Sir Ronald Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda’s Ambassador to the United States, used a column carried this week by Kaieteur News to make a deceptively simple argument about Caribbean migration policy: sovereignty cuts both ways. Governments, he wrote, rightly assert their authority to regulate borders, determine who may enter, and enforce their laws. The United States has that right. So does every sovereign Caribbean state. The question is what each does with it.
The argument matters at this particular moment because of who it implicitly answers. Caribbean responses to the January US immigrant visa pause, the visa integrity fee, and the visa bond rules have varied from quiet acceptance to public objection to the launch of new Citizenship by Investment programmes into a hostile environment. None of those responses has involved a coordinated regional articulation of Caribbean migration policy as a sovereign assertion in its own right. Sanders is gently arguing that the absence of that articulation is itself a strategic failure.
The Carib-Indian dimension threads through this conversation in ways that are often missed. The Indian diaspora across the Caribbean — concentrated in Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and to varying degrees across the wider region — has its own migration corridors that run through North America, the United Kingdom, and increasingly to India itself. When the US tightens visa policy on Guyana or Trinidad, the effect is not abstract; it lands directly on families that have been working those corridors for generations. Sanders’s framing — that Caribbean sovereignty in migration policy is real and should be exercised — points toward a more confident regional posture. Whether CARICOM produces that posture, or continues to react piecemeal, is the question the next 12 months will answer.
Sources: Kaieteur News; Caribbean News Global, May 10–13, 2026.