Dear Editor,

It’s comforting when a nation, beset with trials and tribulations, can dress them up and make believe they are virtues.

Former Prime Minister Bruce Golding, in a recent address to the Diaspora in New York on Sunday, May 20, 2018, would have us believe that the substantial migration of our brightest and best graduates is a virtual “foreign investment” because their remittances make up such a significant part of the national budget.

Many moons ago another former prime minister, Edward Seaga, characterised all this as Jamaica’s “foreign aid” to developed countries. Seaga was right.

Jamaicans have been migrating in large numbers for at least a century — to Panama, Cuba, Britain, North America, and elsewhere. Nothing wrong with that. Certainly, for several decades now, their remittances — at least until US President Donald Trump starts putting hefty taxes on every dollar — have been crucial. But, as a policy, to be encouraged, winked at, commended, and characterised as an “investment”, not good at all.

Successive governments have borrowed money, paid interest on that money, engaged tutors in our publicly funded educational institutions so that we can train nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, etc. Has this been for export? It would have been far better had we maximised our agricultural exports instead and not left North American and European markets flooded with produce from Central and South America.

We have failed the challenge of providing sufficient opportunities and living wages for our brightest and best, especially for our teachers and nurses, who continue to migrate at an alarming rate. That, I believe,s is hardly an “investment” policy anyone, least of all a former prime minister, ought to applaud.

Errol W A Townshend

Ontario, Canada

ewat@rogers.com