Migration in the Caribbean - what do we know? an overview of data, policies and programmes at the international and regional levels to address critical issues

Historically the nature, direction and magnitude of migration in the Caribbean have always been influenced by trends in global and regional socio-economic development. The slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the first major immigration waves into the region. After Emancipation in the nineteenth century, workers began moving within the region in search of employment or better working conditions. In the twentieth century, the movement of labor to destinations within the region continued. The oil-boom in the 1970s attracted many migrants from the smaller and less developed islands to work in the oil refineries in the dependencies of the Netherlands and the United States, particularly the United States Virgin Islands, Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles. Also the booming energy sector in Trinidad and Tobago was a magnet for many in search of employment. With the global crisis in the energy sector in the 1980s the demand for labor declined and new employment opportunities were needed. The growing tourism sector in the Caribbean in the 1990s increased the demand for workers in the service sector which, in many instances, could not be supplied by the domestic labor force in some of the smaller Caribbean islands. As a consequence, workers from other islands and neighboring countries in Latin America, particularly Columbia and Venezuela, came to fill in the gaps.