Jamaican Americans
| Total population | |
|---|---|
|
1,091,482 0.3% of the U.S. population (2013) |
|
| Regions with significant populations | |
| New York, Florida, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, and California | |
| Languages | |
| American English, Jamaican English, Jamaican Patois | |
| Religion | |
| Predominantly Protestantism. Some adherents of Catholicism, Islam, and other faiths. | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Jamaican British, Jamaican Canadians, Chinese Jamaicans, Jamaicans of African ancestry, Jamaican Nigerians, Indo-Jamaicans, Jamaican Australians, Afro Americans, Hakka Americans |
1,091,482
Jamaican Americans are Americans who have full or partial Jamaican ancestry. The largest proportion of Jamaicans live in New York City, which has various other Caribbean cultural elements such as food and music. There are also communities of Jamaican Americans residing in Philadelphia, Boston, South Florida, Tampa, Los Angeles, Orlando, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Cleveland, Western New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
After 1838, European colonies in the Caribbean with expanding sugar industries imported large numbers of immigrants to meet their acute labor shortage. Large numbers of Jamaicans were recruited to work in Panama and Costa Rica in the 1850s. After slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, American planters imported temporary workers, called "swallow migrants", to harvest crops on an annual basis. These workers, many of them Jamaicans, returned to their countries after harvest. Between 1881 and the beginning of World War I, the United States recruited over 250,000 workers from the Caribbean, 90,000 of whom were Jamaicans, to work on the Panama Canal. During both world wars, the United States again recruited Jamaican men for service on various American bases in the region. The vast majority of Jamaican American are of black Afro-Caribbean descent.
Apart from Canada and England, the U.S. houses the majority of Jamaican émigrés worldwide. Jamaican immigration to the U.S. increased during the civil rights era of the 1960s. As with many other sources of Caribbean immigration, the geographical nearness of Jamaica to the U.S. increased the likelihood of migration. The economic attractiveness and general Jamaican perception of the U.S. as a land of opportunity explain continued migration flows despite economic downturn in America. Traditionally, America has experienced increased migration through means of family preference, in which U.S. citizens sponsor their immediate family. Through this category a substantial amount of Jamaican immigrants were able to enter mainly urban cities within the U.S that provided blue-collar work opportunities. Jamaican immigrants utilized employment opportunities despite the discriminatory policies that affected some Caribbean émigrés.
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