Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2020

Annual Review | Published: 31 December 2020 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways: 2020 in Six Lines

• COVID-19 Pandemic Declared in March: Diaspora Life Transformed
• Caribbean Communities Face Disproportionate COVID Death Rates
• George Floyd Murdered on 25 May: Black Lives Matter Goes Global
• Biden and Harris Win US Election: First Female, First Black Vice-President
• Jamaica Remittances Defy Pandemic to Reach Record US$2.9 Billion
• Windrush Lessons Learned Review Published: “Institutionally Racist” Finding

The Year in Review

2020 was the most disruptive year for Jamaica’s diaspora communities since the Second World War — and possibly since the communities’ formation in the post-war migration period. The COVID-19 pandemic, declared a global emergency by the WHO on 11 March, closed borders, ended physical community gatherings, shuttered churches and community centres, and imposed a physical isolation that struck at the foundations of diaspora social life. The cost in lives was severe and unequal: Caribbean-British communities in the UK suffered COVID death rates significantly higher than the national average, due to occupational exposure (disproportionate representation in NHS, social care, transport, and other frontline roles), socioeconomic factors, and underlying health conditions that reflected decades of health inequality. The data from Public Health England’s analysis of COVID disparities confirmed what Caribbean community organisations and healthcare workers had been reporting from the front line of the epidemic: that the pandemic’s human cost was not evenly distributed.

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25 May — filmed in its entirety and shared globally within hours — produced the largest Black Lives Matter mobilisation since the movement’s founding in 2013. Demonstrations in all fifty US states and in over sixty countries, including the UK, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand, transformed a specific American police killing into a global reckoning on anti-Black racism that directly engaged Caribbean diaspora communities in every host country. In Britain, the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol on 7 June was a specific and symbolic act that connected the BLM moment to the reparations debate that CARICOM had been advancing since 2013. Joe Biden’s election as president on 7 November — with Kamala Harris as the first female, first Black, and first South Asian vice-president — ended four years of a Trump presidency whose impact on immigration, race relations, and international alliances had been felt across the diaspora. And in the most counter-intuitive economic outcome of the crisis year, Jamaica’s remittances did not fall — they surged to a record approximately US$2.9 billion. Diaspora members unable to visit home sent money instead; recipients of government income support in host countries directed portions to family on the island. The pandemic revealed the non-discretionary core of remittance behaviour at its starkest.

Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2020 | Jamaica Homes News. Compiled from four quarterly editions published April, July, October 2020, and January 2021.