Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre on Monday appealed to fellow citizens to “stop making excuses” for careless drivers’ recklessness.
He was referring to fatal traffic accidents, but this also applies to those who generally invent reasons to justify wrongdoings, simply for refusing to accept uncomfortable facts.
But this attitude also extends to the political field, where hard-line (‘hardest’ or ‘harder-than-hard’) party supporters prefer to die with their loyalty boots on than accept certain realities.
It also applies to how some Sant Lucians (and Caribbean citizens elsewhere) refuse to accept that every country has a right to review its (visa and other) immigration procedures and will simply blame ‘the government’ for whatever ‘problems’ they imagine may affect those wishing to visit the USA, for whatever reason.
President Donald Trump says his iron-fisted approach to Immigration in the first year of his second White House outing is all about ending immigrants abusing America’s welfare state by making false claims, to enable them to stay in the USA — and unfairly enjoy welfare benefits.
But this is something real, even though Washington shouldn’t punish Peter and Mary to make them pay for Paul
Let’s be realistic: Every Saint Lucian (and Caribbean citizen) knows someone proud to boast their child or children were ‘Born in the USA’.
But now that Uncle Sam is looking to keep those he chooses and deport ‘undocumented aliens’ the Homeland Security Department has determined have fouled their way onto US soil and are now crying foul.
Historically, the USA has always been seen and treated by Caribbean citizens like the next-door Land of Opportunity everyone should aspire to visit, if only a trip to New York, just for the experience of ‘Living-it-Up in The Big Apple’.
US visas have therefore always been important to Caribbean citizens for business and trade, diplomacy and holiday travel.
But now, even those with Green Cards are worried they may get caught-up in the maelstrom of new or amended (but hardly-explained) entry rules and regulations.
The US has stopped processing new Green Card applications, while planning to deport tens of thousands of asylum-seekers it’s rejected.
However, one truth being rejected by the persistent naysayers is that Candidate Trump telegraphed most or all he’s doing now during his 2024 campaign.
In his first year in office this time, he’s unleashed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) against immigrants in a way that seems to target people by (among other things) race and accent.
In the process, ICE is also detaining and mistreating legal citizens with immigrant backgrounds, separating parents from children and deporting those rounded-up — voluntarily, or by force.
Interestingly, a US President with immigrant roots, in a powerful nation stolen from its First People and built by immigrants, is outlawing and deporting today’s immigrants who, like his forebears, flocked to a land they were told would make all their dreams true.
Immigrants who earlier enjoyed brighter days through hard work in the ‘Land of Liberty’ are now facing daily nightmares.
Caribbean citizens who faked their way through US borders or engaged in arranged Marriages-of-Convenience to stay, now face the shameful likelihood of voluntarily returning home, or accepting permanent deportation to a ‘third country’ they may never have heard of.
The natural concern in every Caribbean country that will eventually agree to accept the unwanted deportees is that the ‘worst of the worst’ among them might land on regional shores.
But another fact being rejected outright by too-many is that not every person who migrates is a liar or a cheat, as, always among them are also those with skills they hoped to market and sell in the US, for lack of opportunities at home.
Many developing countries – including in the Caribbean and the Commonwealth — like in Latin America, Africa, the Arab world, Asia and The Pacific — have (over long decades) lost their best brains to the USA, Canada, Australia and Europe, through the never-ending Brain Drain, facilitated by education systems designed to produce external labour for industrial capital, in a South-North direction.
So then, who are we really afraid of landing on our shores? Only American rejects and suspect foreigners?
What about the inherent possibilities that among them may be skilled persons who can help us reverse a bad historical trend forever — by turning an old ‘Brain Drain’ to a new ‘Brain Gain’?
Another case: More cruise ships are coming to Saint Lucia and other Eastern Caribbean ports because the lines are afraid of taking passengers along compromising routes — so those who advocate ‘ignoring Venezuela’s troubles and minding our own’ are now saying the region is ‘benefitting from the (January 3, 2026 US) invasion.’
This argument is also being applied to the strictly-commercial arrangement between Buckeye (an American-owned oil trans-shipment terminal in Saint Lucia) and the US Government, regarding a recent offloading here of shipload of Venezuelan oil on a super-tanker recently seized by the US, off Venezuela.
Here too, its permanent cynics and critics advise the Saint Lucia government ‘should tax those oil deposits’, ignorant of the fact that all such shipments deposited at the former Hess Oil terminal in Cul-de-Sac already attract ‘throughput charges’.
Nor are they aware of the provisions of the Hess Oil Refinery Act (1978) that allows for the deposits of Venezuelan oil seized by the US on high seas, at Buckeye.
The eternal naysayers and Doubting Thomases will continue to ‘spit in the sky and call it rain’ (to quote retired Saint Lucian bard and newspaper publisher Rick Wayne), but none of what drops back onto their faces from On-High will change or soften the hard facts that they simply cannot change.
Nontheless, new ideas are coming forth more-quickly in 2026 than ever before — and from a more-mature Caribbean citizenry — than after the Grenada Revolution imploded in 1983.
And that’s not just good but should also be applauded as a very-healthy and most-welcome development!