Marks’ 10,000 skilled-worker plan still only a proposal, Morris Dixon says

Information Minister Dr Dana Morris Dixon says the idea of bringing 10,000 skilled workers to Jamaica — floated by Cabinet Minister Audrey Marks when she served as Jamaica’s ambassador to the United States — has not advanced beyond early talk.

Dixon answered a question from Zahra Burton, an investigative journalist with 18 Degrees North, at last week’s post-Cabinet media briefing. She said the concept remains exactly where Marks left it as ambassador and has not entered formal talks with Washington.

“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.

Her remarks land in the middle of a wider public argument over Jamaica’s deal with the United States to receive third-country nationals (TCNs), a central plank of US President Donald Trump’s migration agenda.

Dixon stressed that Jamaica, through the Ministry of Health and Wellness, has already looked abroad for scarce talent — including specialised nurses and doctors from Ghana and the Philippines — because of domestic shortages in those fields.

“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.

In June, The Gleaner reported that Kingston and Washington were talking about Jamaica taking in third-country nationals from the United States under terms that could have meant as many as 10,000 people being sent to the island.

A diplomatic note from the US Embassy in Kingston identified Marks as the senior minister behind a proposal made in March 2026 and asked for a meeting with Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness to push the conversation further.

Jamaican officials counter that US officers “conflated” Marks’ reported skilled-worker idea with the separate TCN talks that the foreign affairs and national security ministries have pursued since January 2026.

The US Embassy did not answer a Gleaner query seeking clarification.

“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.

In a Jamaica Information Service interview earlier this month, Marks linked her pitch to 2024 America First policy papers outlining mass removals and tighter immigration rules. As ambassador, she said, she tried both to cushion Jamaica against US policy swings and to spot economic openings for the island.

She placed the start of those talks in January 2025, with a finished proposal around March 2025.

Her first step, she said, was to urge a jump in Jamaica’s seasonal worker ceiling from about 20,000 to 200,000, using the country’s existing legal framework for managed migration to ease US labour gaps.

“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 track, Marks explained, targeted an estimated 8.5 million undocumented migrants in the United States who hold high-level skills. The scheme would begin with a pilot of 1,000 people and later grow to 10,000, aiming to ease acute skills gaps while weighing the needs of some 50,000 jobless and 50,000 underemployed Jamaicans at home.

“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.