Foreword. The Most Hon. P.J. Patterson, ON, PC, QC (Prime Minister of Jamaica 1992-2006)

• Author: Elizabeth Thomas Hope
• Profession: James Sievright Moss-Solomon (Snr) Professor of Environmental Management and Director of the Centre for the Environment at the University of the West Indies, Mona
• Pages: 9-10

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FOREWORD

FOREWORDFOREWORD

FOREWORDFOREWORD

FOREWORD

It gives me as much pleasure to write the foreword to this book, Freedom

and Constraint in Caribbean Migration and Diaspora, as it did to give

the opening address for the conference, ‘Caribbean Migration: Forced and

Free’, at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies in June

2006, from which these contributions have been drawn.

Nothing in the intervening months since that academic gathering has

lessened the importance of this subject; in fact, quite the reverse. The

current immigration debate in the United States highlights some of the

dilemmas thrown up by migration. It is also at the forefront of the political

debate in Europe at the national level, and of critical concern for the future

expansion of the European Union. Further, it exists in the fears generated

by the attacks in New York of 9/11 and the discussions over international

terrorism.

Migration has dominated the history of humankind and has often been

at the root of military conquest, religious conflict and ethnic strife. One

only has to recall the level and intensity of the convulsions which reverberate

today — between Israel and Palestine, indeed throughout the entire Middle

East, among the successor states of the former Yugoslavia (especially Bosnia

and Kosovo), and on the continent of Africa, as in the Sudan (Darfur),

Rwanda and Somalia.

Caribbean people know better than most what it means to be uprooted.

The dehumanizing aspects of the slave trade, the bicentenary of whose

abolition we celebrated last year (2007), can never be forgotten. It severed

us from the roots of our social and cultural belonging and obliged us, as

the dispossessed, to struggle against formidable odds in the search to regain

our self respect and forge a new identity. Nor should we forget the conditions

under which Indian and Chinese immigrants were brought to the

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