Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — January to March 2013

Published: 2 April 2013 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• Obama’s second inaugural: immigration reform as a second-term priority: President Obama’s second inaugural address on 21 January 2013 — notable for its explicit embrace of equality, “our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity” — placed immigration reform as a stated second-term legislative priority. For Jamaican-American communities that had watched comprehensive reform’s failure in Obama’s first term — partly due to the president’s prioritisation of healthcare reform and partly due to Republican obstruction — the inaugural’s immigration commitment was received as a signal that the second term would be different. The political calculus had changed: Republican analysts, processing their November 2012 loss among Latino and minority voters, were increasingly arguing that immigration reform was necessary for the party’s survival.
• Gang of Eight: bipartisan Senate negotiations take shape: Through Q1 2013, a bipartisan group of eight US senators — four Democrats and four Republicans, including Marco Rubio whose participation was seen as essential to conservative credibility — were negotiating the framework of a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Early indications suggested the bill would include a path to citizenship, enhanced border security, an agricultural guestworker programme, and changes to the visa system. Caribbean community advocacy organisations were engaged in the process, pressing for adequate treatment of the family reunification visa categories that had historically been the primary legal pathway for Caribbean immigration and that restrictionist reform proposals sometimes targeted for reduction.
• Hurricane Sandy’s Caribbean community aftermath: Hurricane Sandy’s October 2012 devastation of the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area — including the Caribbean communities of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and the Jamaican-American enclave of Flatbush — continued to define community life through Q1 2013. Community members whose homes had been flooded, whose cars had been lost, and whose small businesses had been shuttered were navigating FEMA’s disaster recovery programmes with the help of Caribbean community legal and advocacy organisations. The recovery was slower than the community needed, and the gap between Sandy’s public profile as a white suburban disaster and its reality as a Black and immigrant community disaster was a source of community frustration.
• Jamaica: IMF programme negotiations: Jamaica’s government under PM Portia Simpson Miller was in active negotiation with the IMF through Q1 2013, seeking to agree the Extended Fund Facility terms that would replace the previous Stand-By Arrangement and provide the fiscal framework within which Jamaica’s debt sustainability path would be managed. The negotiations involved the National Debt Exchange — Jamaica’s domestic debt restructuring — as a precondition for the IMF programme, and the NDX’s successful completion in February 2013 cleared the way for the programme’s conclusion. For the diaspora community, the IMF programme’s terms and the economic trajectory they implied were central to the assessment of Jamaica’s investment climate.
• 5th Biennial: nine months of follow-through: Nine months on from the 5th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference of June 2012, MFAFT’s implementation tracking showed continued progress across the conference’s working group commitments. The digital engagement platform developments were advancing, the trade facilitation working group had completed its initial mapping of diaspora business capacity, and the returnee facilitation stream was processing its first cohort of conference-referred prospective returnees through PICA’s formal facilitation programme.
• Remittances Q1 2013: steady start to the year: Bank of Jamaica data for Q1 2013 confirmed a positive year-on-year remittance performance, with the US source market’s improving employment conditions supporting steady flows. The Sandy aftermath’s community financial pressure may have modestly constrained New York-area remittance sending in the quarter, but the overall picture was positive. Total 2013 annual flows were expected to remain close to 2012’s approximately US$2.1 billion.

Introduction: A New Term, A New Chance

Obama’s second inaugural’s immigration commitment and the Gang of Eight’s early progress gave Q1 2013 a tone of genuine legislative possibility that the diaspora community received with cautious hope. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 31 March 2013.

The Political Calculus Shifts

The Republican Party’s internal reckoning with its November 2012 election loss — producing the Republican National Committee’s “Autopsy Report” in March 2013, which explicitly identified the party’s immigration positions as a barrier to Hispanic and minority voter support — created a political environment in which conservative support for immigration reform was for the first time in years a genuine legislative possibility. The Gang of Eight’s inclusion of Republican senators whose home-state political constituencies demanded border security made the emerging bill’s architecture more comprehensive than previous reform proposals: it traded the path to citizenship for an enforcement investment that conservatives could justify to their base.

Outlook for Q2 2013

Q2 2013 brings the Gang of Eight bill’s Senate introduction and potential vote, Jamaica’s IMF programme finalisation, the 5th Biennial’s one-year anniversary, and the beginning of the Hurricane Sandy recovery’s longer-term phase. We report next from 2 July 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 April 2013.

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