<Tr> <Th_colspan="2"> Related ethnic groups </Th> </Tr> <Tr> <Td_colspan="2"> Jamaican British, Jamaican Canadians, Chinese Jamaicans, Jamaicans of African ancestry, Jamaican Nigerians, Indo - Jamaicans, Jamaican Australians, Afro Americans, Hakka Americans </Td> </Tr> <P> Jamaican Americans are Americans who have full or partial Jamaican ancestry . The largest proportion of Jamaicans live in New York City, which has various other Caribbean cultural elements such as food and music . There are also communities of Jamaican Americans residing in Philadelphia, Boston, South Florida, Tampa, Los Angeles, Orlando, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Cleveland, Western New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey . </P> <P> After 1838, European colonies in the Caribbean with expanding sugar industries imported large numbers of immigrants to meet their acute labor shortage . Large numbers of Jamaicans were recruited to work in Panama and Costa Rica in the 1850s . After slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, American planters imported temporary workers, called "swallow migrants", to harvest crops on an annual basis . These workers, many of them Jamaicans, returned to their countries after harvest . Between 1881 and the beginning of World War I, the United States recruited over 250,000 workers from the Caribbean, 90,000 of whom were Jamaicans, to work on the Panama Canal . During both world wars, the United States again recruited Jamaican men for service on various American bases in the region . The vast majority of Jamaican American are of black Afro - Caribbean descent . </P>

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