Jamaicans Targeted for Deportation

Victor emigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica when he was five. He joined his mother and sister, who already lived in Brooklyn, and started school right away. Kids teased him: they called him coconut and said he came over on a banana boat. He had his first fight in elementary school, when another student threw a chicken bone at him during lunch.

By the time Victor got to high school, the taunting stopped, because he was indistinguishable from the other young black men in Brooklyn. When he graduated in the 1990s from an overcrowded, underequipped, and drug-ridden high school, Victor wanted the life his mother wanted for him, a life free from the poverty they knew both in Kingston and in Brooklyn. “I started seeing my mother struggling,” he says “and I just wanted to help.”

Victor earned little money, however, at his record store job. He decided to sell marijuana to make ends meet, and his life quickly turned sour. He was caught, charged with felony possession of marijuana, and put on probation at age 18. With a felony on his record, finding a job became next to impossible, though as a legal permanent resident, Victor could work. Department stores wouldn’t even hire him during the holiday season, “when they were giving out jobs,” he recalls. “I feel that one charge took my life through stigma,” he says. He went back to selling marijuana, and when he was caught again, he got a four-year prison sentence for violating probation. After that, the almost-native Brooklynite faced an even harsher sentence: Victor was deported to Jamaica, taking his place among the 30,000 deportees there who once lived in the U.S.

The story of Jamaican deportation is not a tale one familiar with Jamaican immigrants would expect to hear. Most of our cultural lore about Jamaican immigrants focuses on their economic successes, triumphant stories that are too often held up in contrast to what’s perceived as the lesser achievements of African-Americans. All this attention on West Indian economic success, however, obscures stories like Victor’s, which are in fact all-too-common.

Read the rest at: http://thepublicintellectual.org/2011/05/02/jamaicans-targeted-for-deportation/