Miami to Montego Bay

As the world reckoned with anti-Black racism and Britain resumed its deportation flights, the Jamaican diaspora navigated 2020’s second half with grief, fury and determined community solidarity

Briefing

• UK deports 23 to Jamaica on controversial charter flight in September 2020.
• BLM protests reshape political conversation from Miami to Montego Bay.
• Jamaica reopens cautiously to tourists; diaspora travel remains restricted.
• COVID second wave hits Caribbean community organisations hard.
• Remittances to Jamaica rise as diaspora supports families through pandemic.

On 2 September 2020, a charter flight departed from the United Kingdom bound for Jamaica carrying 23 people the Home Office had determined should be deported. The flight was the first such removal to Jamaica in months, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic but not cancelled. For community organisations, legal advocates and the families of those on board, the resumption of deportation flights during a global pandemic — when Jamaica’s health system was under pressure, when families could not travel to support returning relatives, when reintegration services were stretched — represented a particular cruelty. For the Home Office, the backlog of removals during the pandemic made resuming flights operationally necessary.

The flight became a focal point for campaigns that had been building for years against the policy of deporting people to countries they had left as children, or had never known at all. Many of those removed to Jamaica had grown up entirely in the United Kingdom, had family and community in Britain, and had no functioning support network in Jamaica. Some did not speak Jamaican patois with any fluency. The campaigners who had been arguing against what they called a policy of exile — removing people from the only country they knew — found that COVID had not interrupted the Home Office’s plans. It had merely delayed them.

Black Lives Matter: The Caribbean Dimension

The Black Lives Matter movement, which had erupted in the United States following George Floyd’s murder on 25 May 2020, remained a powerful force through the summer and into the autumn. In Miami, home to one of the largest Jamaican communities in North America, the protests had a particular Caribbean dimension: the anti-Black racism being named and demonstrated against was inseparable from the histories of enslavement and colonialism that had created the Caribbean. Jamaicans marching in Flatbush, in Brixton, in Chapeltown and on the streets of Kingston were not importing a foreign movement. They were recognising something that had always been part of their own political inheritance.

In Jamaica itself, Prime Minister Andrew Holness addressed the Floyd killing. Jamaican social media was full of commentary linking the American police violence to local debates about police brutality, extrajudicial killings and the conduct of the Jamaica Constabulary Force. The island had its own long and painful history of state violence, and the international moment created space for those conversations to be more public than usual. Meanwhile, the debate about reparations — which had been building through CARICOM’s official reparations committee since 2013 — gained new energy from the international focus on anti-Black racism and the histories that underpinned it.

Tourism, Travel and the Severed Diaspora Connection

Jamaica had closed its borders to international tourism in March 2020 and had reopened carefully in June, implementing health protocols that included a designated tourism corridor, mandatory testing and quarantine requirements for those outside it. The island’s economy, heavily dependent on tourism, had contracted sharply in 2020. By the second half of the year, the government was cautiously promoting Jamaica as a safe destination and the early signs were that the more adventurous travellers, reassured by the health protocols, were beginning to return.

But for the diaspora, travel to Jamaica remained complicated. Those in Miami, in Toronto, in London, who had family on the island and who would normally have visited at Christmas or during the summer — the annual pilgrimages that renew the living connection between yard and foreign — faced a patchwork of travel restrictions, quarantine requirements on both sides, and the simple anxiety of long-haul travel during a pandemic. Christmas 2020, for many diaspora Jamaican families, was the first in living memory spent entirely apart. The gatherings at which money was handed over, property discussed, family decisions made, and community maintained simply did not happen.

Remittances: The Resilient Lifeline

Against this backdrop, one of the most significant economic stories of the second half of 2020 was the unexpected resilience — and in many corridors, the growth — of remittances from the Jamaican diaspora to Jamaica. The Bank of Jamaica reported that remittance inflows remained strong through 2020, confounding early predictions that the pandemic would cause a sharp decline. The reasons were complex: many diaspora Jamaicans in essential work had remained employed when others had not; the closure of tourism channels had actually redirected some funds through formal remittance systems; and the pandemic had sharpened diaspora awareness of family vulnerability on the island.

Remittances represent a larger share of Jamaica’s GDP than in almost any comparable economy — the diaspora is, in the most direct economic sense, part of the island’s financial system. In 2020, that role became more visible and more explicitly acknowledged by both the Jamaican government and the diaspora communities that sustained it. Community organisations in Miami, New York, London and Toronto noted an increase in formal giving to Jamaican charities and community projects alongside the private remittances that flowed to individual families.

The Carnival Silence

Notting Hill Carnival, the largest Caribbean street festival in Europe, had been cancelled in 2020 — the first time in its history that it had not taken place in some form. The decision was inevitable given the pandemic, but the cancellation was felt as a loss that was more than logistical. Carnival is one of the primary public expressions of Caribbean culture and identity in Britain, the moment when the Jamaican and wider Caribbean community’s contribution to British life is most visible and most celebrated. Its absence from the streets of West London — and the simultaneous suppression of the BLM protest energy by COVID restrictions — created a strange, muffled autumn in which the community’s grief and anger had few public outlets.

As 2020 drew to a close and the first vaccines began to be administered in Britain, the Jamaican diaspora faced the new year with a characteristic combination of resilience and wariness. The deportation flights had resumed. The BLM moment had not produced the institutional changes demanded. The Windrush compensation was still failing most of its intended beneficiaries. And Jamaica was entering 2021 without the tourism revenues that kept its economy afloat. But the community had also demonstrated, through the pandemic months, a capacity for mutual support, organisation and advocacy that no crisis had extinguished. From Miami to Montego Bay, the connection held.