Free movement and CARICOM realities
WITH UNUSUAL frankness for CARICOM, Gaston Browne, Antigua and Barbuda’s premier, placed firmly on the table an issue around which regional leaders usually tiptoe, yet many in the Eastern Caribbean consider a constraint to implementing an element critical to the Community’s transition to a genuine single market and economy – the free movement of people.
Essentially, Mr Browne fears that with too few jobs at home, unskilled Jamaicans will overrun small, economically better-off countries like his own. The Eastern Caribbean, therefore, wants assurances of a compensatory cushion. This concern, in some respects, is not dissimilar to arguments in Jamaica that contributed to its withdrawal from the West Indies Federation, leading to its collapse.
Unfortunately, the issue raised by Mr Browne at Wednesday’s opening of the CARICOM summit in Montego Bay - and recently in Kingstown by the St Vincent and Grenadines leader, Ralph Gonsalves – wasn’t attended, in our view, with the deserved robustness by the Golding review commission on Jamaica’s relationship with CARICOM.
COUNTRY’S SUPPORT
Importantly, Prime Minister Browne declared his country’s support for the regional enterprise as a buffer against a hostile global environment. Yet, while recognising that there are wins and losses in such processes, Mr Browne believes that there would be undue burden on those countries that comprise the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), which, he says, have, over the last three decades, “borne a disproportionate burden in the movement of goods, services and people in the region”, including absorbing “a great number of unskilled labour from Jamaica and Guyana”.
“By absorbing those numbers of people, we have eased the strain on the economies of Jamaica and Guyana at a time of need,” he said. “And that contribution is heightened by the remittances that these migrants send to their home countries. “
The debate in Jamaica about the free movement of people in CARICOM usually revolves around the hassle too many Jamaicans believe they get when travelling in the region. Nonetheless, there may be worthy kernels in Mr Browne’s observations.
In 2008 when Bruce Golding, the author of Jamaica’s CARICOM review, addressed Jamaicans in St John’s in the aftermath of a CARICOM summit, it was estimated that 12,000 Jamaicans lived in Antigua and Barbuda. That would be nearly 12 per cent of Antigua and Barbuda’s current population. Put another way, it is, by ratio, having more than 300,000 Antiguans, or three times the number of that country’s population, living in Jamaica. Indeed, Anthony Hylton, the opposition MP, used an estimate, during the legislature’s debate of the Golding Report, of up to 40,000 Jamaicans living in CARICOM countries.
PURCHASING-POWER PARITY
There are good reasons why Jamaicans move to Antigua and other OECS countries. They are relatively wealthier. On a purchasing-power parity basis, Jamaica’s per-capita GDP is around US$7,000. Antigua’s is more than US$20,000. According to Bank of Jamaica data, in 2016, Jamaicans in Antigua remitted nearly US$8 million, or more than a billion Jamaican dollars at current exchange rate. For the first nine months of 2016, they sent home more than US$5 million.
OECS leaders, however, believe that such figures mask the relative development of Jamaica and CARICOM’s other more developed countries (MDCs) and the lesser-developed designees. The removal of the protections afforded to the lesser-developed countries – as proposed in the Golding Report – wouldn’t, they argue, be adequately offset by special arrangements for disadvantaged regions and sectors, which would also be open to the MDCs.
That Mr Browne has put these issues to the forefront of CARICOM for, as he put it, illumination and guide, is useful on two fronts. One is that it shows that people are ahead of leaders in the integration process. Further, assuming there is a renewed push for regional integration, as echoed by several leaders in Montego Bay, we mustn’t proceed behind rose-tinted glasses.