Jamaican Female Migration to the USA: Brain Drain, Left-behind Families, and ‘Barrel Children’

Abstract

AbstractIn Jamaica, the predilection to migrate has historical roots, forming a well-rehearsed strategy of aspirant young people seeking economic success. Such migrants retain strong emotional ties and communication links with their Jamaican family members, through cyber transnational space and social exchange across national borders. Many young adults migrate from Jamaica to North America and the United Kingdom. The population is highly educated relative to national levels of formal employment. Alongside Jamaica’s trajectory of out-migration, left-behind family members are overly represented by the relatively uneducated, elderly and children who have become dependent on economic remittances, social support, and cultural products originating from abroad, forming what is termed the ‘barrel society’. The immigrants are obliged to send remittances. The economic centrality of migrants’ economic contribution to the welfare of family members left behind is in no doubt, but there are emotional costs for children and youth left behind in Jamaica, some of whom experience lack of self-esteem and demotivation. With the rising out-migration of educated young women, the ensuing brain drain constitutes a national economic and social quandary. Declining professional delivery of social services in Jamaica generates resentment. At the family level, absent parents are associated with ‘barrel children’, given remittance goods are sent back to Jamaica in barrels, a historically rooted practice. Such transfers are both material and symbolic gestures. The barrels’ low value trinkets and packaged foodstuffs are intended to communicate the migrants’ love and concern for their children and perhaps guilt for their physical absence from them.KeywordsMigrationRemittanceDependencyBarrel childrenBarrel society