By the time this is pub­lished, the coun­try would have al­ready en­tered a fresh and ir­re­sistible phase of in­trigue, con­fu­sion, and gen­er­al bac­cha­nal as the nat­ur­al out­come of an­oth­er elec­tion sea­son.

All of this is be­ing pack­aged against the back­drop of cur­rent con­cerns about im­mi­gra­tion prac­tice and mal­prac­tice on the part of oth­ers. There has been no short­age of weep­ing, wail­ing and gnash­ing of teeth. Cheer­ing and jeer­ing in some cas­es.

I have, how­ev­er, not­ed re­peat­ed­ly that on this is­sue we, as a na­tion of mi­grants, can be de­scribed as both sub­jects and ob­jects—vic­tims and per­pe­tra­tors.

The awk­ward man­age­ment of Venezue­lan and oth­er mi­grant chal­lenges, the gen­er­al lack of pub­lic and even of­fi­cial aware­ness of the lan­guage of or­der­ly mi­gra­tion, and the per­va­sive pres­ence of xeno­pho­bic sen­ti­ment, even as po­lit­i­cal am­mu­ni­tion—“close de bor­ders, close de bor­ders”—all” point to an un­sat­is­fac­to­ry state of af­fairs at sev­er­al do­mes­tic lev­els.

This in­con­ve­nient­ly points to mat­ters tran­scen­den­tal of oc­cu­pa­tion of po­lit­i­cal of­fice. The three cas­es I ref­er­ence to­day ac­tu­al­ly span po­lit­i­cal ad­min­is­tra­tions. Elec­toral pref­er­ence ap­pears ir­rel­e­vant. It has not mat­tered much who has been prime min­is­ter or line min­is­ter.

In­deed, the most sig­nif­i­cant ar­eas of dys­func­tion and fail­ure have de­fied the com­plex­ion of po­lit­i­cal of­fice. Such is­sues earn on­ly pass­ing men­tion in elec­tion man­i­festos and even more su­per­fi­cial ref­er­ence on the hus­tings.

What, for in­stance, are the feel­ings of politi­cians about the fact that im­mi­gra­tion prac­tice ap­pears to rou­tine­ly de­fy the spir­it of in­ter­na­tion­al con­ven­tions, do­mes­tic leg­is­la­tion, and ba­sic prin­ci­ples of hu­mane state con­duct?

It’s dis­com­fit­ing when you think about it. Our of­fi­cial pos­ture on im­mi­gra­tion, as ex­pressed in ad­min­is­tra­tive prac­tice, is in fact not vast­ly dif­fer­ent from what ob­tains in some oth­er parts of the world, where visas and oth­er en­try and res­i­dent rights are be­ing de­ployed as tools of re­ward and pun­ish­ment.

Here now are three ex­am­ples of our own prob­lem­at­ic ap­proach­es. The first is young cre­ative Omar Jar­ra, 26, who came to this coun­try as a child with his fa­ther, Gam­bian med­ical con­sul­tant, Dr Ebri­ma Jar­ra. Omar was him­self born in The Gam­bia.

Since the death of his fa­ther in 2013, he has been the vic­tim of a bu­reau­crat­ic maze that has left him, in the words of an on­line pe­ti­tion on his case, “with­out le­gal recog­ni­tion” in the coun­try.

I have met him sev­er­al times and ad­mire his out­stand­ing work in dra­ma and song, but on­ly Sat­ur­day came across the pe­ti­tion in sup­port of his ap­peal to es­cape “state­less­ness.”

The fine de­tails of his plight will re­quire more space, but you can view the en­tire sto­ry in the Change.org cam­paign bear­ing the ban­ner ‘Jus­tice for Omar Jar­ra: End State­less­ness & Bu­reau­crat­ic Neg­li­gence.’

There are, of course, tech­ni­cal de­tails to tra­verse—but cer­tain­ly not more than a decade’s worth of pa­per push­ing! What about the “pro­cess­ing” of his case should take this long?

Even so, this is less time than my sec­ond ex­am­ple, which con­cerns a Guyana-born wid­ow—her hus­band was a Trinida­di­an—who has been res­i­dent in this coun­try for over 40 years and is yet to ac­quire full cit­i­zen­ship de­spite her best ef­forts.

Her adult chil­dren were all born here, she owns prop­er­ty, pays tax­es, votes, and con­sid­ers T&T her home. What takes decades to pro­vide a prop­er re­sponse to such an ap­pli­ca­tion? How many pages con­sti­tute such an ex­er­cise? What is the size of her file?

Fi­nal­ly, and painful­ly, I have been with­hold­ing pub­lic ex­po­sure of the tra­vails of high­ly dec­o­rat­ed Guyana-born Caribbean jour­nal­ist and pro­fes­sion­al men­tor Rick­ey Singh.

The full sto­ry of his jour­ney to even­tu­al, shame­ful re­jec­tion by this coun­try in the late stages of his life will some­day be ful­ly dis­closed.

Not by him, be­cause the once pro­lif­ic writer/ed­i­tor/press free­dom ad­vo­cate has been si­lenced by ill­ness for some time now. But he spent the pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od lan­guish­ing at the hands of ad­min­is­tra­tive in­dif­fer­ence in T&T and is now in Bar­ba­dos in poor health.

Now, there are a few oth­er pub­lic fig­ures in our re­gion who have pro­mot­ed the idea of a sin­gle Caribbean space as Rick­ey has over decades. In the end, the con­di­tions to ac­com­mo­date him here sim­ply did not ex­ist. We failed him and what he stands for.

In Omar’s “In­no­cence Procla­ma­tion”—penned” as an ad­den­dum to his on­line pe­ti­tion—he speaks of an “end to bu­reau­crat­ic neg­li­gence and state­less­ness.”

This, he con­tends, “is about the sys­temic op­pres­sion of the state­less, the dis­placed, and the wrong­ful­ly ac­cused. It is about re­claim­ing hu­man dig­ni­ty and en­sur­ing that no one is left with­out a name, a home, or a fu­ture.”

Are we pre­pared to leave it at that?