Caribbean Studies

Running Head : The Caribbean Immigration

The Caribbean Immigration Experience

Name : Navneet Lakhan

Student Number : 500 205 089

Course : CCRB100

Professor : Terry Roswell

Date

The Caribbean Immigration Experience

The push factor for the migration of Caribbean peoples has largely been economic in nature . Unemployment , increasing costs of basic commodities or insufficient wages are among the reasons why Caribbeans opt to seek greener pastures abroad . However , the high expectations they might have had regarding their host countries have almost always led to disappointment and frustration as they increasingly experienced

br obstacles that only immigrants experience

In the United States , the estimated number of Caribbean-born immigrants from 1960 to 2000 was 2 .9 million (Gelatt and Dixon , 2006 . From 2000-2005 , an estimated 467 ,000 immigrants were from the Caribbean where more or less half were illegal aliens (Arthur , 2005 . In Canada immigration statistics have put the number of Caribbean immigrants at 315 ,410 as of 2006 (Statistics Canada , 2007 . However , this excludes the undocumented number of illegal immigrants . There have been economic and socio-cultural barriers faced by Caribbeans in their immigration

First , the absence of meaningful employment is the major barrier that they have to contend with . For the highly educated Caribbeans , the non-recognition of the host country of their academic and professional credentials rendered them unable to hold jobs that are commensurate to their skills (PROMP , 2006 . For example , tough accreditation requirements for health care professionals include re-training , taking licensure examinations and gaining actual clinical experience in Canada or the U .S . are beyond their reach financially . This forces a Caribbean doctor to take on a job as a nursing aide which is lower paid

Second , lower class Caribbeans who have attained lower educational attainments because of poverty back home find it doubly difficult to find employment in a labor market that is highly competitive and more so if they are illegal aliens . Faced with stiff competition from their native counterparts and other immigrants as well , Caribbeans often end up as low-skilled manual and contractual workers in the manufacturing or construction sectors (Ornstein , 2000 . An additional barrier is language . In the U .S . English proficiency is necessary to get a job in the services sector (i .e . waitress , sales clerk ) and in Canada , both English and French (Kunz , Melan and Schetagne , 2000 ,

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The impact of these economic barriers has led to a disparity in the living conditions between Caribbean immigrants and the native-born Recent statistics in the United States revealed the following : the poverty rate of immigrants is twice the rate of natives , the average income of immigrants is far lower than that of natives and immigrants are most often without insurance than their native counterparts (Camarota , 2007

This reality is reinforced by data in Canada which show that although 75 of Caribbeans are active in the workforce , the number of Caribbean people who hold managerial , supervisorial or technical positions has been persistently lower than those of the Canadian natives (Henry n .d . On the contrary , there are more Caribbeans who...