A positive immigration policy
Editorial
Guyana is underpopulated and lacks crucial skills in many areas, partly due to a prolonged brain drain. One obvious way of dealing with both of these issues is a positive immigration policy, that is a policy that encourages people with skills and capital for investment to come and settle here by offering them incentives to do so. In other words, the government should go shopping for people with skills, just as Botswana recently did with our teachers. With imagination and a bit of planning the possibilities are tremendous. For example, India enjoys a high standard of education and there are many highly educated people who could be recruited at a reasonable remuneration and induced to settle here permanently including teachers and engineers. Human capital is perhaps the most crucial factor in economic development and there are many who now feel that the most serious obstacle to our progress is the fact that at many levels of government and in the bureaucracy, and of course in other areas including private business, the skill levels are not high enough to allow important matters to be dealt with effectively. Things just don't get done, whether it is dealing promptly and efficiently with the public service union, or facilitating investment or building a sports stadium, or making all the legislative and other changes that will be necessary to implement the National Development Strategy when it is completed. There are human bottlenecks, the people are not there to do the jobs effectively and government policies are not implemented whether it is producing an investment code, dealing effectively with the educational problem, handling trade issues with Caricom and doing the myriad other things that must be done at many levels to bring our country into the modern era. And there is no way these skills and this level of experience will be readily produced through our depleted educational system. And a revamped system will take time to get going and produce the people we need. The lack of intelligence, energy and know how deters our progress at every level. For example, there can be no doubt that with an effective policy eco-tourism and adventure tourism could have developed by now into a thriving business employing many people, as the Tourism Association has said more than once. Such progress as there has been to date in telling people abroad about Guyana and setting up facilities here has been due to the efforts of pioneering entrepreneurs who have had little or no help or encouragement. The problem did not, of course, start with the PPP government in l992. They inherited a battered social and physical infrastructure and long years of governmental and bureaucratic stagnation, though some progress had been made under President Hoyte from l989 under the Economic Recovery Programme to reverse the disastrous policies and there had been some important private sector investments. But the problem goes right back to the Burnham era when emigration was in full swing, the private sector was being `miniaturised' to use the term then in vogue, and the public service was so demoralised by its politicisation, increasingly low wages, and emigration that the level of functioning of government departments fell visibly, year by year, notoriously in the social sector (education, health) but also in almost every other area of governmental activity. Things fell apart. The price for those days of stagnation and despair is still being paid. There is a crisis in human resources. It affects the country at every level. There is no vision, no vigour. We don't know where we're going, we have no coherent idea of the future. A policy of positive immigration holds out a lot of possibilities if we can be mature enough to embrace it. 
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