After months of country-by-country pressure, visa bonds and quiet signings, the Conference of Heads of Government has finally spoken on Third Country Nationals — in four paragraphs of diplomatic language the region’s citizens are unlikely to swallow.

The Caribbean Community has finally spoken on the most contentious question confronting the region this year — and it took a closed-door caucus of Heads of Government to produce four paragraphs of the most carefully lawyered language to emerge from the Secretariat in recent memory.

In a statement issued Thursday from Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, CARICOM leaders confirmed what the region’s citizens have suspected for months: the Memoranda of Understanding on Third Country Nationals (TCNs), pressed upon individual member states by the government of the United States, are now an accomplished fact of Caribbean life.