Deportees standing up for their rights
Dear Editor,
I completely understand the need for eye-catching headlines in the fierce competition to sell morning newspapers. But as someone working closely on the troubling matter of deportations to the Caribbean, I just wish there had been another way to capture on your front page the truth of your story, without the glaringly misleading headline, “Deportees refuse £5,000”.
Several Jamaicans, including I’d imagine within your readership, readily admit to a negative predisposition toward deportees. Your headline, deliberately or not, reinforces – before the reader even begins to read an otherwise accurate story – that wrongful predisposition. “Seet deh. Wha mi tell yu? People gi dem money fi help dem help demself, an dem nuh waant it. All dem waan fi do is tief an rob an kill.”
That’s not, however, the conclusion that any of us who do the research, test the suppositions and work at developing structures of opportunity for deported people hold. Rather, the opposite is what my colleague Rachel Ustanny, administrator of the Hibiscus project (mentioned in your story), and I know for the 200 or more deported migrant men and women we work with. They are, to a person, easily the most expectant, most hopeful, eager, wanting to work, wanting-to-be-part-of-the-society set of Jamaicans we know.
Your story speaks to a universal, fundamental right of free people living in (or were once part of) a free society not wanting to give up, sell or purchase for 5,000 pieces of silver their right to appeal, to have their case taken to another level, so it can be heard and adjudicated by another authority. The people in your story are mostly mothers who could not live with the thought that 5, 10, 20 years down the road a juridical body could rule that cases like theirs were wrongful evictions – but no relief for them. They had sold and signed away their right to restitution. Never will they reunite with offspring in the British land of their birth.
You could have, on the day after Heroes Day, headlined the story in keeping with the spirit of perhaps our most revered national hero, deported migrant Marcus Garvey. You could have titled the story, “Deportees standing up for their rights”.
Bernard Headley
Professor, Department of Sociology, Psychology & Social Work
Director EU-UNDP Reintegrating Deported Migrants Project
Institute for Sustainable Development
University of the West Indies, Mona
Kingston 7
