The Sixty-Year Argument

 

Sunday Essay · Diaspora & Development

Why Guyana keeps having the same diaspora conversation — and what it will take to finally stop

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · March 31, 2026

In 1987, a young Guyanese engineer named Fitzroy packed two suitcases and flew to Toronto. He was not fleeing failure. He was fleeing a country that had no use for what he could do. The Burnham economy had hollowed out the professional class so thoroughly that a qualified engineer could not find work commensurate with his training, could not purchase basic materials, could not feed his family on a state salary, as inflation had reduced it to near-fiction. Guyana lost somewhere between a quarter and a third of its educated population in those years — including an estimated 70 percent of its university-trained professionals between 1962 and 1968 alone. It was a sustained hemorrhage that gutted medicine, engineering, education, and law simultaneously. The country that remained was not simply poorer. It was structurally diminished, weakened at the precise moment it needed to be strong.

GBJ Data Note: The structural hemorrhage described above is historically unmatched in the region. Between 1965 and 2000, Guyana experienced an emigration rate of approximately 89 percent among its tertiary-educated population — the highest in the Caribbean and among the highest recorded globally.

Thirty years later, Fitzroy’s daughter flew back to Georgetown with a project management certification, a network of Canadian investors, and a genuine desire to contribute to the country her father had described across three decades of diaspora longing. She was met with bureaucratic opacity, professional suspicion from colleagues who read her return as competition rather than reinforcement, and a government incentive package that — however well-intentioned — communicated to the people around her that she was considered more valuable than they were. She stayed eighteen months. Then she went back to Toronto.

This is not a story about ingratitude. It is not a story about small-mindedness. It is a story about what happens when policy design keeps colliding with history and refuses to learn from it.

The Sixty-Year Cycle

Guyana has been having the diaspora conversation for nearly six decades. The cycle did not begin with the oil boom, nor did it begin in the 1980s. It began in 1967, just one year after independence, when Prime Minister Forbes Burnham and his Finance Minister, Peter D’Aguiar, launched the first formal remigration scheme to reverse the initial wave of post-colonial brain drain. The primary mechanism of that 1967 scheme was the provision of duty-free concessions on personal effects and tools of trade. Fifty-eight years later, the cast of characters has changed. The GDP figures have changed. The rhetoric — “nation-building,” “brain gain,” “One Guyana” — refreshes with each administration. But the underlying argument remains structurally identical: the diaspora wants to come home, local professionals feel threatened, the government offers the exact same duty-free perks that inflame rather than reconcile, and the cycle resets.

The oil boom has not resolved this argument. By radically accelerating the timeline for national development, it has amplified the stakes of getting it wrong.

GBJ Data Note: Guyana’s real GDP growth averaged 47 percent annually from 2022 to 2024 — the fastest in the world by a significant margin. The Caribbean average over the same period was approximately 4 percent. This asymmetry exponentially raises the stakes of the diaspora debate.

We are now the fastest-growing economy in the world — a fact repeated so often it has acquired the numbness of a slogan. Nearly half of all Guyanese live outside the country, and more than half of Guyanese residents in Guyana still live in poverty.

GBJ Data Note: Guyana ranks first globally for its diaspora as a share of total population. When accounting for undocumented migration and second-generation diaspora members, the “nearly half” framing accurately reflects the scale of the Guyanese transnational community.

This diaspora sends remittances that, in President Ali’s own words, “contributed significantly to the eradication of many social problems” and “helped us during many difficult times.” The Guyanese Diaspora are not peripheral people. They are co-authors of whatever national survival Guyana managed across fifty years of turbulence and exodus.

GBJ Data Note: While remittances as a percentage of GDP have mathematically declined since oil production began, this is a denominator effect caused by the rapid expansion of oil-driven GDP. Absolute remittance flows remain a critical pillar of national survival.

And yet the moment they appear at the Cheddi Jagan International airport with ambitions rather than just remittances, suspicion hardens into resentment.

The Sixty-Year Record

The history of this argument is not a footnote; it is the blueprint of our current failure. The context for Guyana’s initial remigration efforts was a period of intense demographic hemorrhage. In the early 1960s, political instability and worsening economic conditions — exacerbated by the deeply unpopular “Kaldor Budget” of 1962¹ — triggered an initial wave of emigration. This exodus was accelerated by a dual shift in international immigration policies: while the United Kingdom tightened its borders with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, the United States and Canada simultaneously opened their doors to skilled labor, redirecting the flow of Guyanese professionals to North America.

Recognizing the critical need for skilled personnel to build the newly independent state, Prime Minister Forbes Burnham launched a formal remigration scheme in 1967. The primary mechanism of this scheme was the provision of duty-free concessions on personal effects, household goods, and tools of trade. It was intended to ease the financial burden of relocation and make returning to Guyana a more attractive proposition for those who had established lives abroad.

GBJ Data Note: The 1967 scheme established the precedent of offering duty-free concessions as the primary tool for incentivizing return — a policy mechanism that remains the cornerstone of Guyana’s modern Re-migrant Scheme, which was formalized and expanded in the 1990s.

As Guyana transitioned into a “cooperative republic” in 1970, the government actively recruited overseas Guyanese to manage newly nationalized sectors, recognizing that internal capacity was insufficient. However, the effectiveness of these early remigration schemes was continually undermined by broader economic realities. The shift toward cooperative socialism, coupled with economic stagnation, accelerated the emigration of the middle class. While the government offered duty-free concessions, these incentives were insufficient to counterbalance the declining standard of living and foreign exchange shortages. The 1967 scheme could not stem the larger tide of outward migration because the incentives were overwhelmed by the conditions.

The Plantation Reflex

To understand why, you have to resist the temptation to make this a story about personalities. It is a story about what Lloyd Best spent a career trying to name: the plantation economy’s most durable inheritance is not poverty. It is a structural reflex — the compulsive orientation of Caribbean states toward the external, the metropolitan, the certified-elsewhere. The plantation did not merely extract labor. It trained an entire social order to distrust what it produced internally and defer to what arrived from outside. Best argued that Caribbean independence changed the personnel of power without dismantling this reflex. The new postcolonial managers inherited the plantation’s orientation even as they inherited its buildings.

Walter Rodney made the analysis more devastating. Underdevelopment, in his account, was not an accident of geography or culture. It was actively produced through policy and institutional design — the daily choices states make about whose knowledge counts and whose labor is worth what. But Rodney also believed — and this is the part of his thinking most often suppressed — that the reversal was possible. Not through sentiment, not through the politics of guilt, but through the deliberate construction of what he called genuine human infrastructure: the trained people, the functioning institutions, the accumulated knowledge, and the social trust that allow a people to develop themselves rather than waiting to be developed by others.

Apply both lenses to Guyanese diaspora policy and the picture clarifies immediately. When a postcolonial state offers personal perks — tax breaks, duty concessions, subsidized housing — to returning diaspora members unavailable to local professionals of equivalent qualification, it reproduces the plantation’s foundational hierarchy: external over internal, certified-abroad over built-at-home. The resentment this generates is not petty nationalism. It is the historically informed response of a professional class that has correctly read what the state is communicating about their worth.

“Policies designed to attract talent end up destroying the trust that makes talent useful. They solve a supply problem while manufacturing a cohesion problem. And cohesion is not soft infrastructure. It is the hardest infrastructure of all.”

Investment vs. Identity: The Correction

The correction is not complicated. It is, however, politically difficult because it requires disaggregating two things conflated since 1967: incentives for investment and perks for identity.

There is a defensible argument for incentivizing specific categories of investment — agro-processing, technology, renewable energy, education, oil and gas skills development — regardless of who makes them. A Guyanese entrepreneur from Berbice who opens a dairy processing plant should enjoy the same concessions as a diaspora Guyanese who does the same. A software engineer from Linden who builds a fintech startup should access the same support as a Silicon Valley returnee. The moment incentives attach to what is being built rather than where the builder has been living, the discriminatory optics dissolve and the playing field levels.

This reorientation also has a sectoral urgency the personal perks debate obscures entirely. Guyana’s oil and gas industry will require, in the coming decade, a substantial cohort of trained geoscientists, petroleum engineers, data scientists, and environmental specialists. These are not positions that can be filled by goodwill and a returning passport. They require deliberate, structured skills pipelines of the kind the diaspora is uniquely positioned to help build — precisely because so many Guyanese professionals are working at the frontier of these disciplines in Houston, Calgary, and Aberdeen.

GBJ Data Note: The arithmetic case for institutional knowledge transfer is unavoidable. The ILO projects a workforce demand of 260,000 against a potential labor force of under 40,000. With over 80 percent of the working-age population lacking tertiary education, employers report that 62 percent of required technical skills are scarce locally but available abroad — precisely the diaspora’s profile.

The question is not whether a diaspora professional deserves a duty concession on personal goods. The question is whether Guyana is building the institutional architecture — curriculum partnerships, endowed chairs at the University of Guyana, visiting scholar programs, research collaborations — that will produce the next generation of local decision-makers rather than permanently importing them.

“The diaspora’s most important contribution is not capital. It is knowledge transfer that stays. A diaspora professional who helps design a curriculum, establishes a mentorship cohort, or co-founds a training program has built something that continues working after the plane takes off.”

The Architecture Already Exists

The Amaya Milk Company story illustrates what diaspora partnership looks like when the architecture supports it. Faced with the absurdity of visiting Guyana and finding no fresh milk in a supermarket, Canada-based entrepreneur Omkaar Sharma did not wait for a government perks package. He partnered with local company Sterling Products, built a supply chain, and launched a business that created jobs on farms, reduced import dependence, and addressed a basic gap in the food economy. The motive was partly commercial. The outcome was structural. Not a handout. A handshake.

Dr. Jason Mars, the Guyanese-born AI scientist who established scholarships for University of Guyana Computer Science majors to pursue PhDs abroad while connecting local developers to projects with major international firms, arrived not performing charity but performing partnership. “The beautiful thing about Guyana,” he observed, “is that it has intellectual and energetic young people with fires in their belly to do good work.” That is not the language of a benefactor surveying the underdeveloped. It is the language of a collaborator who recognizes capacity when he sees it.

And here it is worth pausing to acknowledge that this architecture already exists — built quietly, without government incentive packages, by the diaspora itself. Scholar Lear Matthews, whose research on Caribbean transnational associations is the most sustained documentation of this phenomenon, has argued that the Guyanese diaspora’s most underestimated contribution is not the remittance wire transfer. It is the organized civil society diaspora communities have constructed across North America — hometown associations, church networks, professional guilds, and above all, the high school alumni associations that have maintained living institutional connections to specific Guyanese communities for generations.

The Queens College Alumni Association of New York is perhaps the most prominent example, but far from alone. Alumni associations representing Tutorial High School, Bishops’ High School, St. Stanislaus College, Berbice High School, and dozens of other secondary institutions have been operating in New York, Toronto, and London for decades — funding scholarships, equipping libraries and computer labs, mentoring young alumni, and sustaining the specific, place-rooted institutional loyalty that government diaspora strategies almost never manage to manufacture from above. These associations do not require a duty concession to function. They require something the state consistently underestimates: a connection deep enough to survive distance and time.

Both examples point toward what a serious diaspora engagement strategy prioritizes: the architecture of institutional connection. STEMGuyana — founded by Dr. Karen Abrams, a Guyanese diaspora scientist who returned with the explicit purpose of building something institutional rather than symbolic — embodies precisely this logic. Through robotics clubs now active in all ten regions, Dr. Abrams has given a child in Lethem the same encounter with computational thinking available to a child in Georgetown. None of these require preferential treatment of returning residents over locals. All require the state to recognize what Lear Matthews’s scholarship has been demonstrating for years: the diaspora has already built the connective tissue. The question is whether Guyana’s policy architecture is intelligent enough to work with it rather than around it.

The Altruism Question

The altruism question deserves direct examination, because it is where the public debate most consistently loses its footing.

When local observers question whether the “comebackie” is genuinely committed or merely opportunistic, they are applying a moral standard to economic actors that we apply nowhere else. We do not interrogate the motives of foreign investors entering the oil services sector. We do not require construction firms to demonstrate patriotic feeling before awarding contracts. The relevant question is never purely about motive. It is about terms: Are the terms of engagement structured to build local capacity or to extract value? Does expertise transfer to local counterparts, or stay locked inside the returning professional while locals remain subordinate?

Best would have recognized the risk immediately. The plantation’s most sophisticated modern descendant is not the foreign oil company. It is the project model: importing expertise without producing local competence, and leaving when the contract ends without leaving anything durable behind. Brain gain, in its worst forms, is a more credentialed version of the same extractive logic. We know this because we have lived it. The 1967 remigration scheme ultimately failed not because the diaspora lacked patriotism, but because individual duty-free concessions were insufficient to counterbalance a declining standard of living and a contracting economy. The incentives were overwhelmed by the conditions. The antidote — what economists now call brain circulation — is policy that allows expertise to flow without creating dependency: the visiting professor who mentors graduate students, the energy professional who co-designs curriculum at the University of Guyana, the agribusiness expert who spends a season working alongside local farmers and leaves behind both a technique and a person capable of teaching it.

GBJ Data Note: Transitioning from a model of individual perks to one of institutional architecture aligns with contemporary development economics. It ensures that knowledge transfer remains embedded within local institutions, thereby building genuine human infrastructure.

The Harder Conversation: Regional Equity

There is a harder conversation underneath all of this that Guyana is not yet having clearly enough, and it concerns equity across a different axis than the diaspora-local divide.

The oil boom has concentrated its early benefits along the coast, in Georgetown, among those already positioned to capture contracts, real estate appreciation, and government adjacency. If diaspora engagement produces a more sophisticated Georgetown professional class while the Essequibo farmer and the Lethem schoolteacher remain structurally outside the conversation, we have not solved the development problem. We have upgraded its beneficiaries.

GBJ Data Note: The spatial inequality is stark. While the national poverty rate averages approximately 36 percent, poverty in the rural hinterland regions (1, 7, 8, and 9) reaches 74 percent. A diaspora strategy that ignores this geography will merely subsidize existing disparities.

This is why the sectoral argument carries moral weight beyond its technical merits. Incentives attached to investment in agriculture, in regional infrastructure, in education technology, in rural connectivity — rather than to the identity of the investor — carry a built-in distributional logic. Rodney understood that the geography of underdevelopment is not accidental. The interior was not left behind by neglect alone. It was left behind by a development model that, even in its progressive iterations, kept the coast as the site of value and the hinterland as the site of extraction. Any diaspora engagement strategy that does not consciously interrupt this spatial logic will reproduce it — with diaspora branding on the exterior.

The Compound Cost

Fitzroy never came back. He built a life in Toronto, raised his daughter there, and died there. His daughter, after her eighteen months, returned to Canada and has not come back since.

The tragedy is not merely the absence of one family at the dinner table. It is the absence of what they would have built. The loss is architectural. But architecture can be changed. That is, finally, the point.

Every Fitzroy who packed two suitcases was also a university department not founded, a hospital not staffed, a research program not established, a generation of students not mentored. The loss is not linear. It compounds.

GBJ Data Note: The cumulative loss of an estimated 135,000 tertiary-educated professionals over six decades represents a staggering deficit in institutional capacity. Reversing this requires structural knowledge transfer, not just financial remittances.

Guyana has been given a window of historically singular proportion — the revenues, the attention, the developmental moment — to build the institutions that will sustain this country when the last barrel is pumped. If we get the design right: sector-based incentives, brain circulation embedded in institutional partnerships, equitable regional distribution, a posture that treats all Guyanese contribution as equally legitimate — the forty-year argument ends. Not because the tensions disappear but because the architecture no longer manufactures them.

If we get it wrong, we will be here in another decade with better GDP numbers and the same unresolved resentments. Fitzroy’s granddaughter, born in Toronto, fluent in a country she has visited but never inhabited, will carry the particular grief of the diaspora child: connected enough to mourn what was lost, distant enough to know she cannot retrieve it alone.

The question is no longer whether the diaspora matters. It is whether we are designing a country capable of using what it offers.

“Build the human infrastructure. Build it now. Build it for everyone.”

¹ The 1962 “Kaldor Budget” was a controversial fiscal plan introduced in British Guiana on January 31, 1962, by Dr. Cheddi Jagan’s PPP government, designed by Cambridge economist Nicholas Kaldor to raise funds for industrialization via increased taxes and austerity. It triggered widespread protests, leading to the Feb 16 “Black Friday” riots, looting, and political instability. ↩

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References

1. Mishra, P. Emigration and Brain Drain: Evidence from the Caribbean. IMF Working Paper WP/06/25 (2006). imf.org
2. International Labour Organization. Skills Needs Assessment for the Oil and Gas Sector in Guyana, 2022–2026 (2022). ilo.org
3. IMF. World Economic Outlook, April 2025: Guyana Country Data. imf.org
4. World Bank. Migration and Remittances Data: Guyana (2022). worldbank.org
5. Forbes, R. Guyana Diaspora: Scale and Composition. Caribbean Development Bank Working Paper (2022). caribank.org
6. OCHA. Guyana Country Profile (June 2022). reliefweb.int
7. Inter-American Development Bank. Poverty and Inequality in Guyana Amidst Economic Boom (December 2024). iadb.org
8. Saxenian, A. The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Harvard University Press (2006).
9. Docquier, F. & Rapoport, H. “Globalization, Brain Drain, and Development.” Journal of Economic Literature, 50(3): 681–730 (2012).
10. Matthews, L. Caribbean Transnational Associations and Development. Caribbean Studies Series (2019).
11. Guyana Bureau of Statistics. Labour Force Survey 2021. statisticsguyana.gov.gy
12. Strachan, A.J. Government Sponsored Return Migration to Guyana (1980). Cited in: Sussex University Thesis, Exploring the potential development consequences and impact of return migration to Guyana.
13. UN ECOSOC. Outflow of Trained Personnel from Developing to Developed Countries (1970). United Nations Economic and Social Council.
14. Stabroek News. The Remigrant’s Scheme and Its Shortcomings (2014). stabroeknews.com

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