(Conclusion)
To recap from last week: a heavy flow of illegal immigrants from the small islands flooded Trinidad from 1961, specifically to help the PNM with elections. At the time, tens of thousands of Trinis per year were leaving, and by 1975, about 25 per cent of Trini registered voters were MIA.
The Guardian, in '75, reported a massive birth-paper scam, where illegal documents were provided for the immigrants. And the son of a prominent (60s) government minister recalled that the Chief Immigration Officer at the time told him Eric Williams had ordered the illegal immigrants be issued ID cards to vote.
These facts are public if not official knowledge, and stain the community with criminality. The very communities these illegal immigrants settled in are the ones the police are afraid to go into today, and where murders and gang activity remain concentrated.Additional evidence: in Race and Nationalism Selwyn Ryan makes passing reference (in a footnote) to "an influx from the small islands" who helped the PNM to "capture" the 1961 election.
In his account of the Black Power disturbances in 1970 (in Ryan's The Black Power Revolution) a former PNM minister noted, "A large percentage of those who were carrying on with...misbehaviour were small-islanders who were here illegally."This, among smart people, is called pretty strong evidence. I know some PhDs which were awarded on less.
Back in Trinidad, of course, not all, or even a majority of illegal immigrants were criminal per se. But their entry into Trinidad was based on massive voter fraud. This awareness would have shaped the group's worldview. And the areas they were placed in, characterised by squalor and deprivation, became incubators for criminality.
Naturally, the PNM is intimately connected to these communities. Rather than developing these areas, PNM neglect transformed them into Orwellian barracoons. They fed the residents with the worst form of racial, class and political paranoia, kept them enraged, and used them as blunt instruments.
Laventille is the best example of a host community. It had no amenities, schools, public services and housing. A generation who lived in this bred its own alienated culture, which does not see it as part of Trini society. (Ergo, "Laventille for Laventilleans" etc.) And as the first Trini-born small-island generation came to adulthood, their nihilistic culture integrated into the Creole culture of the East-West Corridor. This explains the incompatibility, and hostility, between the cultures of north and south Trinidad.
So we have a large, potentially criminal underclass, comprised of illegal immigrants, concentrated in the north of the island, alienated from the rest of the society. But immigrants have been known to make their way into host societies and contribute to them–in much the same way the thousands of Trini illegal immigrants have made good in the US, especially. Since pockets of those immigrant communities, from Carenage to Arima, remain steeped in violence, this has clearly not been the case here.
A significant reason is the PNM's desire to permanently disconnect the black middle, working and now underclasses–largely to sever the moral impulse of the indigenous working and middle classes (described by CLR James in Beyond a Boundary). Another reason is the weakness of institutions which help new immigrants to integrate, like education.
The encounter of Trini university-educated teachers and children from these communities in the junior sec schools was a destructive collision from which neither has recovered. (Look at the school system.)
Other PNM institutions helped, like the ethnic nationalism of the 60s which proposed that Afro-Trinidadian was the only authentic Trinidadian, and all else was inauthentic. This went a long way in creating a purposeful amnesia and entitlement among the immigrant underclass. That ethnic nationalism culminated in Black Power in 1970. Post-Black Power, several organisations began to perpetuate and entrench this mythology in the popular imagination.
Until the 1990s, the ESC (et al) was a fringe group. However, with Indian time in 1996, it, and similar groups, suddenly became important. Under the guise of "culture" and flimsy facades like "Emancipation," the message of racial paranoia became their staple. No better example of this exists than Ms Pearl Eintou Springer, a librarian, who assaults public consciousness from time to time to remind Africans of their destiny and say the Hindu government is forcing their children to learn Indian dance. No one from the ESC has refuted this.
(More on the ESC in a later column.)
Naturally not all the crime is the PNM's fault (as plausible as that sounds). The international drug trade, failing schools, corrupt police, economic inequity, all contribute. However, small-island illegal immigration, in tandem with Trini society, provided a social group that was extraordinarily susceptible to criminality.
The absence of social scientists and cultural critics studying (or their determination to ignore) the phenomenon leads to a lacuna in official knowledge, and an absurd perplexity in the crime debate. Everybody knows what the problems are, but since it's politically incorrect (or disloyal to the PNM) to admit it, the posse goes off wildly in the other direction while the Injuns invade the homestead.