One ‘Bay’ for all or One ‘Bay’ for some?
Dear Editor,
Montego Bay is changing before our eyes. What many residents notice daily — more diverse faces on the streets, new professional cohorts in our hospitals, and a tourism skyline rising faster than supporting services — is not anecdote. It is measurable demographic and economic transformation inside a nationally shrinking population.
Official figures show Jamaica remains one of the world’s lowest-immigration countries, with only about 21,000-23,500 foreign-born residents. Yet St James has gained population share while other parishes lose relative weight. Cuban and Haitian arrivals, long-established Chinese and Indian merchant communities, a visible Jewish Chabad presence since 2014, and now formal pipelines of Nigerian doctors and Ghanaian nurses are concentrating in the west.
The first 43 specialist Ghanaian nurses arrived on September 27, 2026; the majority are assigned to the Western Regional Health Authority (WRHA) and South East Regional Health Authority (SERHA). This follows the departure of 27 Cuban health-care workers from Cornwall Regional Hospital and ongoing recruitment talks with Nigeria and India.
Jamaica loses its own nurses at high rates and fills the gap with West African professionals who, in turn, leave shortages at home. The result is a cascading redistribution of talent rather than a solution to the underlying shortfall.
Tourism is the engine. Plans call for new hotel rooms by 2030 — a 33-storey Moon Palace tower in Rose Hall, a Tourism Innovation Township clustering thousands of rooms, and major airport expansion. Worker housing of a few thousand units is promised, yet the gap between formal projects and the informal settlements where many low-wage and migrant workers actually live is widening. Crime pressures in St James remain acute, and the new third-country nationals transit arrangement with the United States adds another politically charged variable.
The 2015 One Bay for All: Sustainable Montego Bay Action Plan was a highly accurate diagnostic blueprint that targeted sprawl, flooding, waste, informal settlements, and youth unemployment. Its physical elements — waterfront access, Railway Lane housing, drainage, smart-city systems — may partially materialise.
Its social vision of shared prosperity, however, did not anticipate today’s scale of tourism investment or the volume and diversity of migration. A city projected towards 130,000-140,000 people by 2030, serviced by a multicultural workforce, and ringed by mega-resorts, will be more cosmopolitan and more unequal than the city the plan was written for.
The deeper question is whether Montego Bay’s institutions can absorb this change without fracturing. Tourism revenues can and should finance public goods — housing, health, education, and drainage — for all residents, not only resort corridors. Local data on migrant populations, including those outside formal channels, must inform planning. Citizen monitoring and governance frameworks need to include the new professional and merchant communities. Without an updated strategy that treats demographic change as a core priority, “One Bay for All” risks becoming “One Bay for Some.”
Montego Bay’s future need not be a cautionary tale of growth without inclusion. With deliberate policy, it can become a model of managed diversity in a tourism-dependent Caribbean city. The next four years will decide which path we take.
Yannick Pessoa
A concerned resident of St James
yannickpessoa@yahoo.com
