Wednesday, October 28, 2026
Jamaicans abroad sent home US$3.12 billion in remittances in the 2025/26 financial year, the Minister of State for Diaspora Affairs told a conference in Philadelphia, with a record US$296 million arriving in December 2025 after Hurricane Melissa. Remittances were worth 15.3 per cent of GDP in 2024, more than tourism receipts, and have risen by 45 per cent since 2019.
The traffic home is far thinner. Only 943 voluntary returning residents registered in 2023, the latest year published, against 23,723 Jamaicans who settled abroad in 2025, three in four of them of working age. Returnees get a one-time duty concession on household goods, but no vehicle concession and no overseas vote, and although the Prime Minister urged the diaspora in June to buy homes in Jamaica, no named mortgage product or incentive came with the call. If the country is so grateful for the money, where is the road home for the people who send it?
Against a backdrop of Kingston office towers, a towering, smug official piles bundles of cash, the biggest marked “US$3.12BN”, onto a wobbly scaffold of pink piggy banks beneath a banner reading “THANK YOU DIASPORA”. Down on the street, a small family hauls its suitcases past unnoticed, one tagged “943 CAME BACK”, while the mother holds up a cardboard sign asking “HOME LOAN?”.
Read more: Jamaica Hails the Diaspora’s US$3.12 Billion. Where Is the Red Carpet Home?
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