Guyana’s escalating debate over migrant workers, foreign companies and access to government contracts is in danger of becoming a political distraction from the harder questions of procurement, accountability and labour exploitation, according to Dr. Terrence Richard Blackman, who is urging the country to separate legitimate scrutiny of migration from hostility toward the people who come here to work.
In his latest Sunday essay, “The Odyssey from Dhaka to Den Amstel,” published by the Guyana Business Journal, Blackman argues that Guyana’s own history makes it particularly ill-suited to turn migrants into political scapegoats.
Blackman is a Professor and Chair of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal. He places the present controversy against Guyana’s long history of forced, indentured and voluntary migration.
At the centre of his essay is Den Amstel, a village on the West Coast Demerara whose land was acquired by formerly enslaved Africans who pooled their wages to purchase property after emancipation.
Blackman argues that the history carries a direct lesson for contemporary Guyana: people who were once treated as labour and property became owners, institution-builders and community leaders.
“The Village Movement is the founding proof of a proposition I have spent my life defending in another register: that the people this world writes off as labour are, given the smallest opening, its most disciplined builders of institutions.”
That history, he argues, should inform how Guyana responds to a new wave of migration, particularly the arrival of workers from Bangladesh.
“So when a man from Dhaka walks the West Coast road, he is not walking into someone else’s story. He is walking into ours, at an earlier page.”
But Blackman is not calling for Guyana to ignore questions surrounding foreign recruitment or government contracts. Quite the opposite.
He points to the controversy surrounding Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc., including competing claims over government contracts, its corporate relationships and its involvement in recruiting foreign workers. Those claims, he argues, must be settled through documentary evidence rather than political rhetoric.
“Two sets of claims are now loose in the country, and they must not be allowed to fuse.”
That distinction is crucial. Allegations of procurement irregularities, political connections or conflicts of interest are questions about institutions and power. Migrant workers are not the authors of government contracts, procurement systems or work-permit rules.
Blackman warns that collapsing the two issues risks allowing legitimate anger about elite decision-making to be redirected downward toward workers who may themselves be vulnerable.
“The surest way to make immigration hurt Guyanese workers is to let migrants be cheated.”
His argument amounts to a more uncomfortable critique of Guyana’s migration debate: if foreign workers are recruited through opaque arrangements, burdened with recruitment debts or placed in abusive employment conditions, they can become a source of downward pressure on wages—not because they are inherently the problem, but because weak institutions allow employers to exploit them.
That, Blackman suggests, is where the government’s attention should be directed.
He calls for a transparent recruitment regime, public disclosure of work-permit data, stronger labour inspections and enforcement of wage protections. He also insists that government must address the conditions driving Guyanese professionals abroad rather than using foreign recruitment as a substitute for fixing domestic labour policies.
Guyana’s rapidly expanding economy, he argues, will continue to create labour shortages. The question is therefore not whether migration will happen, but whether it will occur through rules and institutions or opaque arrangements and political connections.
“The question is whether it imports labor under rules or under rackets.”
The sharper point in Blackman’s essay is that Guyana cannot demand transparency while tolerating ambiguity in areas where enormous public resources are involved.
If contracts were awarded improperly, the evidence should establish it. If allegations are false, the documents should clear those accused. If migrant workers are being exploited, the state should intervene. None of those questions requires turning nationality into a criminal category.
Blackman ultimately returns to the history of Den Amstel as a measure of Guyana’s national character.
“He is not a threat to it. He is its next chapter, if we govern well.”
His warning is as much about the integrity of Guyana’s institutions as it is about migrants: audit the contracts, expose the connections, enforce the labour laws and hold the powerful accountable—but do not make the worker carry the burden for decisions made above him.
