10,000 skilled workers lost in translation

There has been no further development of the reported proposal for 10,000 skilled workers made by Cabinet Minister Audrey Marks while she was Jamaica’s ambassador to the United States (US), according to Information Minister Dr Dana Morris Dixon.
Morris Dixon was responding to a question posed at last week’s post-Cabinet press briefing by Zahra Burton, investigative journalist with media platform 18 Degrees North, when she disclosed that the proposal had not moved beyond the discussion stage.
“So, the 10,000 proposal from Minister Marks has not moved from a proposal that she had as ambassador. The Jamaican Government has not been in negotiations with the US on that 10,000 programme. The Cabinet of Jamaica, and this is a post-Cabinet briefing, has not approved negotiations around that 10,000 skilled-worker programme,” Morris-Dixon said.
The information minister’s comments came amid an ongoing national debate concerning Jamaica’s agreement with the US to host third-country nationals (TCN), a key migration policy of US President Donald Trump’s administration.
Morris Dixon maintained that Jamaica has, through the Ministry of Health and Wellness, sought skilled workers, including specialised nurses and doctors from Ghana and the Philippines, amid a shortage of such professionals in the country.
“And so, that is a part of our skilled-worker programme. We would not be discussing Ghana or Philippines with the US. So, I think Minister Mark’s proposal for 10,000 was looking at the US. But, as I said, it was for Americans ... not Americans, but persons in America.
“And so the reality is that Cabinet has not approved this programme. And so the day after it was conflated, the US government was informed that Jamaica is only at this time interested in negotiating a regular TCN agreement, and we have done so, and it is 25 persons. So that proposal has not moved any further in terms of discussions,” said Morris Dixon. 
Diplomatic note
In June, The Gleaner reported that Jamaica was in discussions with the US to accept third-country nationals from the North American country under an arrangement that could see up to 10,000 people being deported to the island.
A diplomatic note from the US Embassy in Kingston named Marks as the senior government minister who made the proposal in March 2026. The embassy had also requested a meeting with Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness for further discussion on the matter.
However, the Jamaican Government has insisted that US officials “conflated” Marks’ reported proposal for 10,000 skilled workers with the TCN programme that the foreign and national security ministries had been negotiating since January 2026.
The US Embassy did not respond to a Gleaner request for clarity on the matter.
“The United States government reached out to the Jamaican Government, asking us to participate in a Third-Country Nationals programme. So that’s early January. Negotiation, discussion, started; but prior to that, there had been a proposal that Minister Marks, when she was ambassador, had started to look at – which was whether or not there could be persons who may be in the United States that were skilled, that, for whatever reason, may want to be leaving the United States and whether or not Jamaica could be an avenue for them. That had nothing to do with TCNs,” the minister asserted.
“That started in her time as ambassador and before she became minister. And so there was a conversation some months after the US made their overtures to the Jamaican Government. And, as I said, the negotiations were taking place between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, and also the Ministry of National Security. Minister Marks had a meeting and in that meeting there were some, with the US - with some US officials. In that meeting she had mentioned her previous proposal that had been in place from she was...that she had done from she was an ambassador, really looking out for the interest of Jamaica, and she mentioned it.
“Because they were in the middle of the negotiations on the TCNs, there was, at some point, some officials [who] conflated the two things. There was never any discussion around 10,000 TCNs. That has never been a conversation. Those officials who had that conversation and did the conflation, did a diplomatic note to Jamaica. That diplomatic note noted the 10,000 proposal. The very next day, the Government of Jamaica sent a diplomatic note saying that Jamaica is not negotiating anything around 10,000. We are only interested in the TCN negotiations that we had already started to discuss in January 2026,” she noted.
‘America First’
In a Jamaica Information Service interview earlier this month, Marks said her proposal was driven by the 2024 America First policy documents that detailed plans for mass deportations and stricter immigration controls.
She said that, as ambassador, she sought to mitigate the risks of US policy shifts on Jamaica while identifying economic opportunities for the island.
Marks said discussions began in January 2025, and the formal proposal was finalised around March 2025.
She said her first move was to scale up Jamaica’s seasonal workers cap from roughly 20,000 workers to 200,000 workers, leveraging Jamaica’s established legal system for managed migration to assist US labour needs.
“And so my thinking was, how do we get ahead of this situation and propose to the US that we can help? We can help because we have an established legal system of bringing workers into the country. And so that was the first proposal,” she said.
The second, Marks said, was tapping into the estimated 8.5 million undocumented migrants in the US who are highly skilled.
She said the proposal looked at a gradual programme, starting with a pilot of 1,000 persons and would eventually scale to 10,000.
She said this was designed to fill critical skills shortages in the country, while balancing the needs of the 50,000 unemployed and 50,000 underemployed citizens locally.
“So that was for that skilled-workers programme… . That’s how that 10,000 figure came up. That’s how that came up and that was from January 2025. That conversation started then and the proposal was done about March 2025,” said Marks, the minister of efficiency, innovation and digital transformation.
kimone.francis@gleanerjm.com