# data[].attributes.body
1610-1629: The first voluntary indentured workers from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 aboard a Dutch frigate. Even when a Portuguese ship arrived in 1629 with the first shipload of enslaved blacks, they lived and worked as "free persons."

# data[].attributes.body
After 1838, European and American Caribbean colonies with expanding sugar industries imported large numbers of immigrants to fill labor shortages.

# data[].attributes.body
1865: After slavery was abolished, American planters imported temporary workers known as "swallow migrants" to harvest crops on a year-to-year basis. After harvest, these workers, many of whom were Jamaicans, returned to their homelands.

# data[].attributes.body
Between 1881 and the start of World War I, the US recruited over 250,000 workers from the Caribbean to work on the Panama Canal, with 90,000 of them being Jamaicans. The United States recruited Jamaican men for their services on various American bases, in there region during both world wars.

# data[].attributes.body
Three distinct waves of Caribbean immigration into the United States have occurred since the turn of the twentieth century, with the majority of these immigrants hailing from Jamaica.

# data[].attributes.body
1900-1930: The first wave of Caribbean immigrants arrived in small numbers. By 1930, the United States had 178,000 documented first-generation blacks and their children. Around 100,000 people were from the British Caribbean, including Jamaica.

# data[].attributes.body
Between the 1930s and the new immigration policy of the mid-1960s, the second and weakest immigration wave occurred. The McCarran-Walter Act reaffirmed and upheld the quota law, which discriminated against black immigrants by allowing only 100 Jamaicans to enter the US each year.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Protest against the McCarren-Walter Act 

# data[].attributes.body
The most recent and largest wave of immigration began in 1965 and is still going on today. After Britain restricted immigration in its former black Commonwealth colonies, this wave began. Inadvertently, the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act altered US immigration policy and paved the way for a surge in Caribbean immigration.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Lydon B. Johnson signing the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act

# data[].attributes.body
2000-present: Jamaicans have a heritage that is rich and vibrant. Through the powerful message embedded in the island's youth empowered to play a vital role in their own development as well as in that of their communities, helping them to learn vital life-skills, develop knowledge on human rights and citizenship and to promote positive civic action.