Bring our children home

THE EDITOR: Like many parents in TT, I sent my children to complete their tertiary education abroad. Today they are all gainfully employed in a foreign land.

The quality of life, the access to decent housing, salary, and living with the constant reminder of criminal behaviour have combined to make TT unattractive to many who grew up here.

I have many good friends whose children are doctors, others whose children are in financial services, and some in construction abroad. They have no interest in every returning to their homeland.

While watching a football game with another friend recently, he talked about how many people in management, teachers, farmers and public servants in the sixties, and the decades that followed, migrated to North America and Europe, leaving those who could not access the opportunity to manage our country. The reality is that we have lost some of our best minds.

We must find a way to make TT attractive again and bring our people back home. They usually return for Christmas and Carnival, and they really love living here. But they cannot afford to do so. Living in these twin islands is not easy.

Affordable housing for young people is almost impossible unless assisted by parents who would have had their inherited assets increased through uncontrolled real estate prices.

There are not many opportunities for employment outside of the government sector or the retail trade. Then there is the possibility that after working hard and achieving some level of success, one is targeted for extortion, robbery or even murder.

We the older managers of this land have made a mess of our inheritance, and it is time for us to go. We have exploited our racial differences for political opportunities rather than celebrated our diversity for peaceful and prosperous co-existence. We have desecrated our agricultural lands to the point where we mass produce nothing.

We wasted billions of dollars earned through the energy sector and foreign investments without long-term economic planning for when the resources run out. We have failed our children.

Now is the time to rescue them from abroad. Give qualified returning citizens easy access to housing. Offer them incentives for innovation and investing in businesses with long-term projections for success. Lease acres of agricultural lands to our citizens, local and abroad, together with adequate financing, for large-scale farming in coconuts, citrus, cocoa, coffee, avocados, sugar cane, livestock and fruits and vegetables.

The global climate is changing, and the the threatened trade wars can be detrimental to a nation that depends on imported food to feed its people. We cannot rebuild our nation with the type of politicians whose politics is that of disparaging their opponents with demeaning phrases, and then making up when it is convenient.

We need people with a vision and experience of a better life. Our people abroad bring that and much more. It's time to end this era of despair and embrace a future with hope, a hope that can immediately impact our development if we utilise one of our most valuable assets – our children living abroad.

STEVE ALVAREZ

via e-mail