Five-Year Retrospective | Published: 31 December 2024 | Jamaica Homes News
Key Takeaways: 2020–2024 in Six Lines
- COVID-19 Pandemic Closes the World but Diaspora Remittances Surge
- George Floyd Murder 2020: Black Lives Matter Reaches Global Peak
- Thompson-Herah’s Tokyo Sprint Double: Jamaica’s Athletic Dynasty Continues
- Windrush Lessons Learned Review Confirms ‘Institutional Racism’ in 2021
- UK Navigates Six Prime Ministers; US Swings from Biden to Trump
- Remittances Grow From US$2.9 Billion to US$3.4 Billion in Five Years
2020–2024: The Five Years That Proved the Diaspora’s Resilience
The fourth quinquennium of this series was the most turbulent in its history, and the one that most definitively proved the Jamaica diaspora’s structural resilience. COVID-19 — declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 — closed borders, ended community gatherings, shuttered churches, suspended the physical networks through which diaspora life is sustained, and killed members of Caribbean communities in the UK and US at rates significantly higher than the national averages. And yet the remittances kept flowing. Indeed, they increased: the counter-intuitive macroeconomic discovery of the pandemic years was that diaspora transfers to Jamaica did not fall but surged, reaching approximately US$2.9 billion in 2020, exceeding US$3.0 billion for the first time in 2021, and continuing to grow as the pandemic’s immediate emergency receded. The non-discretionary core of remittance behaviour — the social and family obligation to send that persists regardless of economic conditions in the host country — was demonstrated at maximum stress-test in the pandemic years and confirmed.
The murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter mobilisation that followed — demonstrations in over sixty countries, the toppling of slave trader statues in Bristol and elsewhere — produced the five-year period’s most intense global racial justice moment and directly engaged Caribbean diaspora communities in every host country. The Wendy Williams Windrush Lessons Learned Review of March 2021 — finding the Home Office “institutionally racist” in its design and implementation of the hostile environment — was the most significant official acknowledgement of structural racism in a British government department in the modern era, and a vindication of the decade of advocacy that Caribbean community organisations had invested in the campaign. At the Tokyo Olympics, Elaine Thompson-Herah’s 100m/200m sprint double — running 10.61 and 21.53 — confirmed that Jamaica’s sprint dominance extended beyond Bolt into a new generation of female athletics excellence.
The five-year period’s political landscape was defined by extraordinary instability in both host countries. The United Kingdom passed through six prime ministers (Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, and the transitional figures of 2022’s Conservative crisis), culminating in the July 2024 Labour landslide that ended fourteen years of Conservative government. The United States moved from Trump to Biden and back to Trump across the quinquennium, with the 2024 US election’s defeat of Kamala Harris — whose Caribbean heritage had made her a figure of specific significance to Caribbean diaspora communities — carrying a weight that went beyond the partisan political outcome. The Caribbean reparations campaign reached new diplomatic heights through the period, with CARICOM’s legal frameworks advancing and the William and Catherine royal tour of Jamaica in 2022 — met by Jamaican government reparations statements and community protests — bringing the debate to global attention. Annual remittances to Jamaica grew from US$2.9 billion in 2020 to US$3.4 billion by 2024: the most sustained period of remittance growth in the series’ twenty-year history.
Jamaica Diaspora Five-Year Roundup 2020–2024 | Jamaica Homes News. Compiled from twenty quarterly editions and five annual roundups, 2020–2024.
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