PRIME Minister Dr Andrew Holness has dismissed talk that his Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Government bowed to pressure when it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the United States (US) Government to accept third-country nationals (TCNs) because it was afraid of being on the wrong side of US President Donald Trump.

“Jamaica has been asked to do many things before and we have not. We have made sure it complies with our laws, that it suits our political timetable, that it suits our interests, and that it is in the interest of our friends,” said Holness.

He was speaking Monday during an interview with Nationwide News journalist Cliff Hughes on Cliff Hughes Online.

When Hughes asked if Holness was prepared to defend Jamaica in the same vein as former Prime Minister Michael Manley did in the 1970s, Holness said, “I’m not about to go on a pedestal of revolutionaries. I’m not a revolutionary; I’ve never sought to wear that mantle. The mantle I wear is to protect Jamaica, not on an ideological platform which all the people who make those comments are — ideologues stuck in the 70s and can’t see what is in front of them.”

The controversial TCN programme will see 25 illegal aliens being taken to Jamaica every two weeks en route to their country of origin. It is being implemented with the assistance of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Holness was also asked whether Jamaica was coerced by Washington into signing the MOU, after dragging its feet on the matter.

“We were very deliberate in what we do because we understand the Jamaican public, the Jamaican psyche, and how Miss Mattie in north-east Manchester is going to view it as if the US is coming to dump unwanted persons in our country to create a problem for us,” he responded.

“Absolutely not,” he responded when asked if the Government was forced into the agreement. It was a similar response when he was asked whether former Jamaican Ambassador to the United States Audrey Marks initiated the discussions for Jamaica to accept up to 10,000 illegal aliens under the TCN.

The controversy and the resulting back-and-forth between Washington and Kingston as to which Administration initiated the discussions that led to the signing of the MOU has been a source of distraction for Holness and the JLP which has been accused of entering into a secret deal.

The prime minister said Jamaicans must understand that they have him as prime minister, and ministers “who stand up for you, who seek to get the best deals for you”.

According to Holness, the controversy is the result of a conflation of two separate programmes — the TCNs programme which includes about 30 countries, and Jamaica pursing what he called a structured migration programme.

He explained that in the case of Jamaica, 25 TCNs would arrive every two weeks and, where 10 of them decide to stay, the programme would be paused and the IOM would assist in its management.

The prime minister sought to explain further that when Marks served as ambassador to the US, one of her jobs was to advise the Jamaican Government of likely changes in foreign policy and how those changes would impact Jamaica.

“In parallel to that, Jamaica was going through some changes ourselves; we, for the first time in our history, reached what economists call full employment,” said Holness. Pointing to the latest data which showed 3.6 per cent unemployment with 50,000 Jamaicans unemployed, the prime minister said “We have had to be figuring out what do we do when we get to two per cent unemployment?”

He said with the United States changing its policy to limit Jamaican migration, the Jamaican Government had to start thinking about a structured migration programme, “which is quite separate from the third-country national programme which uses Jamaica as a transit point”.

“This is not even policy, it is just the Government thinking in advance,” he remarked.

When pressed on what Marks shared with her counterparts in the United States, Holness explained that she attended an event in the United States on his behalf. “I think she would have shared with them that Jamaica is considering a structured migration programme, and I believe that might have been taken, and rolled up, and conflated [with the TCNs programme].”

The prime minister noted that Jamaica currently has examples of structured migration in the farm work and hotel workers’ programmes. He said other unstructured programmes see recruiters coming to Jamaica each year to recruit nurses and teachers, creating a “real dislocation in our operations”.

He noted that the Government was now pursuing structured arrangements with Ghana, the Phillipines, India and Nigeria for nurses. He also pointed to the previous, decades-old, structured migration programme with Cuba whose doctors and nurses worked in Jamaica for many years.

Addressing the issue of secrecy in the deal, the prime minister emphasised that one can’t go public until the negotiations are completed and “everything is signed and done”.

“You believe that we could have done this in secret that a plane lands with 25 people [every two weeks]? It would be all over the news!” Holness said, adding that he found the chatter around the issue to be “almost ridiculous”.

He argued that Jamaica was not doing what 28 others countries, including within the Caribbean region, have not already done.

“The United States has asked countries that it considers its friends to assist them in managing their immigration challenges,” he said before reeling off a string of questions of his own.

“Who are we as Jamaicans? Are we part of the global system? Are we a friend of the United States? Are we looking to the United States to assist with things? Do we only assist in exchange for something? Is the relationship always transactional?”

Stating that these are questions that we have to start to ask ourselves, the prime minister urged Jamaicans to “put away the notion about our relationships only in the prism of the 70s and 80s.

“Now is a different time. Jamaica is an independent country, Jamaica is a country that is part of a multilateral system. We are using our foreign policy for our economic and social benefit,” Holness said.