Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — October to December 2010

Published: 2 January 2011 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• US midterms: the Tea Party wave and diaspora political engagement: The 2 November 2010 US midterm elections produced the largest shift in the House of Representatives since 1938: Republicans gained 63 seats, retaking majority control, powered substantially by the Tea Party movement’s grassroots mobilisation. For Caribbean-American diaspora communities concentrated in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and the major urban centres, the elections signalled a political environment increasingly hostile to the progressive immigration reform that Obama had promised but not delivered. The Tea Party’s nativist wing had made immigration restriction a central theme. Diaspora communities that had supported Obama’s 2008 coalition were now watching a Congress that would obstruct both immigration reform and the economic agenda that diaspora households depended on.
• Haiti: the cholera outbreak compounds the crisis: Nine months after the 12 January earthquake, Haiti’s humanitarian crisis was deepening rather than resolving. A cholera outbreak, traced by international health investigators to a UN peacekeeping base’s sewage system contaminating the Artibonite River, was confirmed in mid-October 2010 and spread with alarming speed. By the end of December the outbreak had killed more than 3,500 people and infected over 150,000. Jamaican diaspora organisations that had been channelling humanitarian support to Haiti since January re-activated their response networks, with particular attention to cholera prevention supply chains. The Haitian-Jamaican community solidarity forged in the earthquake’s immediate aftermath was tested and sustained.
• Jamaica’s PM Golding: surviving the political fallout: Bruce Golding remained Prime Minister throughout Q4 2010, but the political damage from the Dudus affair’s dual blows — the Tivoli Incursion of May 2010 with its civilian death toll, and the admission of the lobbying contract — was persistent. The Western Kingston Commission of Enquiry’s preparatory work was underway. Opposition PNP leader Portia Simpson Miller maintained a consistent polling lead. Diaspora investors who had been monitoring the political environment before committing to return or investment decisions remained in a holding pattern, waiting for the political temperature to settle.
• UK austerity: the Comprehensive Spending Review bites: The Comprehensive Spending Review announced by Chancellor George Osborne in October 2010 — delivering average departmental cuts of 19 per cent over four years, with welfare caps, housing benefit reductions, and a public sector pay freeze — began to be felt in Q4 as the detail of local authority grant reductions became clear. British-Jamaican communities in London, Birmingham, and other major cities faced cuts to the community infrastructure — libraries, community centres, youth services — that had been built over decades. The student tuition fee increase to £9,000 — protested in November and December with the most significant student demonstrations since the early 1990s — had particular resonance in communities where higher education had been the primary social mobility pathway.
• 4th Biennial six-month follow-through: returnee programme update: Six months after the 4th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference of June 2010, the MFAFT’s returnee support agencies were assessing the conference’s implementation pipeline. The returnee facilitation recommendations — encompassing streamlined customs duty concessions on household goods, improved PICA documentation support, and improved health and pension portability information — were at varying stages of implementation. The political turbulence of the post-Tivoli period had not suppressed returnee enquiry volumes, with push factors in the UK and US maintaining interest.
• Christmas remittances close 2010: approximately US$1.9 billion for the year: Bank of Jamaica end-of-year data placed 2010’s total remittances at approximately US$1.9 billion — a modest recovery from 2009’s dip to approximately US$1.8 billion, which had reflected the acute phase of the global financial crisis’s impact on diaspora household incomes. December’s traditional Christmas transfer surge maintained its seasonal pattern, providing Jamaican families with the year-end cash injection that had become a structural feature of the domestic economy.

Introduction: Closing a Year of Crisis and Recovery

2010 closes as one of the most turbulent years the Jamaican diaspora has navigated: Haiti’s earthquake in January, the Tivoli Incursion in May, the Dudus extradition affair’s political fallout, the 4th Biennial in June, Haiti’s cholera in October, and the US and UK political shifts that will shape the diaspora’s operating environment for years. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 31 December 2010.

The US Midterms: What the Tea Party Wave Means for the Diaspora

The 63-seat Republican gain on 2 November was the largest House shift since the post-World War II Republican wave of 1946. The Tea Party movement — a coalition of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and libertarians bound together by opposition to Obama’s stimulus and healthcare reform — had fielded candidates across the country and won decisively in districts that had voted for Obama in 2008. The result produced a divided government that made legislative progress on virtually any issue requiring bipartisan support effectively impossible.

For Caribbean-American diaspora communities, the most immediate concern was immigration reform’s definitive death in the new Congress. The DREAM Act — legislation that would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants who had arrived as children — had been awaiting Senate action and would now be shelved indefinitely. The broader Comprehensive Immigration Reform that Obama had promised his Latino and Caribbean-American coalition partners was similarly blocked. Community organisations that had invested in immigration advocacy across 2009 and 2010 were now recalibrating their strategy for a congressional environment of active resistance.

Haiti: Cholera and the Continuing Crisis

The confirmation of cholera in Haiti in mid-October 2010 — nine months after the earthquake that had killed more than 230,000 people and displaced over a million — was a devastating addition to an already overwhelming humanitarian situation. International investigators’ conclusion that the outbreak was linked to a UN peacekeeping base’s inadequate sanitation — a finding the UN initially disputed but would later acknowledge — added a dimension of institutional culpability to the natural and political disaster. The Artibonite River’s contamination spread the infection to communities far from Port-au-Prince, reaching rural areas where sanitation infrastructure was already minimal.

Jamaican diaspora organisations’ response was practical and immediate: water purification tablets, oral rehydration salts, and cholera prevention education materials were added to the humanitarian supply pipelines that had been maintained since January. The Haitian-Jamaican relationship — the two islands’ proximity and their shared Caribbean experience — gave Jamaica’s diaspora a particular sense of obligation that organisations translated into sustained practical support.

Jamaica’s Political Year: The Dudus Affair’s Lasting Damage

Bruce Golding enters 2011 having survived the year’s political crisis but diminished by it. The December 2010 quarter closed with the Western Kingston Commission of Enquiry’s terms of reference being established and the Dudus extradition still awaiting its legal conclusion. Christopher Coke remained at large. The commission’s hearings, expected to begin in early 2011, would keep the affair’s painful questions — about the death toll, the conduct of security forces, and the government’s prior relationship with Coke — in public view throughout the year.

We report next from 2 April 2011, when the commission’s first quarter of hearings will have been completed and the Dudus affair’s next political chapter will be clearer.

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 2011.

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