Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — October to December 2009

Published: 2 January 2010 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize to Global Surprise
• Copenhagen Summit Ends Without a Binding Climate Deal
• US Unemployment Hits Decade-High 10.2 Per Cent
• Jamaica Enters Pivotal IMF Debt Exchange Programme
• Christmas Remittances Dip Under Financial Crisis Pressure
• Fort Hood Shooting Shocks Caribbean-American Military Families

Introduction: A Quarter of Global Reckoning

Q4 2009 ended a year of extraordinary turbulence for Jamaica’s diaspora communities with a cluster of events that will define the decade’s close: a Nobel Prize that surprised the world, a climate summit that failed it, an unemployment rate that confirmed the recession’s deepest damage, and a fiscal crisis in Jamaica that required an IMF intervention. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 31 December 2009.

Obama’s Nobel: The Diaspora’s Complicated Pride

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on 9 October 2009 that Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the reaction across Caribbean diaspora communities — communities that had celebrated his inauguration nine months earlier with a fervour unlike any previous US political event — was a mixture of pride and bewilderment. Pride, because the recognition of a Black American president by the world’s most prestigious peace institution carried a symbolic weight that transcended the prize’s usual significance. Bewilderment, because Obama himself acknowledged that he had been in office for less than two weeks when the nomination closed, and that his accomplishments were, by any objective measure, still prospective rather than achieved.

The Committee’s citation — praising Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” — was understood by diaspora community leaders as recognition of what Obama’s election had represented globally rather than what his administration had yet delivered. The Afghanistan surge, announced in November, complicated the peace-prize narrative further: within weeks of receiving the Nobel, Obama announced a decision to deploy 30,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan. The diaspora’s response to the surge was as divided as the broader American public’s, with Caribbean-American veterans’ groups, community organisations, and individual members holding genuinely different views on the necessity and wisdom of escalation.

For the British-Jamaican community, the Nobel coverage was filtered through the lens of Gordon Brown’s government’s own Afghanistan commitment, which was generating increasing public unease in the UK. Caribbean-British families with members serving in the armed forces — the Caribbean community has had a distinctive and proud military service tradition in Britain since both World Wars — were following the Afghanistan campaign’s human cost with the particular attention of those with personal stakes in the outcome.

Copenhagen: The Climate Failure and Its Caribbean Implications

The 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in Copenhagen from 7 to 19 December 2009 and attended by more than 190 nations including the major Caribbean island states, produced the Copenhagen Accord — a non-binding political agreement that fell far short of the legally binding emissions reduction framework that the scientific consensus and small island developing states had demanded. For the Caribbean diaspora community, the Copenhagen outcome was experienced not as an abstract diplomatic failure but as a direct threat to the island homes from which diaspora communities had come and to which many planned to return.

Jamaica, like all Caribbean island nations, is acutely exposed to the consequences of unchecked climate change: sea level rise threatening coastal communities and tourist infrastructure; intensifying hurricane seasons; coral reef bleaching damaging the fisheries and marine ecosystems that underpin significant parts of the rural economy; and freshwater stress in the interior. The CARICOM grouping had attended Copenhagen with a unified position demanding 1.5-degree maximum warming targets and binding emissions commitments from major emitters. The Copenhagen Accord’s voluntary pledges and 2-degree framing were experienced in Caribbean capitals as developed-nation abandonment of small island survival imperatives.

Caribbean diaspora advocacy organisations in New York, London, and Toronto had run climate awareness campaigns through the autumn, building on the CARICOM position and the moral clarity of small island voices like Tuvalu’s. The outcome — produced in a back-room deal between the US, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, with small islands and most of the developing world excluded from the key negotiations — generated deep bitterness in Caribbean communities and a renewed commitment to diaspora advocacy on the climate agenda in the years ahead.

US Unemployment at 10.2 Per Cent: The Diaspora Household Crisis

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ October 2009 report, showing US unemployment at 10.2 per cent — the highest rate since April 1983 — confirmed what diaspora communities had been experiencing in their daily lives for the better part of a year. The headline rate, already alarming, masked the disproportionate impact on the communities where Caribbean-American populations were concentrated. The unemployment rate for Black Americans in October 2009 was 15.7 per cent. In the construction, hospitality, care, and retail sectors where Jamaican-American workers were heavily represented, the contraction had been severe.

The unemployment crisis had a direct transmission mechanism to Jamaica through remittances. Bank of Jamaica data pointed to 2009 closing with total annual remittances of approximately US$1.8 billion — the first significant year-on-year decline since data collection began in its modern form, and a reduction of roughly 10 per cent from 2008’s pre-crisis level. The human reality behind that aggregate number was diaspora households managing their own job losses and reduced income while simultaneously trying to maintain financial support to Jamaican family members whose own economic prospects had deteriorated as the global recession spread to Jamaica’s tourism and bauxite-dependent economy.

Community organisations in the Flatbush and Crown Heights neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, in the Liberty City and Miramar areas of South Florida, and in the Jamaican community concentrations of the Bronx reported increased demand for emergency food assistance, debt counselling, housing support, and utility payment aid through Q4. The Christmas season, which normally produced an upswing in community spirits and remittance flows, was more muted than in any year in recent memory. Families were managing the tension between their desire to maintain Christmas traditions — including sending funds to Jamaica for family celebrations — and the constrained reality of unemployment, reduced hours, or the anxiety of employment that felt insecure.

Jamaica’s IMF Deal: The Debt Exchange and Its Diaspora Implications

Jamaica entered Q4 2009 with its public debt approaching 130 per cent of GDP — one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world for a nation not in default — and with the Golding government in advanced negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for a new standby arrangement to provide balance of payments support and signal fiscal credibility to international markets. The Jamaica Debt Exchange — a domestic debt restructuring operation in which domestic bondholders were asked to voluntarily exchange existing high-yield instruments for new lower-rate bonds — was being structured through Q4 and would be launched in early 2010.

For diaspora investors who had channelled savings into Jamaican government instruments through local banks or investment firms — a significant cohort in the remittance-engaged diaspora, particularly among older returnee-intending community members who had been building Jamaican financial assets in preparation for return — the debt exchange signalled a reduction in their returns and raised questions about Jamaica’s fiscal trajectory. PIOJ projections for 2009 showed Jamaica’s economy contracting by approximately 3 per cent, the sharpest single-year contraction in a generation, driven by the collapse of bauxite revenues as global commodity prices fell and by tourism’s sharp decline as US and UK visitors curtailed discretionary travel.

Fort Hood: Caribbean-American Military Families in Mourning

The mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009 — in which Major Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and wounded 32 at the Soldier Readiness Processing Centre — affected Caribbean-American military families directly. The Caribbean community’s tradition of military service in the United States — sustained across generations from the Second World War through Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars, and continuing in the all-volunteer force — meant that Fort Hood’s posting lists included Caribbean-American service members. Community organisations in the New York metropolitan area and Florida organised prayer vigils and support for affected families, sustaining the tradition of mutual aid that had characterised Caribbean-American community response to national tragedy since 11 September 2001.

Christmas Remittances and the Year in Review

December’s traditional remittance surge — the year’s largest monthly flow, driven by Christmas giving, school fee payments for the January term, and the symbolic importance of being seen to provide for family at the festive season — materialised in 2009 at a reduced level relative to 2008 but remained structurally robust. The diaspora’s commitment to Christmas remittances was, community leaders observed, the last budget line to be cut: diaspora households would reduce personal spending, delay purchases, and draw down savings before reducing the Christmas transfer to Jamaica. That structural commitment sustained what would otherwise have been a steeper decline.

As 2009 closes and 2010 opens, the diaspora community looks forward with cautious optimism. The Haiti earthquake — which struck on 12 January 2010, just ten days into the new year and after this bulletin’s copy date — will be the defining story of Q1 2010. The 4th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference is scheduled for June 2010. The global recovery, tentative but real, offers hope for the remittance restoration that Jamaica’s economy urgently needs. We report next from 2 April 2010.

This Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora and Returnee Update is researched and published by Jamaica Homes News. Sources include Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and PICA. All figures and developments are accurate as of the publication date, 2 January 2010.

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