Avia Ustanny, freelance writerIN THIS three-bed- room house, every room sports a 21-inch colour television. DSS provides unlimited cable viewing. There is always food on the table, new clothes on the children's backs, and enough funds to pay for school.
In the Jamaican landscape, this and other examples of "conspicuous" consumption, present in every community, usually indicates that some member of the household is living abroad and sending back money. Remittances are the increasing backbone of many families in which some have been made redundant. It is also appraised in many quarters as a buttress in the national economy, providing vast inflows of foreign exchange.
Information released at the Inter-American Development Bank Conference on remittances, in May 2001, indicates that the annual income in 1999 from remittances was estimated at 50 per cent of Jamaica's income from exports and 63 per cent of income from tourism.
Remittances, the report said, account for nearly 12 per cent of gross domestic product and is 35 times greater than the amount
of official development
assistance.
While, justifiably, many remain concerned about the negative effects of migration and the movement of labour from our shores to the more developed countries, others are viewing the development as a cause to celebrate. Replacing old concepts of 'brain drain' are new ones of 'brain gain'. The perspective from some international organisations, including the International labour Organisation (ILO) is that new strategic alliances between migrant communities and the home country can be developed to the advantage of both.
In the last two weeks, advertisements appearing in the local papers began a new recruitment drive for teachers and nurses in 2002. Will policy makers continue to view this in terms of 'loss of skills'?
What will happen to its hospitals, to its schools, to its information technology industries and its hotels when workers in these key sectors abandon poorly paid jobs (comparatively speaking)?
The answer may lie in training them at an even faster rate. There is a large population of unskilled and undereducated Jamaicans who await any opportunity to escape poverty and access means of improving their standard of living. Those who fear the pressure cooker effects of poverty and crime may agree with this.
