Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee announced last Thursday that the local law enforcement officers had uncovered a racket involving locals and Chinese immigrants. Someone -- either here or aboard -- was forging Guyana visas and selling them to the Chinese.
By Thursday, there were 13 Chinese in detention pending deportation. The police had also received that there were three Chinese members of a gang who were instrumental in the procurement of the visas.
It is no secret that the Chinese have been coming here, one way or another, for a number of years. We have seen them all over the country, and closer examination revealed that very few ever remained. Those who came would somehow be absorbed into the local Chinese community and, before long, they would disappear.
We suspect that they would head north, either legally or illegally. We know that many of them were caught in the backtrack ring and deported, often to mainland China since none could claim to be of Guyanese origin.
Guyana has the land space to accept large numbers of immigrants. It is about the size of Great Britain, which has some 50 million people, but here the population is less than a million.
However, every country needs to protect its integrity. No country in the world would tolerate people simply moving in and living illegally. This has implications for the economy. People are required to pay taxes, and if someone is illegal then that person would not be on the tax register.
Meanwhile, that person enjoys all the benefits that tax-paying citizens enjoy, including free education and free medical attention. The great United States, with its untold wealth, complains about illegal immigrants. The residents often became angry at these illegal immigrants accessing the goods and services for free while the Americans were forced to foot the bill.
But there is something amazing here. China is by far the fastest growing country in the world. It has untold resources, and at this time it is demanding so much material that certain entities are hard pressed to maintain supplies. Cement, steel, wood and all the building products one could imagine simply disappear in the world's most populous nation.
There is no shortage of work, as cities undergo some of the most remarkable transformation the world would ever see. China is undergoing development that Guyana could only dream of. It is a case of the very rich and the very poor. This, then, boggles the mind that people would leave a fast-growing economy to come to one that has precious little.
It surely cannot be that China is so restricted that people cannot move about freely. And in any case, that country is so big that one could move from one part to another if it is that one wants to change one's location.
So there must be another reason for the outward migration. We should wonder whether those Chinese who come are not being trafficked. There is a lot of money being made in human trafficking, and perhaps rampant Chinese gangs, in cahoots with equally money-hungry Guyanese, have decided to capitalise on the less fortunate in the Chinese society.
Sociologists may wish to explain the movement of the Chinese by concluding that man, by nature, is a migratory animal and he would always want to move from one location to another.
That may be so, but one would never hear of someone from the developed north seeking a false visa to come to this part of the world for a residence of any sort, although many of them do set up what they call summer homes in these parts. However, these are the very rich.
The Chinese who come are by no means among the very rich. Perhaps the lure of a world to which they have been attracted by magazines and brochures is greater than the riches they have back in their homeland.
In any case, Guyana has a right to clamp down on the illegal migration. In the first instance, to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration is to create a haven for criminals and other undesirables. We have enough problems with our own criminals; then we have to take our own deportees into consideration.