Wrap: US Embassy schools Jagdeo on visa policy
Coming in now… the US embassy has taken the opportunity to refute the baseless prediction by Bharrat Jagdeo on Sunday that if the opposition takes power it “will trigger a mass exodus so that the U.S. Embassy (in Guyana) will have to clamp down, once again, in issuing visas.”
Asked by Carib News Desk if this could occur, it replied, “The Embassy does not issue non-immigrant visas based on a quota system, nor does any Embassy or Consulate change the eligibility criteria for non-immigrant visas based on conditions in the host country.”
The fact is that we are not sure how much higher this country’s migration rate can reach. It is ninth highest in the world according to the CIA Word Fact Book. As we reported last week 168,335 Guyanese have been granted permanent residency status in the US from 1990 to 2013. That’s 7,318 per year. Or 20 every day. To one country, legally.
Now let’s look at illegal migrants. Even the US finds this hard to estimate but one study put those who overstay their non-immigrant visas as 2.5% for the South American region (prior to 2004). There are no figures for Guyana for the issuance of I-94’s prior to 2004 but non-immigrant visas (I-94) granted to Guyanese for the period 2004 to 2013 totalled 287,580. Could we safely say that 300,000 were granted from 1990 to 2004? If so that would be 687,580 visas and another 14,000 migrants.
There are other ways to find out the country’s total migration rate, the simplest being the number of persons departing from the airport rather than arriving. The raw numbers as provided by the Bureau of Statistics show that between 2002 and 2010 there were 99,962 more outgoing passengers through CJIA than incoming.
That’s an exodus of people all voting with their feet.