Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — July to September 2017

Published: 2 October 2017 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• URGENT: Hurricane Maria has devastated Puerto Rico and Dominica: Hurricane Maria made landfall on Dominica on 18 September 2017 as a Category 5 storm, destroying the island’s infrastructure almost entirely. Two days later, on 20 September, Maria hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4, knocking out the entire electrical grid, destroying thousands of homes, and producing a humanitarian catastrophe on a US territory that is still only partially understood twelve days after landfall. The official death toll is still being counted. Power has been restored to only a tiny fraction of the island. Jamaican-American and broader Caribbean diaspora communities are in emergency mobilisation mode, collecting relief, hosting evacuees, and pressing for a federal response commensurate with the scale of the disaster.
• Hurricanes Harvey and Irma: Texas, Caribbean, and Florida hit: Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston, Texas area from 25 August, producing historic flooding that killed more than eighty people and caused over $125 billion in damage. Hurricane Irma, which briefly threatened Jamaica on 9 September before tracking north and devastating Barbuda, Saint Barthélémy, Saint Martin, the British Virgin Islands, and subsequently Florida, produced the mass evacuation of multiple Caribbean islands and widespread destruction across the region. Jamaica experienced tropical storm-force winds and some coastal flooding from Irma but escaped the catastrophic direct impact that destroyed Barbuda and devastated Saint Martin.
• DACA rescinded: September 5 announcement shocks Dreamers: Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ September 5, 2017 announcement that the Trump administration was rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, with a six-month wind-down period to allow Congress to legislate a replacement, was the most consequential immigration action of the Trump presidency to that date. Approximately 700,000 DACA recipients — including Jamaican-origin Dreamers who had grown up in the United States — were placed under a March 2018 deadline that the administration presented as a Congressional ultimatum rather than a compassionate policy choice.
• Charlottesville and Trump’s ‘both sides’ response: racial justice debate intensifies: The Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on 12 August 2017 — during which neo-Nazis marched openly, a counter-protester was killed when a white supremacist drove a car into the crowd, and President Trump responded by attributing blame to “both sides” and describing “very fine people” among the white supremacist marchers — intensified the racial justice debate across Black American and Caribbean-American communities. Trump’s response to Charlottesville was widely condemned across the political spectrum and produced the largest cohort of corporate and advisory council resignations of his presidency to that point.
• Jamaica: Irma’s limited impact and hurricane preparedness: Jamaica’s experience of Hurricane Irma — which produced tropical storm conditions and emergency preparations but not the catastrophic impact that destroyed Barbuda, a smaller island with fewer resources for fortification — demonstrated both the efficacy of Jamaica’s disaster preparedness infrastructure and the fundamental vulnerability of all Caribbean island nations to the intensifying hurricane seasons that climate change appears to be producing. The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) coordinated Jamaica’s emergency response, and the government’s rapid communication with diaspora communities about the island’s status was widely commended.
• Remittances: humanitarian surge expected from hurricane-season giving: The extraordinary humanitarian context of Q3 2017 — three major Atlantic hurricanes within weeks, producing catastrophic losses across the Caribbean diaspora’s network of family connections — was expected to produce a surge in remittance and charitable giving through the quarter’s end and into Q4. BOJ and Western Union data through August showed Jamaica’s year-on-year remittance growth continuing on the positive trajectory established in 2016, and the hurricane season’s humanitarian urgency was expected to amplify that trajectory through September and October.

Introduction: The Most Devastating Atlantic Hurricane Season in a Generation

The third quarter of 2017 has been defined, in ways that are still unfolding as this report is published on 2 October, by the most catastrophic Atlantic hurricane season in living memory. The three major hurricanes that struck in rapid succession — Harvey in Texas, Irma across the northern Caribbean and Florida, Maria in Puerto Rico and Dominica — produced a scale of Caribbean destruction that has no precedent in the modern era. For Jamaica’s diaspora communities, the hurricane season’s human toll — in family members in Puerto Rico without power or clean water, in friends from Dominica whose homes no longer exist, in the Caribbean-born residents of the Houston neighborhoods that Harvey drowned — has been intensely personal. This report is written with Puerto Rico’s catastrophe still in its earliest days and Maria’s full impact still being tallied. It draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 30 September 2017.

Hurricane Maria: A Catastrophe Still Unfolding

Hurricane Maria’s impact on the Caribbean as of this report’s publication date is still being measured, but what is already clear is that it represents one of the most devastating natural disasters in the Western Hemisphere’s modern history. Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, sheltering in place as the Category 5 storm destroyed his residence and then the entire island’s infrastructure around him, posted real-time updates from his phone as the storm stripped Dominica of most of its buildings and all of its trees. Puerto Rico’s situation — still largely without power, with large portions of the population lacking access to clean water and communications — is both a humanitarian crisis and a test of whether the United States government will provide a US territory’s three and a half million citizens with the same level of response it provides to mainland disaster areas.

The federal government’s response in the twelve days since Maria’s Puerto Rico landfall has been widely criticised as inadequate: slow in mobilising logistics, limited in the resources deployed, and characterised by a presidential posture — including tweets criticising Puerto Rico’s elected officials rather than directing federal attention to the humanitarian emergency — that has shocked American observers across the political spectrum. For Caribbean-American diaspora communities, whose Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Caribbean-island connections mean that the human face of Maria’s devastation is intensely personal, the federal response’s inadequacy has produced a political fury that is already shaping the diaspora’s engagement with the 2018 midterm cycle.

Jamaican-American community organisations across New York, South Florida, and Atlanta have been mobilising emergency relief efforts: collections of food, water, baby supplies, and medical equipment; fundraising drives through Caribbean cultural organisations and churches; and advocacy with Congressional representatives for additional FEMA resources for Puerto Rico. The diaspora solidarity that the hurricane season has produced cuts across national lines — Jamaican-Americans helping Puerto Rican evacuees, Trinidadian-Americans contributing to Dominica relief, the Caribbean diaspora functioning as a mutual aid network in the face of a crisis that has struck all of its constituent communities.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma: Houston and the Caribbean

Hurricane Harvey’s landfall near Rockport, Texas on 25 August 2017 and its subsequent stall over the Houston metropolitan area produced historic rainfall — over sixty inches in some locations — that overwhelmed the city’s drainage infrastructure and flooded hundreds of thousands of homes. Houston’s Caribbean-origin population, including a significant Jamaican-American community concentrated in the city’s southwest, was among those affected by the flooding. Jamaican-American organisations outside Houston coordinated support for affected community members, and PICA maintained communication with consular contacts about Jamaican nationals affected in the disaster zone.

Hurricane Irma’s track through the Caribbean produced existential devastation in Barbuda — where 95 per cent of structures were damaged or destroyed and the island’s entire population was evacuated — and severe damage across the British Virgin Islands, Saint Martin, the US Virgin Islands, and the Turks and Caicos. Irma’s approach to Jamaica on 9 September produced emergency preparations, the pre-positioning of relief supplies, and the staged evacuation of coastal areas, but the storm’s track northward meant that Jamaica experienced tropical storm-force rather than hurricane conditions. The island’s escape from Irma’s direct impact — while neighbouring territories suffered catastrophically — prompted both relief and solidarity from Jamaica’s government and diaspora community.

DACA Rescission: September 5 and the Dreamers

Attorney General Sessions’ September 5 announcement of DACA’s rescission was framed by the administration as a constitutional necessity — the reversal of what it characterised as President Obama’s executive overreach in creating a programme without Congressional authorisation — but its practical effect was to place approximately 700,000 young people who had built their entire adult lives in the United States under a six-month deportation threat unless Congress acted. The announcement was delivered amid the hurricane season’s urgency, creating a compound moment of anxiety for Jamaican-American communities simultaneously tracking the fates of family members in Puerto Rico and Dominica and processing the existential threat to Dreamer community members.

Jamaican-American community organisations moved quickly to provide DACA recipients with legal information, Know Your Rights sessions, and emergency legal representation resources following the September 5 announcement. The approximately 700,000 current DACA holders — a figure that includes Jamaican-origin young people who arrived in the US as children and have no meaningful connection to Jamaica — were navigating a legal landscape in which their ability to remain in the country they had grown up in now depended on a Congress that had repeatedly failed to pass comprehensive immigration legislation.

Charlottesville and the Racial Justice Moment

The Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on 12 August 2017 — at which neo-Nazis marched openly, chanting racist and antisemitic slogans, and a counter-protester was killed when a white supremacist drove a car into the crowd — produced a political moment whose significance for Black and Caribbean-American communities went far beyond the Charlottesville violence itself. President Trump’s initial response — attributing blame to “many sides” and subsequently describing “very fine people on both sides” — was interpreted across the Black American political community, including Jamaican-American civic organisations, as a presidential endorsement of white supremacist moral equivalence rather than an unambiguous condemnation of racial hatred.

The Charlottesville response intensified the debate, within Jamaican-American community organisations, about the specific vulnerabilities of Black immigrants in an era of emboldened white nationalism. The intersection of anti-Black racism and anti-immigrant sentiment — themes that the white supremacist movement explicitly connected in its Charlottesville messaging — created a political context in which Jamaican-American civic engagement was simultaneously animated by racial justice concerns and immigration defence imperatives. Community organisations across New York, South Florida, and Atlanta responded to Charlottesville with town halls, solidarity statements, and renewed voter registration efforts.

Outlook for Q4 2017

The immediate task of Q4 2017 is humanitarian: continuing to support the recovery of Caribbean communities from the hurricane season’s devastation, and pressing for a federal response to Puerto Rico commensurate with the scale of the emergency. Beyond that immediate horizon, the DACA clock is ticking toward March 2018. Jamaica’s Christmas remittance peak will build through Q4. And the 8th Biennial’s planning for June 2018 will begin to accelerate. We report next from 2 January 2018.

This Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora and Returnee Update is researched and published by Jamaica Homes News. Sources consulted include the Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Nationwide News Network, RJR News, Caribbean National Weekly, Bank of Jamaica, Planning Institute of Jamaica, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, and PICA. All figures and developments are accurate as of the publication date, 2 October 2017.

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