Over the Hurdle

One evening last week in Port-of-Spain, the political chieftains of the British West Indies and dignified officials from London's Colonial Office, attending a dance recital, leaped gaily up and joined the cast in a calypso "jump-up" while a steel band drummed and clanged. It was a week for exuberance in Trinidad: swiftly, almost offhandedly, the assembled leaders tore down the biggest roadblock in the way of fast-approaching nationhood for the British West Indian colonies.

The hurdle was immigration. Though the logic of their common geography and fate points insistently to a federation government within the Commonwealth along with free movement of populations among the islands, passionate local prejudices have raised formidable barriers. The most striking: Trinidad's exclusion of Barbadians. Trinidad's East Indians, a potent bloc forming one-third of the island's 660,000 people, fear they would lose their political leverage and their oil-economy prosperity if the job-hungry Negroes of swarming Barbados (1,200 persons to the square mile) could move in freely. Fears that the immigration problem could not be solved have hung over the federation plan ever since it got started in 1947; London's guess before the Trinidad meeting started was that the talks might take weeks.

But once they had gathered, island leaders tacitly agreed that federation--which amounts to making a British dominion out of Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and the Windward and Leeward Islands--would be meaningless if the bars stayed up. The islands' elder statesman, Barbados' Premier Grantley Herbert Adams, set forth the case for free movement, Trinidadian Labor Minister Albert Gomes offered concessions, and Jamaican Chief Minister Norman Washington Manley soon brought them into agreement.

The planned solution: for a few years --probably five--after federation, island legislatures will keep the power to make immigration laws, presumably retaining some barriers. After that the projected federal Parliament will get power to act on immigration, presumably to remove the barriers. Ratification of this compromise by island legislatures is expected in coming weeks. The next step toward federation will be a constitution-writing conference next October.

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