Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — April to June 2020

Published: 2 July 2020 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• COVID-19 lockdowns: global peak and Jamaica’s managed response: The COVID-19 pandemic reached its first peak of global lockdown intensity through April–June 2020, with major diaspora countries implementing sweeping movement restrictions, business closures, and social distancing requirements. Jamaica imposed its own curfew and gathering restrictions while pursuing its distinctive strategy of keeping the air border open under health protocols, recognising the catastrophic economic consequences of a complete tourism-sector shutdown.
• CARES Act stimulus: unexpected remittance boost from Washington: The US CARES Act’s $1,200 direct payments and $600 weekly unemployment supplement, which began flowing to Jamaican-American households from April 2020, produced a notable spike in US-origin remittances to Jamaica. BOJ data for April and May showed remittances running significantly above the equivalent 2019 months, confounding predictions of a pandemic-driven remittance collapse and establishing the “pandemic remittance paradox” as the defining feature of 2020’s remittance story.
• George Floyd: racial justice moment at quarter’s end: The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020 — filmed and shared globally — produced an immediate and massive protest response across the United States that was still building at this report’s publication date. For Jamaican-American and British-Jamaican communities with deep experience of racial injustice in their countries of residence, Floyd’s killing and the BLM movement’s resurgence resonated profoundly.
• 9th Biennial Conference formally postponed: virtual engagement planned: The 9th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference, which had been planned for June 2020 in Jamaica, was formally postponed during Q2 as the pandemic made an in-person international gathering impossible. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade committed to a virtual diaspora engagement programme as a substitute, maintaining the connection with the diaspora community through the pandemic period.
• Tourism collapse: Jamaica’s economy in unprecedented crisis: Jamaica’s tourism sector — the engine of the island’s economy — was devastated through Q2 2020 as international flight networks collapsed, hotels closed, and global travel demand evaporated. Stopover visitor arrivals through Q2 were a tiny fraction of the equivalent 2019 period, and the broader economic impact — through the tourism supply chain’s linkages with agriculture, transport, retail, and services — was severe.
• Deportees: PICA adapts reception to COVID protocols: Deportation flights from the United States continued through Q2 2020, requiring PICA to adapt its deportee reception and processing protocols to COVID-19 health requirements. Arriving deportees were subject to health screening, testing, and quarantine arrangements, adding complexity to an already challenging reintegration process and placing additional demands on the resources of RISE Life Management Services.

Introduction: The Quarter the World Stopped

The second quarter of 2020 was one of the most extraordinary periods in modern global history. Across North America and Europe, the COVID-19 pandemic produced lockdowns of historic comprehensiveness: schools closed, offices emptied, non-essential businesses shuttered, and billions of people were confined to their homes. The global economy contracted at a pace not seen since the Great Depression. Airlines grounded their fleets. International borders closed. The interconnected world that had enabled Jamaica’s diaspora to maintain close transnational family ties suddenly became radically more distant.

And yet, paradoxically, the quarter that saw the most severe economic shock in living memory also produced one of the strongest quarters for Jamaica’s remittance inflows in recent history. The mechanisms through which this occurred — the US government’s unprecedented fiscal intervention, the substitution of remote financial support for suppressed in-person giving, and the intensification of diaspora solidarity in a moment of shared global crisis — would define Jamaica’s remittance story for the remainder of 2020 and into 2021. This update draws on the Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, PICA, and Caribbean diaspora media.

COVID-19: The Pandemic’s Peak and Jamaica’s Response

By April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had produced lockdowns of unprecedented scale across the major diaspora countries. The United States — which had been slow to implement national measures — was experiencing its first acute wave in New York, New Jersey, and other northeastern states, with daily death tolls that shocked a nation that had underestimated the virus’s lethality. The United Kingdom was in full national lockdown from 23 March, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson—himself hospitalised with COVID in April—directing the country’s emergency response. Canada implemented provincial lockdowns through March and April. Jamaica’s diaspora communities in all three countries were experiencing the pandemic’s full weight: the loss of loved ones, the health anxiety of front-line key workers, the economic disruption of business closures, and the isolation of strict social distancing.

Jamaica’s own COVID response through Q2 2020 involved significant domestic restrictions — including curfews, gathering limits of no more than ten people, and the closure of schools, restaurants, entertainment venues, and non-essential retail — while maintaining the distinctive open-border approach that would characterise the island’s pandemic strategy. Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Health Minister Christopher Tufton provided regular public updates, establishing a communication framework that maintained public confidence while the scale of the pandemic’s domestic impact became clear. Jamaica’s case count through Q2 remained relatively low compared to larger nations, but the economic devastation of tourism’s collapse was immediate and severe regardless of the domestic health trajectory.

CARES Act Stimulus: Remittances Defy the Recession

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, signed by President Trump on 27 March 2020, authorised $2.2 trillion in economic relief—the largest emergency fiscal intervention in US history. Its most immediately visible element for ordinary Americans was the $1,200 direct payment to eligible individuals, which began arriving in bank accounts from mid-April 2020. The Act also added $600 per week to state unemployment insurance benefits, dramatically boosting the replacement income of laid-off workers. And it established the Paycheck Protection Programme, which provided small business loans to keep employees on payroll.

For Jamaica’s remittance inflows, the CARES Act’s effects were almost immediately visible. BOJ data for April and May 2020 showed US-origin remittances running significantly above the equivalent months of 2019 — an outcome that confounded early predictions that the pandemic would cause a sharp remittance decline. Jamaican-American workers who had received the $1,200 stimulus payment directed a portion into remittances to Jamaican family members. Those who became unemployed — and a significant share of Jamaican-American workers in hospitality, domestic service, and retail were laid off through the lockdown period — received unemployment benefits that, with the $600 supplement, replaced or exceeded their pre-pandemic wages. The income maintenance effect preserved remittance-sending capacity even for those who lost their jobs.

The second mechanism was the substitution of financial transfers for suppressed in-person giving. Jamaican-American households that normally spent several thousand dollars per year on flights to Jamaica — for annual visits, family events, and holidays — could not travel. Some portion of that spending redirected into formal wire transfers. The mechanical effect on recorded remittance figures was significant, as spending that would previously have been classified as tourism expenditure was reclassified as remittance transfers.

George Floyd and the BLM Moment

The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25 May 2020 — filmed by bystanders and shared globally within hours — produced one of the most immediate and massive social movements in American history. Within days, protests had spread to hundreds of US cities; within weeks, the movement had become global, with significant protests in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, and dozens of other countries.

For Jamaican-American communities, the Floyd killing resonated on multiple levels simultaneously. The video’s documentation of a police officer killing a Black man by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds while bystanders pleaded for him to stop confirmed what many Black Americans had long insisted: that police violence against Black people was not an exception but a systemic pattern. For diaspora members who had experienced racial profiling, who had family members who had been killed or brutalised by police, or who had navigated the particular vulnerabilities of Blackness in the American justice system, the Floyd killing was an intensely personal political moment.

In the United Kingdom, the BLM moment connected to the fresh wounds of the Windrush scandal and the documented COVID-19 racial mortality disparities. British-Jamaican communities that had been publicly celebrating their contribution to the NHS through the pandemic — and mourning the disproportionate COVID deaths among Black and Asian healthcare workers — found in the BLM protests a frame for connecting their specific British experience of racial inequality to the global movement. The toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, days after Floyd’s killing, became one of the defining images of the British BLM moment, carrying particular resonance for Caribbean communities with direct historical connections to the Atlantic slave trade.

9th Biennial Conference Postponed

The 9th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference, which had been planned for June 2020 in Jamaica, was formally postponed during Q2 as the pandemic’s continuation made an in-person international gathering impossible. The decision was inevitable given the global travel restrictions and the impracticality of convening thousands of diaspora members from multiple countries in a single location during a pandemic. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade committed to maintaining diaspora engagement through virtual means through the remainder of 2020 and to planning for a 2021 virtual diaspora engagement event as a substitute.

The postponement was widely understood within diaspora community organisations as the only responsible course of action, but it created a real gap in the biennial cycle’s function. The in-person conference is not merely an administrative event: it is a moment of community renewal, physical connection with Jamaica, and relational investment between diaspora leaders and government officials that virtual formats cannot fully replicate. The prospect of two consecutive years without a biennial — 2020 postponed, 2021 virtual — raised legitimate concerns about the maintenance of diaspora engagement momentum through the pandemic period.

Tourism Collapse and Economic Emergency

Jamaica’s Q2 2020 economic performance was dominated by the near-total collapse of tourism. The international flight networks that connect Jamaica’s tourist source markets — primarily the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom — had effectively ceased operation from late March, and even as some flights tentatively resumed through May and June, consumer demand for international travel remained minimal. Stopover visitor arrivals to Jamaica in Q2 2020 were a tiny fraction of Q2 2019, and cruise ship calls — which had already been suspended by the major cruise lines in March — remained suspended through the quarter.

The government’s fiscal response — drawing on IMF emergency financing, the Caribbean Development Bank, and multilateral development partner support — provided some cushion against the most acute economic pressures, but the structural dependence on tourism left Jamaica in a position where economic recovery was fundamentally dependent on the pandemic’s global resolution rather than on domestic policy levers. The CARE programme of targeted social support reached the most vulnerable Jamaican households, but the scale of the economic shock far exceeded the resources available for relief.

Returnees and PICA During Lockdown

Voluntary return migration from the United Kingdom was effectively suspended through Q2 2020 as international flights ceased and the logistics of an intercontinental move became impossible. Some UK Jamaican community members who had been in the process of planning their return to Jamaica were forced to defer their timelines indefinitely as the pandemic disrupted every element of the return logistics: shipping, property purchase, school arrangements, and the closure of PICA’s Returning Residents processing services during the lockdown period. PICA adapted its services to remote processing where possible through the quarter, but the volume of formal returnee processing was significantly reduced.

Outlook for Q3 2020

The third quarter of 2020 will determine whether Jamaica’s open-border strategy begins to generate meaningful tourist arrivals as US vaccination (still months away) is not yet a factor, but as the first wave’s peak passes and cautious travel resumes. The remittance trajectory — extraordinary through Q2 despite the economic shock — will be watched for signs of whether the CARES Act stimulus effect sustains or fades as the supplemental unemployment benefits expire in late July without a Congressional renewal deal. And the BLM movement’s momentum, still building at the close of Q2, will continue to shape the political landscape in which Jamaican-American communities are navigating their multiple intersecting vulnerabilities.

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 2020.

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