On Oc­to­ber 7, labour mar­ket re­searcher Dr Jus­tine Pierre re­leased an ar­ti­cle en­ti­tled “How Falling Fer­til­i­ty and Mass Mi­gra­tion Threat­en the Re­gion’s Growth: An ur­gent need to im­port up­wards of 150,000 Haitians/Venezue­lans as cit­i­zens of the re­gion.”

Dr Pierre was pre­vi­ous­ly hired by Car­i­fo­rum/Cari­com in 2019 to do a re­gion­al study on hu­man traf­fick­ing pat­terns in the Caribbean. Pierre is recog­nised as Cana­da and the Caribbean’s fore­most Black labour mar­ket re­searcher. As such, I be­lieve his re­cent­ly pub­lished da­ta com­plied with the high­est stan­dards of aca­d­e­m­ic rigour.

The ar­ti­cle pre­sent­ed a Caribbean-wide analy­sis with an em­pha­sis on Ja­maica’s pop­u­la­tion de­cline, but some in­for­ma­tion about Trinidad and To­ba­go’s de­clin­ing de­mo­graph­ics was al­so in­clud­ed.

Over­all, the re­gion faces a low fer­til­i­ty rate and mass mi­gra­tion due to Cari­com na­tion­als seek­ing bet­ter em­ploy­ment in North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope. This de­mo­graph­ic de­cline is cre­at­ing a shrink­ing tax base, which will make it more dif­fi­cult to fund pub­lic ser­vices such as health­care and pen­sions.

T&T is fac­ing a sig­nif­i­cant de­mo­graph­ic chal­lenge due to a sharp de­cline in its fer­til­i­ty rate, which now stands at 1.5 chil­dren per woman, among the low­est in the Caribbean and sec­ond on­ly to Ja­maica at 1.3.

This is a sub­stan­tial drop from the rate of 2.6 record­ed be­tween 1995 and 2000. The ar­ti­cle at­trib­ut­es this de­cline to sev­er­al fac­tors, among them high fe­male ed­u­ca­tion­al at­tain­ment, which then caus­es de­layed mar­riage and child­bear­ing. Both Ja­maica and T&T suf­fer from brain drain and mi­gra­tion as fac­tors caus­ing pop­u­la­tion de­cline. Ac­cord­ing to the World Bank (2024), Ja­maica los­es 1% of its pop­u­la­tion each year due to em­i­gra­tion.

Dr Pierre not­ed that the de­mo­graph­ic trend has im­pli­ca­tions for T&T’s fu­ture. Since life ex­pectan­cy now ex­ceeds 75 years, T&T’s health­care and pen­sion sys­tem will be fur­ther bur­dened by in­creas­ing health­care costs. With­out more young tax­pay­ers to plug the hole in the na­tion­al bud­get, fis­cal aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures may be nec­es­sary in the fu­ture.

To ad­dress the shrink­ing work­force re­sult­ing from this low fer­til­i­ty rate, Pierre pro­pos­es a re­gion­al so­lu­tion in­volv­ing man­aged mi­gra­tion.

Pierre sug­gests that T&T, along with Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos, could fa­cil­i­tate the move­ment of work­ers from coun­tries with high­er pop­u­la­tion growth, such as Haiti, Do­mini­ca, and Suri­name, un­der an ex­pand­ed Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket and Econ­o­my (CSME) frame­work.

Dr Pierre’s ar­ti­cle goes in­to great de­tail, show­ing his math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el to jus­ti­fy the strat­e­gy he put for­ward.

The Caribbean’s best path to pop­u­la­tion re­new­al lies in a dual-track plan that com­bines re­gion­al­ly man­aged mi­gra­tion with a com­pre­hen­sive fam­i­ly-pol­i­cy bun­dle. In the near term, coun­tries should pri­ori­tise in­tra-Cari­com mi­gra­tion, for ex­am­ple, by fa­cil­i­tat­ing the move­ment of 30,000 per­sons from Haiti, Do­mini­ca, and Suri­name to Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos, and T&T, un­der an ex­pand­ed CSME frame­work that utilis­es stan­dard­ised visas, mu­tu­al cre­den­tial­ing, and dig­i­tal so­cial-se­cu­ri­ty porta­bil­i­ty.

A pi­lot ver­sion of more un­re­strict­ed move­ment be­gan on Oc­to­ber 1, 2025 (for Bar­ba­dos, Be­lize, Do­mini­ca, and St Vin­cent & the Grenadines) and is ex­pect­ed to be scaled to all mem­ber states. This re­place­ment mi­gra­tion can off­set work­force shrink­age more quick­ly than fer­til­i­ty poli­cies, which take years to yield re­sults. The re­quired in­flow each year can be es­ti­mat­ed by: M≈(WAPt+1−WAPt)−N

Where WAP is the work­ing-age pop­u­la­tion, and N is the nat­ur­al change from en­trants mi­nus ex­its. Each coun­try can cal­i­brate its tar­get WAPt+1 to labour-mar­ket va­can­cies in agri­cul­ture, con­struc­tion, and health, as well as in the blue and or­ange econ­o­my, and to its de­sired age-de­pen­den­cy ra­tio.

In the medi­um term, gov­ern­ments must launch a five-piece fam­i­ly-pol­i­cy pack­age proven in OECD and Nordic sys­tems to raise fer­til­i­ty while sup­port­ing women’s em­ploy­ment:

(1) cap child­care costs at ≤7 per cent of house­hold in­come and ex­pand com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres

(2) guar­an­tee six to nine months of paid parental leave with a non-trans­fer­able fa­ther quo­ta

(3) pro­vide in­come-test­ed child al­lowances from preg­nan­cy to age 5

(4) cre­ate hous­ing grants or rent-to-own schemes for first-child fam­i­lies; and

(5) of­fer ed­u­ca­tion-debt re­lief tied to con­tin­ued lo­cal em­ploy­ment.

Dr Pierre warns that the Caribbean, in­clu­sive of T&T, is in a de­mo­graph­ic spi­ral that pos­es a threat to the eco­nom­ic progress that our re­gion has ex­pe­ri­enced in the last 50 years. I join with his call for po­lit­i­cal courage to ad­dress this cri­sis.

I would fur­ther add that in the case of T&T, eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and growth can both help plug the fis­cal hole that a de­clin­ing pop­u­la­tion may cause, and avert some pop­u­la­tion de­cline by cre­at­ing jobs that keep the lo­cal pop­u­la­tion em­ployed at a liv­ing wage to re­duce the at­trac­tive­ness of em­i­gra­tion in search of a bet­ter stan­dard of liv­ing.

Tied in­to the birth rate cri­sis is the hous­ing cri­sis in T&T. The stress of pay­ing for a home is caus­ing younger per­sons of child­bear­ing age to have small­er fam­i­lies. We hope that the Gov­ern­ment of T&T took these facts in­to con­sid­er­a­tion when plan­ning the Bud­get for 2025/2026.