THE EDITOR, Sir:
I WOULD like to join the debate about criminal deportees which headlined your issue of November 7.
As a matter of fairness, we Jamaicans should be more sympathetic to deportees. After all, we must acknowledge that our first National Hero, Marcus Garvey, was deported from the USA. We must also recognise that the Ambassador Sue Cobb, in attempting to reduce the argument about deportees to a numbers game, is intentionally obfuscating the issue. What about the influence of criminal masterminds?
The Ambassador knows and understands the problems that transfer of inappropriate technology can cause, and the influence of the individual on society, and yet she speaks about majorities and their length of stay in the USA. This is a problem of technology transfer.
In a different dimension, the weapons of mass destruction, rockets, telephones, and many things too numerous to mention, in which the USA leads the world, were invented or developed by individuals 'exported' to the USA.People who make the argument that our crime problem has been exacerbated by criminals of Jamaican descent deported to us from USA, Canada, UK, are saying that, our country lacks the technological sophistication to deal with criminals who have received their post-graduate training in the 'Criminal Universities' in the metropolitan countries.
They believe that when you educate them or improve their criminal expertise and then catch them there, you should isolate them and prevent them from infecting defenceless countries, especially if they are friendly. You could consider the money spent to be foreign aid.
If they are deported, then create havoc in Jamaica, the monetary aid that you give our law enforcement here to help solve the crime problem is probably more than their incarceration or supervision would cost in the US. If an illegal alien living in your country for 10 years caught the Bubonic Plague, would it be OK to send him right back where he came from, uncured, knowing that we could not cure him?
I do not make the above arguments, because there are a lot of things that we, our Police, our Government, have failed to do, but I hate to see the use of undergraduate debating techniques possibly trying to make us look like fools.
I am etc.,
DENNIS STEPHENS
saturn@jamaica.com
