Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — July to September 2012

Published: 2 October 2012 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• London 2012: Bolt’s second consecutive Olympic sprint treble: The London 2012 Olympic Games, held from 27 July to 12 August in venues across the British capital, produced Jamaica’s most celebrated Olympic performance since independence. Usain Bolt’s completion of a second consecutive 100 metres, 200 metres, and 4×100 metres relay treble — joining his Beijing 2008 sweep with an equally dominant London performance — was the Games’ defining narrative. His 100 metres in 9.63 seconds — an Olympic record — included a moment of theatrical intensity in the final metres that the Olympic Stadium’s 80,000-strong crowd and the estimated 800 million television viewers will not forget. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce successfully defended her 2008 100 metres Olympic gold in 10.75 seconds, becoming Jamaica’s most decorated female Olympic sprinter. The Jamaican squad’s total of twelve medals, including four gold, was the island’s greatest Olympic performance relative to population of any Games in the modern era.
• Jamaica’s 50th independence anniversary: diaspora celebrations worldwide: Jamaica’s 50th anniversary of independence from Britain, celebrated on 6 August 2012 with the global diaspora in full community festivity, was a moment of profound collective reflection for the Jamaican communities of New York, London, Toronto, and beyond. The half-century mark prompted discussions of the independence project’s achievements and unfinished business, of what Jamaica had become and what it was still becoming, and of the diaspora’s role — through remittances, return, and relentless cultural productivity — in the island’s story. The Olympic Games’ timing — with Bolt’s treble coinciding almost exactly with independence day — produced a compression of national pride that diaspora communities across the world experienced as a defining moment.
• DACA applications open: a new beginning for thousands: Following President Obama’s June 2012 announcement of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, the Department of Homeland Security opened DACA applications on 15 August 2012. The first weeks produced an enormous community response: legal aid organisations were swamped with application assistance requests, community outreach workers were conducting eligibility screening sessions, and the first approved DACA recipients were receiving their work authorisation permits by September. For Jamaican-American young adults who had grown up in the United States without legal status, DACA’s opening was one of the most transformative policy developments in the community’s history.
• 5th Biennial: three months of implementation: Three months on from the 5th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference of June 2012, the advisory committee inaugural meetings had been convened and the working group implementation plans were in their early execution phases. The Biennial’s returnee facilitation stream had generated significant interest, and PICA’s returnee facilitation service was processing an elevated volume of inquiries from conference-referred prospective returnees. The digital engagement commitments were in their platform development phase.
• US election: Caribbean community mobilisation: With the US presidential election now five weeks away as of this publication, Jamaican-American civic organisations were in the final push of voter registration and mobilisation drives. Obama’s DACA announcement had energised the community’s engagement with the election, and the contrast between Obama’s immigration positions — including his stated goal of comprehensive reform — and Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” rhetoric was the community’s defining electoral frame.
• Remittances Q3 2012: stable flows: Bank of Jamaica data for Q3 2012 showed broadly stable year-on-year remittance flows, reflecting the US economy’s continued gradual recovery and the UK economy’s shallow improvement. The 50th anniversary diaspora travel to Jamaica — with tens of thousands of diaspora members visiting for independence celebrations — provided additional economic impact beyond the remittance transfer data.

Introduction: Jamaica’s Golden Summer

The summer of 2012 was Jamaica’s finest in living memory: 50 years of independence and an Olympic treble in the nation that had once been the colonial metropolis. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 30 September 2012.

London and the British-Jamaican Community’s Double Pride

For British-Jamaican communities, the London Olympics produced a dual pride of a particularly complex and pleasurable kind: pride in a British Olympics that was, by most assessments, one of the best-organised Games in modern history, and pride in Jamaica’s domination of the sprint track that the Olympics had temporarily returned to British soil. The Opening Ceremony’s explicit acknowledgement of the Windrush generation — the Caribbean migrants whose labour had rebuilt postwar Britain — was received with deep appreciation by communities whose contribution to British life had too rarely been formally recognised in national ceremony.

Outlook for Q4 2012

Q4 2012 brings the US presidential election on 6 November, Hurricane Sandy’s October 29 landfall (its impact on Caribbean communities in New York will be the quarter’s most acute emergency), DACA’s continued rollout, and Christmas remittances. We report next from 2 January 2013.

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 October 2012.

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