Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2008

Annual Review | Published: 31 December 2008 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways: 2008 in Six Lines

• Barack Obama Elected 44th US President on 4 November
• Usain Bolt Wins Beijing Triple Gold With Records of 9.69 and 19.30
• Lehman Brothers Collapses on 15 September: Global Financial Crisis Begins
• 3rd Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference Held Under Golding’s JLP
• Global Recession Spreads: Diaspora Households Feel the Squeeze
• Remittances to Jamaica Reach Approximately US$2.0 Billion

The Year in Review

2008 was a year of polar extremes — the highest of athletic highs and the most frightening financial crisis since the Great Depression. Usain Bolt’s performances at the Beijing Olympics of August transformed the global understanding of human sprinting capacity. His 9.69 seconds in the 100m final — easing up to celebrate in the final strides, his shoelace untied — was followed by 19.30 in the 200m final and a 4x100m relay gold. For Jamaica’s diaspora communities worldwide, the Beijing nights were collective events of a joy and pride that transcended sport. The viewing gatherings — in south London pubs, Brooklyn community centres, Toronto restaurants — were celebrations of Jamaican identity as a global force.

Barack Obama’s election on 4 November as the 44th President of the United States — the first African-American to hold the office — produced scenes of celebration in diaspora communities from London to New York to Toronto that matched the intensity of the Bolt reaction in August. Grant Park in Chicago on election night was watched by millions of diaspora members worldwide who understood the election’s symbolic weight without needing to be American to feel it. Two events in the same year that demonstrated, in different registers, that the barriers that had seemed permanent were not.

Between them, the collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September opened the global financial crisis that would cast its shadow well beyond 2008. The cascade of bank failures, the seizure of credit markets, and the speed with which the crisis spread from Wall Street to Main Street and across the Atlantic produced the deepest global recession since the 1930s. For diaspora communities, the immediate impact was on household finances in host countries: job losses, reduced hours, tighter credit. Annual remittances to Jamaica held at approximately US$2.0 billion for 2008, but the trajectory for 2009 was already downward as the recession deepened. The 3rd Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference, held under Bruce Golding’s JLP administration, demonstrated that the institutional framework had survived the 2007 election’s party change with its commitments intact — a significant proof of durability that the diaspora had needed to see.

Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2008 | Jamaica Homes News. Compiled from four quarterly editions published April, July, October 2008, and January 2009.

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