The promise, the challenge

tropicalities

Pacific Migration

Islanders away from home: The promise, the challenge

Migration is now almost the biggest growth industry in the Pacific Islands. So many people are leaving the smaller communities that the expatriate communities they form in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States sometimes exceed the populations left at home.

Nearly three times more Niueans now live in New Zealand than now inhabit Niue. Samoans and Cook Islanders are very close to achieving the same doubtful distinction and, at the same time, causing urban problems for themselves and their countries by their visibility within the now hard-pressed New Zealand economy.

According to Dr John Connell, an Australian who is involved with Pacific Islands development programs, more than 10 per cent of Pacific Islanders, with the exception of Papua New Guineans, now live in a metropolitan country, that is, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada or the United States.

In many cases, Samoa, the Cooks and Niue being prime examples, the money expatriated islanders send home to support their families has become a significant item on island foreign exchange “earnings.”

Is the Pacific in danger of being told: “Would the last man out please turn off the light” and what are the effects on island economies of this drainage of people? Do they go home, and if they do, how do they fit back into the simpler and slower scheme of island things?

In the next pages PIM writers examine some aspects of the situation.

Perhaps because of their sea-faring herit age, Pacific peoples are among the most mobile in the world. They move from island to island with great regularity and utter aplomb.

But the drift of population away from the islands towards the brighter lights and bigger jobs of industrial countries is a relatively new phenomenon. In many cases the travellers do not initially intend to completely sever links with their families and villages, but often that is what happens. In their adopted countries they frequently, and naturally enough, form social clusters ... not quite ghettos, but bordering on that unfortunate form ... which sometimes pro duce friction with indigenous groups. Karangahape road in Auckland, Newtown in Sydney, and the down-trodden area of Honolulu between Waikiki and the city are examples of this type of island community.

In doing this islanders are in no way different from the Ita lians who migrated to Mel bourne and gathered in Carl ton, or the Pakistanis and West Indians who went to London and clustered in Southall and Netting Hill. They, too, had to weather resentments which, as now, in times of high un employment and economic dif ficulty, can sometimes be very pointed and hurtful to new arrivals.

Time, and improved econo mic conditions solve these diffi culties by dissolving the ghettos; the denizens drift out to better living areas and lose their

identity in wider communities.

There are, therefore, a num ber of aspects of the migration process, some good, and some bad. Migration saps a small country’s strength by depriving it of the brains, the energy and the initiative it needs to deve lop. Even Britain complained of a ’’brain drain” as her scientists, doctors, and engineers went in droves to the U.S.A. after World War 11. Those who move overseas are generally the most ambitious in the community, for they take action where others

just dream of greener pastures.

On the other hand, some migrants are simply looking for pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, and can fare worse in their adopted countries because they cannot cope with the stiffer competition and higher work rates demanded in larger, in dustrial societies.

Yet, as many succeed in carving out good lives for them selves as fail, although in gen eral they do so at the cost of losing their island ways. Cultu ral clubs preserve a bit, but not

often into successive genera tions.

Pacific migration involves numbers which are much more significant to the populations remaining at home than the movement of almost any other people, with the exception, perhaps, of the Irish at the time of the potato famine. The com munities are not big enough to support the population growth most of them produce, but, at the same time, their deve lopment may be stunted by the loss of brains and numbers.

According to Dr John Con nell, who is a senior lecturer at Sydney University, many smal ler Pacific nations have no sensible development strategy and rely heavily on migration in that they are becoming more and more dependent upon money from overseas, sent in the form of aid, or remittances from emigrants. ’’Find Tuvalu on a map: it is so remote that if it had anything to market, which it doesn’t, it would be incredibly costly, so it relies on money sent home,” he said.

The Jackson Report, the ex cellent survey of Australian aid spending, is similarly gloomy: ’Tuvalu is so small that its agriculural resources can sup port only a tiny population at subsistence level. The Cook Islands and Niue have ten times Tuvalu’s area, but they would be similarly disadvantaged without New Zealand’s assist ance and the remittances of islanders working in New Zea land,” said Jackson. About 40,000 Tongans now lived in

New Zealand, the U.S. and Australia, and, like the substan tial populations of Cook Islan ders, Niueans and others sent home remittances which formed significant parts of their countries’ economies.

Pressure to migrate does not always come from outside. “A shortage of land is already a problem for Tuvalu and Tonga.

With rapid population growth and a youthful population, it will become a problem for others. Population growth and increasing urban drift raise dan gers of high youth unemploy ment. Land and job shortages could become explosive issues in the next ten years...”

Almost every Pacific country suffered from these problems to a greater or lesser degree, said Jackson. On the other hand, communities were so small that relatively small changes, infu sions of money, or deve lopment, could produce signifi cant improvements in living standards, except for tiny, re mote, Tuvalu and Kiribati, for which, said Jackson, there seemed to be no possible help except, perhaps, establishment of a special immigration quota in Australia. But countries which, like the Cooks, have come to depend very heavily upon migration and emigrants’ remittances, were, in fact, mak ing problems for themselves, said Dr Connell. ’’Not only do they lose their best workers and their most educated people, but the money eventually stops coming, too.”

Dr Connell says the same fate could await the Cocos Islands which, in April, voted to become part of Australia.

"All through the Pacific, it seems that the people with get up and go have got up and gone,” he said.

Indeed, the movement repre sented a sort of vortex ... young people drifted in from rural villages and camped in shanties around the bigger island towns, causing social and employment problems. Others, better edu cated and more dynamic, from within the bigger communities, moved out, overseas, seeking their fortunes. Some island countries thus faced being left, in extreme cases, with worse problems than migration solved for them.