Credit: Nuestro Stories
Protectionism, exploitation, and greed – that is what the Jones Act is when applied to Puerto Rico. It hurts the island and its people.
What Exactly is the Jones Act?
The Jones Act is shorthand for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, an obscure regulation that requires goods shipped from an American port to another be transported on a ship that is American-built, American-owned, and crewed by U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
Primary shipments of goods from the island to the U.S. mainland, and vice versa, must be conducted by way of expensive protected ships rather than global competition. That makes everything Puerto Ricans buy hugely expensive compared to goods purchased on the U.S. mainland or other Caribbean islands.
A side note. We shouldn’t confuse the Jones Act with the Jones-Shafroth Act signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917. The latter gave US citizenship to Puerto Ricans (without consulting them) and spurred mass migration to the U.S. mainland, mainly to New York State. Approximately 42,000 Puerto Ricans migrated to the U.S. during the 1920s.
The act was followed that same year by the Selective Service Act, which permitted the U.S. to draft soldiers, including Puerto Ricans. As a result, approximately 20,000 Puerto Rican service members served in World War I, and 65,000 fought in World War II.
Read more: This Puerto Rican Cave Was Once Featured in the Pirates of the Caribbean
But of the three, the Jones Act has proven the most onerous over time. First, it ensures, to the detriment of the island, a profitable U.S.-owned commercial shipping industry, important during the blockades of World War I. It aims to stabilize the U.S. maritime industry and help sustain 650,000 American jobs, resulting in $150 billion in economic benefits each year.
But, for Puerto Ricans, the Jones Act is an albatross around the archipelago’s neck.
How It Impacts Puerto Rico
The three most important ways the Jones Act affects Puerto Rico are:
- It drives up the cost of living on the island and leaves Puerto Rico even more dependent on the US.
- According to a recent analysis from the Cato Institute, the Jones Act raises the price of shipping cargo to Puerto Rico by $568.9 million, and that prices are $1.1 billion higher than would be the case without the Jones Act.
- The Jones Act is estimated to mean 13,250 fewer jobs when Puerto Rico still suffers from high unemployment and is still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Maria.
The toll of this is evident in a 2012 report issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It found that shipping a twenty-foot container of goods from the East Coast to the island was estimated to cost $3,063 versus $1,504 to the nearby Dominican Republic and $1,687 to Jamaica.
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