Jamaica

Jamaica has no passive-income residence category, and the reason is worth stating plainly: the two immigration Acts contain no residence statuses at all. Neither the Aliens Act nor the Immigration Restriction (Commonwealth Citizens) Act uses the words permanent residence, and neither creates anything like it. What each does contain is a power for the Minister to exempt a person from all or any of the Act's provisions, either unconditionally or on conditions. Permanent Residence and Unconditional Landing, the two statuses the Agency actually grants and publishes requirements for, are administrative shapes built on that power rather than categories Parliament named. So there is no income threshold to meet, because there is no instrument that could set one. The Agency asks for evidence of financial status and means of support, and publishes no figure.

Jamaica runs two entry statutes side by side, and which one you meet depends on whether your country is in the Commonwealth. A Commonwealth citizen is dealt with under the Immigration Restriction (Commonwealth Citizens) Act, which lets an immigration officer grant leave for up to twelve months and caps extensions at twelve months from the date of entry. Everyone else is an alien under the Aliens Act, which sets conditions for being let in at all - support for yourself, a work permit if you mean to work, a visa unless there is a mutual abolition agreement - and then leaves the length of stay entirely to whatever conditions the officer attaches. There is no six-month ceiling for aliens in the Aliens Act. The Agency publishes one anyway: it tells travellers that non-Commonwealth citizens get a maximum of six months, and that figure has no counterpart in the statute, where the twelve-month Commonwealth figure does. Whether you need a visa is answered by a full country-by-country table, dated entry by entry, which is more than most of the region publishes. One entry on it is worth reading twice: Haiti is a member of the Caribbean Community and its ordinary passport holders need a Jamaican visa.

Retirement is one of the five categories under which the Agency will take a permanent residence application, and that is the whole of it. There is no retirement Act, no incentives programme, no pension threshold and no duty concession attached to retiring - Jamaica built none of the things Belize, Panama and Antigua built. The Agency's requirements are the general permanent residence list: evidence of means, a medical certificate, police certificates, two Jamaican referees and an interview. What does exist, and is often confused with a retirement programme, is the Returning Residents regime - but that is for Jamaican nationals coming home, not for foreign retirees, and Jamaica Customs says so in terms.

Work in Jamaica runs on a permit issued by the Minister of Labour under the Foreign Nationals and Commonwealth Citizens (Employment) Act, and the permit is issued to the worker in the worker's own name while naming the employer and the place of work - so it does not travel with you to a new job. Both the worker and anyone who employs a worker without one commit an offence. Two groups fall outside the requirement. Caribbean Community nationals exercising rights of establishment, providing services or moving capital are exempted by a Schedule that an Act of 2011 wrote into the Act. Holders of a Caribbean Community skills certificate are outside it under a different Act altogether. Everyone else needs the permit, and the Ministry publishes no fee for it - only the statement that one is payable by the employer on approval.

There is no investor route into Jamaica, and no citizenship by investment. The Agency takes permanent residence applications under five categories and investment is not one of them. On the citizenship side the list is closed by the Constitution itself: Chapter II gives birth, descent and registration on marriage, and leaves it to Parliament to provide for anyone else. The only Act Parliament passed for that purpose is the Jamaican Nationality Act, whose routes are registration of a Commonwealth or Irish citizen after five years' ordinary residence, registration of minors, registration on marriage, and naturalisation of an alien on the residence qualifications in its Second Schedule. None of them turns on money. An investor who wants to work in the business applies for a work permit like anyone else; the Ministry asks that investors apply through the national investment promotion agency.

Jamaica issues no student visa. A student arrives as a visitor and then has the stay extended, and the Agency asks for that to happen within two weeks of arrival rather than when the landing stamp runs out. What is produced is a letter of registration from an institution registered with the Ministry of Education, addressed to the Agency's chief executive, together with a return ticket valid for a year. The alternative, for someone who qualifies for it, is Unconditional Landing, which the Agency describes as letting the holder attend school without a student visa and work without a work permit - it is granted on birth, descent, naturalisation or a Caribbean Community skills certificate, not on enrolment.

Jamaica does not give descendants a residence permit; it gives them citizenship, and it does so automatically. Section 3C of the Constitution says that every person born outside Jamaica becomes a citizen on the date of their birth if at that date their father or mother is a citizen of Jamaica by birth, descent or registration by virtue of marriage. Because descent is itself one of the three qualifying parental modes, the chain does not stop at one generation: a child of a citizen by descent is themselves a citizen by descent, and so on indefinitely. That is the kernel of truth in the widely repeated claim that Jamaican descent is unlimited. What the claim leaves out is the limit that does exist, and it is a real one: a parent who became Jamaican by naturalisation, or by any registration other than one by virtue of marriage, does not transmit under section 3C at all. The question is not how many generations back, but how your parent became Jamaican.

Marriage to a Jamaican is not a residence permit in Jamaica; it is an entitlement to citizenship. Section 7 of the Constitution says any man or woman who marries a Jamaican citizen is entitled, on applying and taking the oath, to be registered as a citizen. There is no waiting period and no residence requirement in the section. There are two ways to be refused: satisfactory evidence that the marriage was entered into primarily to acquire citizenship or that the couple have no intention of living permanently together, and a conviction for an offence specified by a law providing for that denial. In the meantime the spouse lives on an extension granted by the Agency and works on a Marriage Exemption Certificate from the Ministry of Labour rather than a work permit. The Agency says it prepares a compliant registration application for the Minister within twenty-four months.

Jamaica implemented both halves of the Caribbean Community's free movement scheme, and the skills half is drafted in a way no other member state's is. Section 3 of the Caribbean Community (Free Movement of Skilled Persons) Act obliges an immigration officer to admit a qualifying national indefinitely; section 4 obliges the same officer to admit a qualifying national for up to six months. The two sections then describe the same person in identical words - a valid Member State passport, an intention to work, and a valid qualifying certificate presented on entry - because an Act of 2013 deliberately substituted the same paragraph into both. Nothing in the Act says which limb an officer should use. The answer is in the Regulations that the same 2013 Act added as a Fourth Schedule: a person admitted under section 4 must present the certificate to the Minister for verification within six months. So the line is verification, as it is in Barbados - but Barbados draws it in its statute and Jamaica draws it in a regulation, having first removed the distinction from the statute. The right of establishment is implemented too, by an Act bearing 30 January 2006 on its face, and an Act of 2011 wrote the resulting work-permit exemption into the employment statute.

Chapter II of the Constitution does the heavy lifting. Birth in Jamaica makes you a citizen; birth abroad to a qualifying Jamaican parent makes you a citizen; marriage to a Jamaican entitles you to be registered as one. Everyone else is left to Parliament, and Parliament's answer is the Jamaican Nationality Act. A Commonwealth or Irish citizen may be registered at the Minister's discretion after five years of ordinary residence or Crown service. Anyone else applies for naturalisation on the Second Schedule qualifications: twelve months' residence immediately before applying, plus four years' residence in the seven years before that, good character in the Minister's opinion, and an intention to stay. Dual citizenship is not forbidden - the Act provides for renunciation where someone chooses to give Jamaican citizenship up, not where they acquire another. The protection a constitutional citizen has is unusual and worth knowing: a citizen by birth, descent or marriage registration cannot be deprived of citizenship at all.

The charging provision is section 5 of the Income Tax Act and it is worldwide on its face. A person residing in the island is charged on profits or gains from any kind of property whatever, whether situated in the island or elsewhere, and from any trade, business, profession, employment or vocation whether carried on in the island or elsewhere. A person not resident is charged only on Jamaican property and on a trade or employment exercised within the island. That is a residence test doing a great deal of work, and the Act does not define it. Section 2 runs from distribution through emoluments to unit holder and contains no definition of resident, residence or residing; whether a person resides in the island is left as a question of fact. The six-month figure that circulates as Jamaica's tax residence rule is not in the Income Tax Act at all. There is a statutory six-month residence test in Jamaican law, but it is in the National Health Fund Act and it decides who gets drug subsidies.

What a Jamaican bank asks for is set by the Bank of Jamaica's guidance notes on money laundering, published in the Jamaica Gazette Extraordinary in June 2018. They require positive identification from a short list - a valid driver's licence bearing a photograph issued where the person resides, a current passport, a voter's identification card, or a signed employer identity card - plus the customer's address, date and place of birth, nationality, contact numbers, a photograph, and a Taxpayer Registration Number. Two references are required as well, and the guidance says in terms that this applies to customers who are visitors to the island and not transacting business under a work permit. The one relief for a newcomer is on the tax number: the Bank recognises that visitors, people here on a work permit and enrolled students would not reasonably be expected to have one.

Jamaica abolished user fees in its public health facilities in 2008, and the abolition is for Jamaicans without health insurance. The Ministry of Health says so in the same breath as it announces fee rises for everyone else: from 1 August 2018 user fees went up for non-residents, private patients and insured patients at all public health facilities, while Jamaicans who are public patients without insurance continue to be treated without charge. So a foreigner in a Jamaican public hospital pays. The second strand is the National Health Fund, which subsidises treatment for listed conditions and is open to residents rather than citizens - and here residence has a precise statutory meaning: ordinarily resident in Jamaica for periods aggregating not less than six months in the calendar year. The Fund's benefit turns on a doctor's certificate that you have one of the listed conditions, and on nothing about nationality.

The Road Traffic Act in force says you may not drive on a road unless you hold a licence for the purpose, and licence there means a Jamaican one. There is no provision in it deeming a foreign licence to be a Jamaican licence, so the familiar advice that a visitor may drive for three months on a home licence has nothing in this Act behind it. What the Act does have is a route to a Jamaican licence without the usual requirements: a person making only a temporary stay who produces a licence issued to them not more than twelve months earlier by the competent authority of the country they come from is exempt from everything in the subsection except the fee - and the Licensing Authority may still require them to comply. A new Road Traffic Act was passed in 2018 and it would change this, but it commences on a day the Minister appoints by notice in the Gazette, different days may be appointed for different provisions, and we did not find the notice published. On the published law, the 1938 Act is what you drive under.

Jamaica's generous import concession is for Jamaicans coming home, not for people moving there. It rests on Item 6A of the Second Schedule to the Customs Act, and Jamaica Customs says so on the front page of its own policy. A returning resident is a Jamaican national of eighteen or over who has been resident overseas for not less than three consecutive years and is returning to live permanently; the exemption covers household effects and tools of trade in the quantities the Schedule lists, is a one-time benefit, and runs to goods imported within six months before or after arrival. The list is specific to the point of comedy - one refrigerator, two television sets, four rugs, six bedside tables - and is published as a form you fill in. The thing most people believe about the regime is not true: there is no duty concession on a motor vehicle, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it in those words. An expatriate moving to Jamaica is not a returning resident at all and gets the ordinary passenger allowance.