Recession, Remittances and a Gathering Storm in Kingston

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2010 | Period covered: July–December 2009

Key Developments at a Glance

• Jamaican remittances from UK fall sharply as recession cuts wages and employment in British Caribbean communities.
• US extradition request for Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke creates acute political crisis for Golding government.
• Gordon Brown’s UK immigration points-based system now fully operational; Caribbean applicants report increased barriers.
• UK recession confirmed; Black unemployment rises faster than national average as cuts begin to bite.
• CARICOM presses for global financial regulation reform and debt relief for Caribbean economies.
• Jamaica Independence anniversary in August marked with diaspora events across UK cities despite economic hardship.

The second half of 2009 arrives with the global financial crisis, which erupted in full force in the autumn of 2008, still working its way through the real economies of Britain and Jamaica and the lives of the people who connect them. For the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, the recession is not an abstraction: it is felt in reduced overtime, in job losses in the public and private sectors, in the diminished capacity to send money home. For Jamaica, the consequences are both direct — in falling tourism revenues and declining foreign investment — and indirect, through the remittance channel that represents the island’s single most important source of external income. The year ends with both economies still struggling, and with a political crisis in Kingston that threatens to overshadow everything else.

The Recession and Its Impact on the Diaspora

Jamaica receives more in remittances each year than it does in foreign direct investment, aid, or export earnings from its largest single commodity. In 2007 and 2008, remittances ran at approximately two billion US dollars annually, with substantial flows coming from the United Kingdom as well as from the United States and Canada. The Caribbean diaspora in Britain, now several generations deep and comprising a community whose economic participation spans the NHS, the transport network, the financial services sector, and public administration, is a major contributor to this flow. When the recession reduces earnings and employment across the British economy — and when Black workers are among those hardest hit, as the unemployment figures consistently show — the consequences are felt directly in communities across Jamaica.

Community organisations and churches in Britain that run remittance support schemes and financial literacy programmes for Caribbean members report a marked increase in anxiety and distress among members who feel the dual pressure of managing reduced income in the UK while meeting family expectations at home. Some members of the diaspora are remitting less than they were two years ago; others are dipping into savings to maintain their commitments to family in Jamaica. The Bank of Jamaica has recorded a decline in remittance inflows, and the Jamaican government has been pressed to consider what policy measures can be taken to mitigate the impact on communities that depend on these transfers for basic needs including food, school fees, and healthcare.

The Coke Extradition Crisis

The request by the United States Department of Justice, transmitted formally to the Jamaican government in August 2009, for the extradition of Christopher “Dudus” Coke — the leader of the Shower Posse gang and a figure of extraordinary influence in the West Kingston constituency — has created an acute political crisis for Prime Minister Bruce Golding and the Jamaica Labour Party government. The extradition request is legally straightforward under the terms of the Jamaica-US extradition treaty; the political dimensions are anything but.

Coke is widely understood to be a central figure in the system of garrison politics that has shaped Jamaican political culture for decades: a community patron whose capacity to deliver votes and maintain order in his territory made him a valued political asset, and whose relationship with the JLP’s West Kingston constituency organisation was intimate and well-documented. Golding’s government initially sought to delay and obstruct the extradition process, including through the controversial engagement of an American lobbying firm — Manatt, Phelps & Phillips — to argue on Coke’s behalf with the US State Department. This arrangement, when it became public knowledge, caused a political scandal whose implications are still being worked through.

For the Jamaican diaspora in Britain, the Coke affair crystallises long-standing anxieties about the depth of organised crime’s penetration of Jamaican political institutions. Caribbean community leaders in the UK have been pressing for years for a more serious Jamaican government commitment to tackling gang violence and the garrison system that sustains it. The extradition request, and the government’s tortuous response to it, has given fresh urgency to those calls. The crisis remains unresolved as the year ends, and its eventual resolution — which most observers believe must ultimately involve compliance with the extradition request — carries the potential for significant violence.

Immigration Policy in the Final Year of New Labour

The UK government’s points-based immigration system, introduced progressively from 2008 onwards as a replacement for the previous work permit and student visa regimes, is now fully operational across all tiers. The system was presented by the Home Office as a merit-based framework designed to attract the skills Britain needs while controlling overall numbers. In practice, Caribbean community organisations and immigration lawyers report that its effect has been to raise barriers to family reunification, to restrict the entry of lower-skilled workers from Commonwealth countries, and to create new compliance burdens for employers and educational institutions that sponsor visa applicants.

Of particular concern to the established Caribbean community is the impact of the system on elderly relatives who wish to join family in Britain, and on younger Jamaicans who seek to visit family members settled in the UK. The financial requirements for spousal and family visas have become more stringent; the documentary requirements have become more onerous; and refusal rates for visitors from Jamaica and other Caribbean countries remain high relative to those for visitors from comparable Commonwealth countries. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has documented these disparities, and Caribbean community organisations continue to press the government for a more equitable approach to Commonwealth citizens’ right to family life in Britain.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, facing a general election that must be held by June 2010, has shown no inclination to relax immigration controls that polling suggests are popular with a majority of the electorate. The political debate on immigration has become increasingly focused on numbers — on the headline net migration figure and on what targets or caps might be introduced — in ways that the Caribbean community finds both reductive and threatening. The Runnymede Trust and the Black Equity Organisation have been arguing consistently that the framing of immigration as a problem to be managed rather than a contribution to be welcomed does particular harm to communities whose presence in Britain is rooted in a specific historical relationship with the Crown and the Commonwealth.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Bank of Jamaica; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; Runnymede Trust; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); UK Parliament Hansard.

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