British Jamaicans (or Jamaican British people) are British people who were born in Jamaica or who are of Jamaican descent. The community is well into its third generation and consists of around 300,000 individuals, the second-largest Jamaican population, behind the United States, living outside of Jamaica. The majority of British people of Jamaican origin were born in the United Kingdom as opposed to Jamaica itself. The Office for National Statistics estimates that in 2015, some 137,000 people born in Jamaica were resident in the UK. The number of Jamaican nationals is estimated to be significantly lower, at 49,000 in 2015. Jamaicans have been present in the UK since the start of the 20th century; however, by far the largest wave of migration occurred after the Second World War. During the 1950s, Britain's economy was suffering greatly and the nation was plagued with high labour shortages. The British government looked to its overseas colonies for help and encouraged migration in an effort to fill the many job vacancies. Jamaicans, alongside other Caribbean, African and South Asian groups, moved in their hundreds of thousands to the United Kingdom. Almost half of all the men who came from the Caribbean to the UK throughout the 1950s had previously worked in skilled positions or possessed excellent employment credentials. The majority of Jamaicans settled in Greater London and found work in the likes of London Transport, British Rail and the NHS. History and settlement The Caribbean island nation of Jamaica was a British colony between 1655 and 1962. More than 300 years of British rule changed the face of the island considerably (having previously been under Spanish rule, which depopulated the indigenous Arawak and Taino communities) – and 92.1% of Jamaicans are descended from sub-Saharan Africans who were brought over during the Atlantic slave trade. Jamaica is the third most populous English-speaking nation in the Americas and the local dialect of English is known as Jamaican Patois. The tight-knit link between Jamaica and the United Kingdom remains evident to this day. There has been a long and well established Jamaican community in the United Kingdom since near the beginning of the 20th century. Many Jamaicans fought for Britain in World War I, with the British West Indies Regiment recruiting solely from the British overseas colonies in the Caribbean. Volunteers originally only came from four nations (excluding Jamaica), however as the regiment grew thousands of Jamaican