Jhe Jamaican Government has been curiously and worryingly silent about this week's report by The Sunday Gleaner of the discrimination that many Jamaicans who live and work in the Cayman Islands are forced to endure.

But, perhaps no one in the administration, including the Foreign Ministry, which we would expect to look out for the interest of Jamaicans abroad, has as yet got around to reading the articles. And, if they have, maybe they are not yet seized of its claims and therefore, its import.

In that regard, the political executive and the public servants on whose advice they rely may be in need of a bit of a nudge. We might have been tempted to discount much of what was contained in the Cayman survey on the grounds that people with hurt and grouses are given to exaggeration. Except that those who corroborated the concerns of Jamaican workers, including the honorary consul, Mr. Robert Hamaty, are not frivolous people to be dismissed lightly.

Indeed, it is not uncommon for there to be tension between immigrants and the natives of their home communities. especially if there is a sense that the perceived newcomer is in competition for jobs and services. And, the fact is that the estimated 11,000 Jamaicans who legally live and work in the Cayman Islands represent about 22 per cent of the country's population. That is not substantial.

Jamaicans, however, are not, for the most part, idle in the Cayman Islands, seeking to sponge off the state. Many work as professionals, though the vast majority work as clerks or domestic helpers, or as artisans. They play a critical role in helping to maintain the Caymanian economy, supplementing a domestic labour force that is insufficient to meet the demands of the labour market.

Yet, they face resentment, even if the reaction is yet to be at the level of national xenophobia. The growing anti-Jamaican sentiment would of itself be bad enough. It is worse when, if the testimony is credible, it rises to a level just short of official victimisation of ordinary, hard-working Jamaicans.

Mr. Hamaty, Anglican priest, Sean Major-Campbell, and other community activists suggest that discrimination is often overlaid by injustice. It is not unknown, for example, for immigrant workers, particularly Jamaicans, to be paid less than agreed wages, or for women who turn up to the jobs for which they assume they were recruited to find out that they were really wanted for prostitution. Those who complain, it has been said, can usually expect that the Cayman authorities will not side with the victims, but the victimisers. Indeed, a report by a British agency, quoted by The Sunday Gleaner, corroborated this attitude towards immigrants in general and Jamaicans in particular.

The cynics will argue that if conditions at home were better Jamaicans would not head to places like the Cayman Islands in search of jobs. That, however, is not the full issue. For in a globalised market, labour will become increasingly mobile. There is economic value to the process.

What is expected is that states will play by the rules and step in with a steady hand to ensure decency and fairness. And jingoism must not get in the way of economics. That is what Jamaica must insist of The Cayman Islands.