LEFT: Edward Seaga.
RIGHT: Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer
Professor Rex Nettleford, (centre) vice-chancellor emeritus, University of the West Indies shares a joke with Irwine Clare, managing director at Caribbean Immigrant Services in New York (left), and Lascelles Poyser, vice-president of the Association for the Restoration of Returning Residents at the Jamaica Diaspora Foundation website launch held at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in New Kingston on March 23.
It is estimated that some five million Jamaicans live overseas, that is, twice as many as those who live here at home.
Presumably, this includes first and second generation Jamaicans living overseas who are automatically entitled to Jamaican citizenship.
This is not surprising. Jamaicans have always been a migrant people, perhaps moreso than any other people of this region.
Jamaican immigrants created huge residential enclaves in New York, Miami, Toronto, London and a dozen other towns and cities elsewhere.
The Jamaican migrants worked hard, acquired substance and even became wealthy in many cases. They earned reputations as responsible citizens and good workers.
In a poll conducted in the Miami area in the 1990s, it was found that Jamaicans were more educated, earned more and were financially better off per capita than any other migrant group in that city of many ethnic people and nationalities.
Recently, the strength of the Jamaican image has been tarnished by criminal activities which have achieved high profile and much media prominence.
But, alongside this shame, there has been the world impact of Jamaican culture as the musical explosion of reggae swept the world bringing pride and respect to Jamaicans.
This is our diaspora a people of strength and resilience, not afraid to venture and achieve, as they yearn to earn.
LOSS OF TALENT
Recently, another flow has emerged which speaks again to that indomitable trait of Jamaicans as they yearn to learn.
Thousands of young Jamaicans are now studying abroad, gaining the knowledge and skills essential for nation building. But which nation?
Data now available from many academic reports, including the World Bank and the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank, tell a tale of talent yearning to learn and staying on to earn, enriching other countries with their skills while their own country struggles to keep afloat, or so it seems.
The figures are formidable.
UNESCO statistics reveal that in 2002, 4,282 Jamaicans were enrolled in tertiary institutions in the United States and 413 in the United Kingdom.
The University Council of Jamaica has 1,677 studying in the U.K. in 2005, a much larger
figure. No figures are available for Canada.
A rough estimate would be 6000-7000 Jamaican students enrolled abroad in tertiary institutions, more than in the University of the West Indies (UWI).
This pattern is likely to continue as the population trend in the U.S. shows a declining position in the workforce resulting from the fallout in births after World War II.
It has always been the dream of ambitious Jamaican youth to have the opportunity for an education which will equip them with a career. This dream is being realised by thousands studying at home and abroad. But graduation time is, as Americans call it, 'commencement', because that is when real life begins.
The choice of what to do after graduation is not made by these young Jamaicans. It is made for them by conditions at home that repel, rather than attract: a
stagnant economy that cannot open the doors of opportunity for skilled and professional youth; a dysfunctional society which shackles social mobility and a
creatively inert established cultural order thriving on privilege,
struggling with the emergence of a creative sub-culture already
reveling in global glory everywhere, except here.
So what is there to entice them here? The answer for the
thousands studying in foreign institutions is to remain overseas, not happily, but not as malcontented as they would have been
if they were pooled with the
discontented at home.
This seeming substantial loss of talent can also be part of the largest resource base of the country, now and moreso in the future.
REMITTANCES
While there is much debate on the prospects of growth of the productive sector, little prominence is given to the biggest export earner of all, remittances from Jamaicans overseas.
It is little known, for instance, that remittance inflows are the largest source of foreign exchange receipts, US$1.3 billion net, in 2002, heading for a projected US$5 billion by 2010.
Remittances accounting for 45 per cent of Jamaica's export earnings and on a basis of net receipts which remain in the island, exceeded the total of Jamaica's top 10 foreign exchange earners: bauxite/alumina, tourism, coffee, sugar, rum, banana, apparel, cocoa and pimento and yams.
This level of performance should force another look at the tertiary education sector which the Minister of Finance, Dr. Omar Davies, recently considered was getting too large a share of the education pie, signalling a
possible cut.
In his recent Budget presentation he, paradoxically, did precisely the opposite by announcing a financial assistance scheme to fund 100 per cent of tuition fees at reduced
interest rates. He can be proud of this move, even though it is
contradictory.
Tertiary education expansion is a key strategy for development, if treated seriously, not ambiguously. The world needs more nurses and teachers and will continue to do so, while Jamaica holds back on expansion.
More of all tertiary skills
will be in demand in countries experiencing steady economic expansion, as most are. While the economy continues to falter here, the openings abroad will absorb surplus skills from Jamaica or Jamaicans trained abroad.
Tuition costs in higher
education in Jamaica are highest at the UWI beginning at $120,000 per annum for most faculties, with clinical studies in medicine
peaking at $370,000.
These translate to US$2,000 to US$6,000 per annum, hardly
likely to cause a graduate earning U.S. dollars overseas to worry about repayment.
Seeing the light
Jamaica has a tendency in
policy-making to see the light, then pull down the shade to screen it out. There is light at the end of the tunnel for well-educated young Jamaicans, perhaps not always in the most preferred
manner, but substantial light nonetheless as long as human resource development is considered like the productive sectors, a way of creating jobs for skills not just using skills for jobs. The emphasis must shift to the earning capacity of this sector not just its development capacity.
I have an abiding faith in the young people of Jamaica, their creative skills, their assertive
energies and their ambition to 'step up eena life', if only the opportunities are available. Opportunity is knocking now. It is said that opportunity does not knock twice.
Edward Seaga is a former prime minister. He is now a Distinguished Fellow at the University of the West Indies.
