New chill winds from up North

AN ANNUAL FEATURE of the Caribbean Christmas experience is the advent of “chill” winds from the north, emanating from the US mainland in our case. In the specific case of our country, the Christmas breeze has become very much a feature of our Nine Mornings festival for instance.

This year the “chill” factor from the north has gone beyond the normal climatic effect; it is threatening to freeze even travel plans of many Caribbean citizens with close connections to family members in the USA. The origin of this “chill” is not the traditional North Pole but much further south of that extremity, none other than the White House in Washington D.C. the seat of government of the USA.

In his second term in office, President Donald Trump has intensified his anti-immigrant campaign, unleashing a vicious onslaught from hordes of ICE officials. It is also clear that this campaign has racial and religious overtones being aimed at black and African countries. If there were any doubt about it, President Trump is simultaneously promoting the racist and ridiculous fallacy that white people in South Africa, the home of apartheid, are being discriminated against and US immigration policies ought to be adjusted to accommodate easier migration for them to the USA.

The international news media, readily copied by our own dominant sources, pass off these dangerous actions of the US President by describing him as “transactional’ and such terms which disguise the true nature of his irrational edicts and their effects on people of colour everywhere.

But increasingly, we in the Caribbean, with centuries of relations with the USA stretching from common experiences in slavery, the anti-colonial struggle and, yes, immigration, find ourselves at the wrong end of this immigration stick. Despite these relations and our never-ending pledges of close alliances to the USA, we are treated no different to the people whom the US President has publicly and contemptuously referred to as “s…hole nations”.