August 27, 2025
Why Barbado’s people downloads people to their homeland

Why Barbado’s people downloads people to their homeland

Hello and welcome to the Long Wave. I am Natricia Duncan, the Caribbean correspondent of the Guardian in Jamaica. I take over this week to concentrate on the sticky topic of migration between the UK and the Caribbean how young people are connected to old wounds on both sides of the pond and why Barbados invites his diaspora to come home.

Since the HMT empire Windrush in Tilbury Docks, Essex, with the dreams and efforts of people looking for a better life, there has been a constant flow of migrants from the Caribbean to Great Britain.

Despite the poisonous xenophobia of a British population, who is largely unprepared or not ready to take up the influx of black migrants, the Caribbean people continued. Many believed that they would go to a better place from which others were apparently transformed – brightly from the secret of the distant kingdom, their accents refined and enriched their bank accounts.

By 2021, more than 1.1 million people identified in Great Britain who lived as Caribbean after this year’s census. And today on Caribbean islands – where economies crippled by the permanent legacy of transatlantic slavery and colonialism and were hindered by more and more catastrophic natural disasters due to the climate emergency – there are still a better life in the UK.

They were not deterred by the Windrush scandal, which incorrectly imprisoned the Caribbean people and actually threatened with deportation or actually deported it or threatened by the persistence of negative attitudes towards immigration in the UK. Studies published by Migration Observatory at the beginning of this year showed that 52% of the people surveyed want to reduce immigration and 32% of the opinion that immigration is a “bad or very bad thing”.

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A Caribbean cultural exchange

When I spoke to 22-year-old Tia Corbin, a student at the University of the West Indies in Barbados, it was clear that many people still have a strong effort to travel to more developed countries. “I know that many of my colleagues and colleagues have the opportunity to travel to another place – and stay,” she said.

Corbin was recently part of the Windrush I Accelerator, an annual social enterprise project with which people from the Caribbean diaspora are to be connected to their roots. It includes students from the British University with Caribbean heritage to work with their colleagues to examine how they can combine their skills, heir, technology and AI in order to solve some of the urgent social and economic problems of the Caribbean.

This year’s cohort of students flew to Barbados. Frances Maching, the founder of the project, said the students of the program had created “solutions that can contribute the economic benefits of both the UK and Caribbean and to share the cultural heritage.

The participant Olivia Howell, 20, a student of social anthropology at the University of Birmingham, whose grandparents are Jamaican and Cuban, said that she was attracted to the program because she had the feeling that she had the feeling of disappearing in her community.

“I am part of an anti -racism Group in Birmingham and we discussed how we saw the decline of certain Caribbean rooms, such as Saturday schools and the carnival in Handsworth [in Birmingham]”, She said. In recent times, Caribbean culture has often been associated with negative problems such as the Windrush scandal.

Corbin, who would like to study and work outside of Barbados, said the program has expanded its options: “I have exposed me all the things that I could reach here in Barbados and elsewhere.”

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“166 square kilometers of love will be waited for you.”

Barbados Senator John King, the country’s former cultural minister, also supported the program. He was born in Birmingham, Great Britain, and was moved to Barbados in 1970 at the age of six. “My parents wanted to get my sister and me out of England, I will be very dull, racism,” he said. “They had the feeling that we would have better chances of education and in a society that accepted us as we are.”

The connection between the current generations of students in Great Britain and the Caribbean will “be perfect for building up new relationships between the region and Great Britain when we go forward,” he told me.

“Some of the students in this program may be the next politicians in the region and in the UK,” he said. “If you build relationships now, it makes it easier for you to do business and build up some bridges that broke due to incidents such as Windrush situation, racism and all the other things that have been distinguished us apart. There are the opportunity to become this young people that we have to develop as a global partner.”

The program, added King, also adds the WE Gather ‘Initiative of the Barbados government, which, among other things, aim to “deepen the connection between Barbados and his diaspora”.

“In Barbados, 166 square kilometers are waiting for them,” said King to those who feel displaced. “You don’t have to be in London or Europe if you don’t want it because there is a place called Caribbean who opens your doors.”

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