Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — April to June 2018

Published: 2 July 2018 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• 8th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference: Montego Bay, June 2018: The 8th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference, held at the Montego Bay Convention Centre in June 2018, convened more than three thousand diaspora representatives from North America, the United Kingdom, and the wider Caribbean for three days of substantive engagement on economic partnership, investment facilitation, and diaspora governance. Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s opening keynote positioned the diaspora as central to Jamaica’s economic development strategy. The conference’s sectoral working groups — covering housing, agriculture, technology, health, education, and cultural industries — produced commitments that will be tracked through the biennial’s two-year implementation cycle.
• Windrush scandal at its peak: Rudd resigns, May apologises: The Windrush scandal reached its political apex in Q2 2018 as the full scale of the Home Office’s wrongful treatment of Windrush generation Caribbean community members became undeniable. Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned on 30 April after admitting she had misled Parliament about immigration removal targets. Prime Minister Theresa May — herself the architect of the hostile environment policy as Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016 — issued a formal apology to affected Caribbean leaders and community members. For the British-Jamaican community, the political reckoning was partial but significant: a state acknowledgment of injustice, though the path to full compensation remained uncharted.
• Trump’s family separation crisis: global outrage, executive reversal: Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s zero tolerance directive of 7 May 2018, which required the criminal prosecution of all illegal border crossers and produced the systematic separation of accompanying children from their parents, generated a wave of national and international condemnation that forced President Trump to sign an executive order on 20 June ostensibly ending family separation. As of this report’s publication date, thousands of children remain separated from their parents, with no clear reunification plan in place. The crisis has damaged the administration’s moral authority on immigration across all immigrant communities.
• Windrush: Jamaica presses UK for action: Prime Minister Holness’s direct engagement with UK Prime Minister May — both in bilateral meetings and through the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting held in London in April 2018 — pressed Jamaica’s demand for justice for affected Jamaican-British community members, accountability for those responsible, and rapid development of a compensation framework. The CHOGM meeting provided a multilateral Caribbean platform for the Windrush issue that elevated it to the highest level of Commonwealth diplomatic engagement.
• Jamaica economy: growth continues, IMF programme on track: Jamaica’s domestic economy continued its positive trajectory through Q2 2018, with the IMF economic reform programme delivering its expected outcomes of controlled inflation, declining unemployment, and modest GDP growth. The tourism sector’s strong first-half performance maintained the positive trajectory established through 2017 and heading toward another record year. Prime Minister Holness’s government pointed to the economic indicators as evidence of the reform programme’s success.
• Remittances: strong first half of 2018: Jamaica’s remittance inflows through Q2 2018 maintained their positive growth trajectory, with preliminary BOJ data confirming year-on-year gains across major source countries. The sustained health of US employment and the continued growth of digital transfer channels supported strong formal remittance performance through the first half of the year.

Introduction: Biennial Celebration and Diaspora Solidarity

The second quarter of 2018 will be remembered as one of the most consequential in the recent history of Jamaica’s global diaspora: the quarter in which the Windrush scandal’s injustice was officially acknowledged in the United Kingdom; the quarter in which the Trump administration’s family separation policy produced one of the most visceral confrontations over immigration in modern American history; and the quarter in which the global Jamaican diaspora community convened in Montego Bay for its 8th Biennial Conference, reaffirming its commitment to Jamaica’s development and its determination to translate diaspora goodwill into economic partnership at scale. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 30 June 2018.

8th Biennial Conference: The Diaspora in Montego Bay

The 8th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference—held at the Montego Bay Convention Centre in June 2018 under the theme “Diaspora: Energising Jamaica’s Development”—was the largest and most substantively ambitious gathering in the biennial conference’s sixteen-year history. More than three thousand diaspora representatives made the journey to Jamaica from New York, Toronto, London, Miami, Atlanta, Birmingham, and diaspora communities across the Caribbean, converging for three days of keynote addresses, sectoral working groups, investment showcases, and community reunion that simultaneously advance the strategic agenda of diaspora engagement and renew the personal bonds of transnational Jamaican community.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s opening keynote address positioned the diaspora’s economic contribution — remittances exceeding 16 per cent of GDP, diaspora investment in housing and business, and the professional skills transfer of returning residents — as central to Jamaica’s development strategy. The conference’s thematic emphasis on moving from remittance dependency toward structured diaspora investment reflected the strategic imperative of leveraging the diaspora’s accumulated capital beyond consumption support into productive economic activity.

The conference’s sectoral working groups produced specific commitments across housing and real estate — where the National Housing Trust’s diaspora mortgage product and customs duty frameworks for returning residents were the primary discussion vehicles — agriculture, technology, health, education, and the creative industries. Jamaica Homes’ participation in the housing working group’s discussions focused on the information gap that historically limits diaspora property investment: the absence of reliable, current, and transparently priced property market data accessible to diaspora buyers at a distance.

The Windrush Scandal: A Political Reckoning

The Windrush scandal’s political trajectory through Q2 2018 moved at extraordinary speed, from initial media exposures of individual hardship cases to a full-scale governmental crisis within weeks. The Guardian’s sustained investigative journalism — documenting the cases of British-Caribbean community members who had lived in the UK for five or six decades but were being treated as illegal immigrants by the Home Office — broke through into the mainstream political debate in April 2018, generating a national conversation about the human cost of the hostile environment immigration policy.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s resignation on 30 April, following her admission to the Home Affairs Select Committee that she had been unaware of immigration removal targets despite evidence to the contrary, crystallised the political crisis. Prime Minister Theresa May — who had designed the hostile environment policy framework as Home Secretary and implemented it through the 2014 Immigration Act — faced sustained pressure to acknowledge her own role in creating the conditions for the Windrush injustice, though she consistently declined to do so with the directness that Caribbean community advocates demanded.

For British-Jamaican community members, the Windrush scandal was both a political moment and a deeply personal reckoning. Many in the community had family members who had arrived in the UK on the Windrush or on subsequent vessels, who had spent their working lives building the NHS, the transport network, and Britain’s service economy, and who were now being told by the state they had contributed to that they had no right to be there. The anger was profound, the sense of betrayal visceral, and the demand for justice — real compensation, real accountability, real reform of the hostile environment — unequivocal.

Trump’s Family Separation: A Policy of Deliberate Cruelty

The Trump administration’s zero tolerance border policy — announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on 7 May 2018 as a direction to US Attorneys in border districts to prosecute all illegal border crossing cases, with the necessary consequence that children accompanying their parents could not be held in adult criminal detention facilities and were therefore separated — produced an escalating crisis through May and June 2018. The images and audio recordings of separated children — of children held in cage-like enclosures, of toddlers crying for their parents — produced a national and international response of moral outrage that transcended the usual political divisions of the Trump era.

President Trump’s executive order of 20 June 2018, purportedly ending family separation, left unresolved the question of how the more than two thousand children already separated from their parents would be reunited. A federal judge in California subsequently ordered the government to reunify all separated families within 30 days — a deadline the government was already acknowledging it could not meet as of this report’s publication. The administration’s implementation of the policy’s reversal has been characterised by the same administrative chaos and indifference to individual family welfare that characterised its implementation.

For Jamaican-American community organisations, the family separation crisis was a moment of intense moral and political clarity. While the zero tolerance policy targeted the southern border and its primary victims were Central American asylum seekers, the willingness of the administration to separate children from their parents as a deliberate policy instrument resonated across all immigrant communities as a demonstration of an approach to immigration enforcement with no meaningful humanitarian limit. The crisis accelerated community organisation efforts to mobilise Jamaican-American civic participation toward the November midterm elections.

Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting: Windrush Goes Global

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, held in London in April 2018, provided a multilateral platform for Caribbean leaders to raise the Windrush issue at the highest diplomatic level. Prime Minister Holness and other Caribbean leaders met directly with Prime Minister May to press their demand for justice, accountability, and rapid compensation. The CHOGM meetings — timed inadvertently to coincide with the Windrush scandal’s political peak — gave Caribbean governments an international platform that amplified the issue beyond the domestic UK political debate and established Jamaica’s role as a persistent diplomatic advocate for the community’s rights.

Jamaica Economy and Returnees

Jamaica’s domestic economy continued its steady positive trajectory through Q2 2018, delivering consistent GDP growth, declining unemployment, and controlled inflation under the IMF economic reform programme. The tourism sector maintained its strong first-half performance, and PICA’s Returning Residents facilitation service continued to process steady inquiry volumes from British-Jamaican and Jamaican-American prospective returnees. The 8th Biennial Conference’s housing working group discussions generated fresh interest in the investment pathways available to diaspora members considering property purchase or return migration, and Jamaica Homes maintained its active engagement with diaspora buyer enquiries through the quarter.

Outlook for Q3 2018

The third quarter of 2018 will be shaped by the family separation crisis’s resolution — or lack thereof — as court-ordered reunification timelines are tested. The Windrush Compensation Scheme’s design will advance under new Home Secretary Sajid Javid. The 8th Biennial’s post-conference implementation will begin in earnest. And the November US midterms will loom increasingly large as a political mobilisation focus for Jamaican-American community organisations. We report next from 2 October 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 July 2018.

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