work-permit exemptions are uncertain, subject to arbitrary extensions.

Venezuelan children are welcome in schools. But the current term began with some locked out. Migrants are equal under the law. But the death of a baby after the Coast Guard shot at a pirogue remains unresolved; deportations are carried out in the face of normal rules and people are detained in illegal facilities.

In all this, the State gets to play it both ways. Officials can boast of a “humanitarian” approach while at the same time pursuing a draconian agenda of deterrence.

After four years, this confused and confusing playbook is not reaping rewards on either front. Or if it is, those rewards are being cancelled out by incalculable moral costs.

The $2.4 million award is just the start. Hundreds, possibly thousands of people, have been raided, detained and deported in circumstances that fall short of applicable legal norms. And there is ample Commonwealth precedent establishing that illegal migrants can bring actions for a range of wrongs, not just unlawful detention.

The State, which reportedly conceded this case, might wish to appeal. Even so, that will generate further costs. There is no outcome in which we do not pay.

Meanwhile, the potential economic productivity boost from properly integrated migrants – extolled by economists, the International Monetary Fund and the private sector – is ignored.

The second irony is that deterrence has now turned into incentive.

Migrants have long known they will not face a bed of roses when they land on these shores. They come anyway.

Now, they can be assured of a lucrative payoff should officials mistreat them. Sadly, given the history of how Venezuelans have been treated, they would be right to bank on such mistreatment.

Justice Gobin was the same judge who, in a landmark 2008 ruling about the Port of Spain Prison, highlighted the appalling conditions there to which locals were subjected.

Now, in this case involving foreigners, the judge has confirmed that our inhumane treatment of people truly knows no bounds. In this mistreatment, migrants have achieved true kinship.