Jamaica Diaspora Five-Year Roundup 2015–2019: Brexit, Bolt’s Farewell, and Windrush

Five-Year Retrospective | Published: 31 December 2019 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways: 2015–2019 in Six Lines

• Brexit Vote June 2016: British-Jamaican Community Faces New Uncertainty
• Trump Elected November 2016: US Immigration Environment Transforms
• Bolt Wins Third Rio 100m Gold Then Retires: The Bolt Era Closes
• Windrush Scandal Erupts 2018: Home Office Found Institutionally Racist
• 7th and 8th Biennials Sustain Framework Through Political Turbulence
• Remittances Grow From US$2.2 Billion to US$2.6 Billion

2015–2019: The Five Years That Changed the Rules

The third quinquennium of this series was defined by two political events — Brexit and Trump — that between them reshaped the conditions in which the largest concentrations of Jamaica’s diaspora community lived. The Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016 — voting 52-48 for Leave — was not specifically about the Caribbean community, but its consequences were direct and immediate for British-Jamaican community members whose settlement status, family reunion rights, and occupational context were all affected by Britain’s departure from the European Union. The immigration framework that Brexit replaced — and the points-based UK immigration system that succeeded it — restructured the pathways through which Commonwealth citizens entered and settled in the UK in ways that are still being measured. Donald Trump’s November 2016 election transformed the US immigration environment through the first term’s enforcement escalations, family separation policy of 2018, and hostile rhetoric toward immigrants from “shithole countries” that diaspora communities understood was directed at them regardless of the specific countries named.

The quinquennium also brought the Bolt era to its close. Rio de Janeiro’s August 2016 100m final — Bolt’s third consecutive Olympic title, his ninth Olympic gold medal — concluded the most extraordinary individual athletic career in the history of sprinting. His retirement that followed was mourned across the diaspora as the end of a decade in which Jamaica’s global cultural standing had been elevated beyond anything sport had previously achieved for a small island nation. The Windrush scandal’s full eruption in 2018 — when The Guardian’s journalism combined with Caribbean leaders’ intervention at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting to force a political crisis of sufficient scale that the Home Secretary resigned — exposed the moral nadir of UK immigration policy toward the Caribbean community. The Wendy Williams Lessons Learned Review, commissioned in 2019, would confirm in 2020 what Caribbean communities already knew: that the hostile environment had been institutionally racist in its design and implementation. The 7th and 8th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conferences — held in 2016 and 2018 under Andrew Holness’s JLP administration — sustained the institutional framework through political turbulence of a kind that had not existed when the series began. Remittances grew from US$2.2 billion in 2015 to a record US$2.6 billion in 2019, driven by digital transfer platforms that had democratised the sender base and reduced transaction costs.

Jamaica Diaspora Five-Year Roundup 2015–2019 | Jamaica Homes News. Compiled from twenty quarterly editions and five annual roundups, 2015–2019.