Dear Editor,

Let me add my two cents to yet another Professor Bernard Headley dissection of the so-called deportee problem (Observer, November 17, 2010), supposedly facing not just Jamaica but the Caribbean. It’s a sad commentary on public debate that more than 15 years after this “deportee” issue was concocted in a brilliant (and partially successful) attempt to externalise Jamaica’s crime problem it should still have any credibility whatseover.

While Professor Headley has repeatedly eviscerated many of the duppy stories about deportees and their supposed impact on crime, let me focus on one myth frequently cited by the storytellers. It has been said that since these deportees emigrated as “toddlers” and learnt their crime abroad, foreign countries should keep them. Such a claim is contrary to known immigration patterns where mostly single-parent, immigrant mothers leave toddlers (the barrel children) with relatives and sponsor them only when the mother is settled and the children are old enough to take care of themselves while mother works three jobs. Few toddlers emigrate.

So instead of wringing our hands, talking and hoping in vain that foreign countries will keep our lawbreakers – mostly of immigration not criminal laws – we could spend our time more profitably making arrangements for these countries to finance modern “deportee prisons” and correction support services in exchange for taking deportees off their hands. This would be done before they finish serving their sentences abroad. That way Jamaica could still have legal authority over them, have time and resources to rehabilitate them on Jamaican soil while relieving Britain, Canada and USA of the huge daily costs of keeping them in jail. A win-win situation.

Errol WA Townshend

Ontario, Canada

ewat@rogers.com