Jamaica’s prolonged mistreatment of Haitian migrants is often defended in the language of capacity, sovereignty, or political realism. 

Yet five years on—and now brutally exposed by Hurricane Melissa—it is evident that what has truly been sacrificed is not sentimentality, but Jamaica’s own national self-interest.

The irony is ghastly. A country that has spent half a decade unlawfully repelling, detaining, and demonising desperate Haitian men, children, and women now finds itself importing North American skilled labour at (conservatively) sixteen to twenty times the regional cost to restore electricity, rebuild infrastructure, and stabilise basic services. Jamaica did not arrive here by accident. We engineered this dependency through policy failure, moral cowardice, and political calculation.

For years, human-rights lawyers, churches, trade unionists, and ordinary Jamaicans warned that the Government of Jamaica’s approach to Haitian migration was both unlawful and strategically foolish. Non-refoulement is not an abstraction. It is a minimum legal standard requiring case-by-case assessment and temporary protection—not mass expulsions, militarised round-ups, or performative cruelty. Yet successive administrations treated compliance with international law as an optional inconvenience, while cultivating public fear and ethnic scapegoating for short-term political gain.

The cost of that posture is now unmistakable.

Haiti, for all its tragedies, possesses a deep pool of skilled artisans: electricians, linemen, masons, carpenters, steel fixers, and mechanics trained through necessity to work under extreme conditions. These skills are regionally mobile, culturally compatible, and economically appropriate for Jamaica’s scale. Had Jamaica adopted a lawful, regulated, and humane temporary-protection and work-permit regime—even a modest one—over the past five years, thousands of skilled Haitian workers would today be legally available for post-Melissa reconstruction.

Instead, Jamaica chose exclusion.

The result is a cruel inversion of reality. A nation with unemployed and underemployed citizens, and a neighbouring country overflowing with willing, skilled labour, now pays premium foreign contractors sourced from North America—often under opaque government-to-utility or government-to-firm arrangements—at enormous cost to the Jamaican public. This is not resilience; it is self-inflicted vulnerability.

Nor can this be dismissed as mere bad luck. Disaster economics is unforgiving. Countries that treat “melanated” CARICPOM neighbours as pariahs rather than partners invariably discover, at moments of crisis, that goodwill cannot be conjured overnight. Solidarity is cumulative. Jamaica eroded it deliberately.

There is a deeper moral injury here as well. By repeatedly signalling that Haitians are a threat to be expelled rather than human beings to be assessed, Jamaica trained its own bureaucracy to operate lawlessly. Power that learns it can bypass legal restraint with one marginalised group rarely confines that habit to a single target. The corrosion spreads—to procurement, disaster spending, labour contracting, and parliamentary oversight.

Thus, when Jamaicans now ask who brokered expensive foreign labour arrangements, under what terms, and with what disclosure, they are asking a question born of institutional distrust—distrust earned through years of impunity.

The language of “shame” is not misplaced. A country that prides itself on regional leadership now appears as a supplicant, forced by necessity to accept arrangements it neither negotiated from strength nor subjected to rigorous public scrutiny. In Caribbean parlance, Jamaica resembles the scornful puppy-dog compelled to swallow what it once arrogantly rejected—over and over again.

This humiliation is not poetic excess; it is policy consequence.

Leadership matters here. States are judged not by bravado in calm weather, but by foresight before the storm. Limp, three-card-fielding face-man leadership—adept at optics, allergic to principle—has left Jamaica less sovereign, not more. True sovereignty lies in lawful preparedness, regional cooperation, and institutional credibility. Jamaica chose spectacle instead.

None of this denies that migration requires management. It does. But management is not the same as cruelty, and legality is not weakness. A rational state would have paired border control with humanitarian processing, skills mapping, and time-bound labour integration. That path would have preserved Jamaica’s dignity, reduced post-disaster costs, and strengthened regional resilience.

We did the opposite.

Hurricane Melissa merely stripped away the pretence. The bill has arrived. It is denominated not only in foreign currency, but in lost trust, squandered opportunity, and moral diminishment.

The question now is whether Jamaica will learn—or whether it will double down, pretending that eating “dutty pudden” is the price of realism rather than the wage of folly.