ABSTRACT
Migration has characterised Caribbean history and is still central to the lives and awareness of its inhabitants today. 1 European immigration, the African slave trade and the recruitment of Asian indentured labour accounted for the populating of the region after the indigenous Amerindian inhabitants had been all but annihilated in the wake of the conquista. Upon the abolition of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, labour migration within the Caribbean and to Central America gained momentum, with Barbadians moving to British Guiana since the 1860s, Jamaicans building the Panama canal at the turn of the century, islanders from all over the Caribbean doing seasonal work at the Cuban and Dominican sugar plantations after World War I, and many being drawn to the oil refineries of Aruba and Curaçao as of the late 1920s. This movement of people within the Caribbean has never stopped. Today, labour migrants from the poorer countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica can be found virtually all over the region.
