Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2018

Annual Review | Published: 31 December 2018 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways: 2018 in Six Lines

• Windrush Scandal Erupts: Amber Rudd Resigns, Compensation Scheme Promised
• 8th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference Held Under Holness Administration
• Brexit Withdrawal Agreement Reached but Rejected by UK Parliament
• US Family Separation Policy Shocks Caribbean-American Diaspora Communities
• Meghan Markle Marries Prince Harry: Caribbean Heritage in the Royal Family
• Jamaica Remittances Pass US$2.5 Billion: Digital Transfers Drive Growth

The Year in Review

2018 was the year the Windrush scandal fully broke. The Guardian’s sustained investigative journalism, combined with Caribbean leaders’ intervention at the April Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London, produced a political crisis in which the scale of the British government’s wrongful treatment of Caribbean residents was no longer deniable. Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s resignation in April, following her misleading statements to Parliament about deportation targets, was followed by a formal apology from Prime Minister Theresa May and the establishment of the Windrush Compensation Scheme. For British-Jamaican and wider Caribbean-British communities, the Windrush revelations were a moral rupture: confirmation that the “hostile environment” immigration policy had treated their elders as targets to be removed rather than citizens to be served, and that the British state had done so for years while asserting otherwise. The anger was deep and sustained, extending well beyond the specific cases of wrongful deportation to the structural questions of how and why this had been allowed to happen.

The 8th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference, held under Andrew Holness’s JLP administration, demonstrated the framework’s cross-party durability for a third successive election cycle. Brexit’s negotiated Withdrawal Agreement — reached in November between Theresa May’s government and the EU — was rejected by the House of Commons in December, opening a parliamentary impasse that would define 2019. In the United States, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy of June — which separated children from parents as a deterrent to asylum seekers — produced one of the most visceral public controversies of the Trump presidency. For Caribbean-American diaspora communities whose members navigated the US immigration system and whose families included individuals with uncertain legal status, the family separation policy was an atrocity committed in their immigration domain. Meghan Markle’s marriage to Prince Harry in May brought the first person of mixed Caribbean heritage into the British Royal Family, generating complex and genuine celebration in Caribbean diaspora communities alongside the inevitable media commentary. Annual remittances to Jamaica passed US$2.5 billion, driven in significant part by the shift to digital transfer platforms that had expanded the remittance sender base and reduced transaction costs.

Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2018 | Jamaica Homes News. Compiled from four quarterly editions published April, July, October 2018, and January 2019.

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