Within countries there is some ambivalence towards migration. In Melanesia there are major concerns about perceptions of excess migration to urban centres and often draconian policies directed to reversing migration flows, notably in PNG but also in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands (Connell and Lea 2002; Connell 2003a). Since such practices address the symptoms of largely rural development problems, rather than their causes, they have failed to slow migration. Policies that focus on decentralisation and regional development are largely things of the past (Connell 1987c) as states exercise a more limited role in policy formation. Broadly based rural and regional development policies are unlikely to be implemented.
No country has sought to discourage international migration in recent years though several have expressed particular concerns, mainly attached to the loss of skilled labour (including nurses and army personnel), the breaching of bonds by scholarship holders or, in the case of Niue, particularly extensive migration. Early Development Plans in Samoa and Tonga did express limited concern, but there was no attempt to translate these concerns into policies that might discourage migration (especially where bureaucrats themselves were sometimes the prime beneficiaries of international migration). For the past quarter of a century, governments have neither sought to intervene in emigration nor tried to curb the loss of skilled and unskilled workers. They are unlikely to do so in the future.
Fiji is one country where there have been serious concerns about some impacts of recent migration, frequent high-level discussions of its consequences, but no policy formation to discourage it. Concerns have been expressed in Fiji within the Ministry of Health, by military leaders and by the Fiji Employers’ Federation and the Ministry for Employment Opportunities (e.g., Fiji Times, April 2, 2004). Bonding of students who study on government scholarships has been the only policy directed at (temporarily) retaining qualified people (although most countries have sought to provide in-country tertiary training, thus discouraging international migration at formative ages). The Fiji Government, however, once tended to regard emigrants as ‘traitors’ and some policies effectively punished return migrants, for example, where migrant nurses had to start on a lower salary on re-employment in Fiji compared with before migration (Rokoduru 2002). While this policy discourages the temporary migration of nurses in the first place, it also discourages return migration in a sector where there are acute shortages.
More recently, however, Fiji has sought overseas migration opportunities, partly as a legacy of earlier perceptions. In 1977, the Fiji Minister of Labour argued that the provision of overseas employment was ‘the greatest form of overseas aid any government can offer’ (quoted in The Fiji Times, December 19, 1977). A quarter of a century later, in 2004, after the Minister of Labour, Kenneth Zinck, had finalised contracts for migrant workers to go to Kuwait, he commented that ‘[w]e need to look for overseas companies to employ locals to combat poverty and unemployment. [We are] already holding talks about sending workers to either Australia or New Zealand to [work on] apple farms. This should be finalized soon’ (Fiji Sun, December 20, 2004). Zinck has also argued that the USA could assist by legalising the status of Fijians who now work illegally as care-givers there (Scott 2003), which would enable them to provide more support for relatives in Fiji:
For a country like Fiji, it will be good if they can give an amnesty to our people there because these people are actually sending money home to feed their families. All I’m asking the government of the United States is to give our people amnesty at least, now that [the] WTO has ordered the United States to scrap the garment export quota it usually offers us. (Quoted in Pareti 2005b: 46)
Such notions of a form of reciprocity were exactly what Tuvalu had long been arguing for with respect to the greenhouse effect, and have economic parallels in Nauru.
Several countries have trained workers for overseas employment, notably in the Marine Training Schools of Tuvalu and Kiribati, and there has been recent discussion in the region of the possibilities of adopting a ‘Philippines model’: expanding and developing the Tuvalu and Kiribati models to include skilled workers such as nurses, for whom there is global demand, centred on the dual assumptions that many such skilled workers will migrate anyway and that their remittances will be greater than the cost of the training, hence there will be a net benefit to the sending countries. The Commonwealth Secretariat, alongside the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, has recently commissioned a study of the potential for a regional training program for nurses (Duncan 2005). Kiribati has sought to extend the seaman program to cover nurses, and Tonga and Samoa would like to train more professionals than can be employed locally (Ware 2005: 445, 446), and benefit from presumably superior remittance flows. This shift to the deliberate export of skilled workers has major potential ramifications for development.
At various times and in various contexts island states have sought greater migration opportunities elsewhere. During the nickel boom in New Caledonia in the 1970s, leaders from Tonga, the then Gilbert and Ellice Islands (Kiribati and Tuvalu) and Fiji all requested opportunities for their citizens to work in New Caledonia but all were rejected, with the French territory preferring to bring workers from the two other French Pacific territories, less because of language issues than because they would be ‘docile labour and reliable voters’ (Connell 1987b: 217). There is a curious contemporary echo of this in the decision of New Caledonia to import as many as 4,000 Filipino workers for the Goro nickel mine rather than hire local workers, despite union demands, or bring workers from regional sources (Oceania Flash, September 6, 2005). In the three decades since the 1970s many countries, notably Tuvalu, have sought more migration opportunities for their citizens, on economic and environmental grounds.
On several occasions, Tuvalu has drawn attention to the particular difficulties of sustaining populations in a small, densely populated island state, with few resources, alongside the problems of absorbing return migrants, while threatened by climate change (Connell 2003e: 94–5). Such requests fell on stony ground in Australia, though New Zealand provided a migration quota of 50 households per year. In the context of the emerging Pacific Plan, the President of Kiribati observed that ‘mobility of labour is the big issue’ (quoted in Islands Business, April 2005: 5). PNG has also requested guest worker positions for agricultural workers in Australia, while the PNG academic John Ngongorr has argued that young Papua New Guineans would benefit from agricultural work in Australia, and might also gain additional social skills (Sharp 2005).
While New Zealand has established quotas for migration from the Pacific, favouring its former colony of Samoa, neither Australia nor the USA has developed particular policies for the island states. Apart from Niueans, Tokelauans and Cook Islanders, with free access to New Zealand, most Tongans, Fijians and others have migrated to New Zealand under the family migration and the general skills categories. In 2002, New Zealand introduced the ‘Pacific Access Category’ under which an annual quota of 250 Tongans, 75 Tuvaluans and 50 i-Kiribati were granted entry to New Zealand (’Esau and Hirai 2002: 22), thus making more widely available specific provisions for more of the Pacific region.
At different times, in Australia at least, specific policies enabling greater migration from the Pacific have been suggested, but never implemented, despite a long history of policy consideration (Connell 1988b). The Report of the Committee to Review the Australian Overseas Aid Program (the Jackson Report) argued in 1984 for two of the smaller countries in the region that ‘[t]heir long-term development prospects are discouraging. In view of structural problems which are beyond their control and beyond the reach of aid, Australia should make available limited opportunities for immigration from Kiribati and Tuvalu’ (Australian Government 1984: 8), and thus go beyond traditional ideas of aid to provide special immigration quotas for the two countries, with which Australia had hitherto had few formal ties (Australian Government 1984: 181). Two decades ago this then radical idea was wholly ignored, from concern that if Tuvalu and Kiribati were accorded special consideration this would become the thin end of the wedge for other countries to follow.
A 1989 review of Australia’s relations with the region called for Australia to introduce a work experience program for Islanders, but it too was rejected. The review also noted that ‘the issue of migration has the potential to damage Australia-South Pacific relations, particularly as population pressures in the region increase’ (Australian Government 1989: 123). Nonetheless, academics and others regularly touted similar possibilities. In 1990, Rowan Callick echoed the Fijian Minister’s comments: ‘In terms of relations with island nations, there are few levers more practical, helpful and yet of course sensitive than immigration.’ He went on to recommend that the Australian Government play a role in taxing such overseas workers, thus ensuring a steady and reliable flow of remittances that would not only be highly beneficial to the island states, and would more directly assist households than overseas aid, but ‘could prove an interesting alternative to the prospect of endlessly propping up micro-economies through aid’ (Callick 1990: 15). Not all have favoured more expanded migration opportunities (as opposed to labour migration), arguing that they might lead to higher birth rates in sending countries and/or welfare ghettoes in destinations (Cuthbertson and Cole 1995; Hughes 2003), though there appears to be little support for such prognostications. A review of aid policy in 1997 returned to the issue of migration and made what had become a now almost familiar statement that granting Pacific Islanders the right to live and work in Australia ‘may prove to be more cost-effective than continuing high levels of aid in perpetuity’ and again met an equally familiar rejection.
Dobell (2003) has similarly suggested that Australia should move towards special short-term migration provisions, rather than aid, for island states, a view further supported in the Australian Senate review of Australia’s relations with the region, which again argued in favour of special migration schemes to fill labour shortages in Australia, especially in seasonal agricultural work, and argued that risks of overstaying would be lessened if workers knew that they could return each year (as happens in Canada) and/or if the schemes were managed in the home country (which might, however, produce a different outcome). In familiar vein, however, the Australian Immigration Department argued against such ‘low-skill migration schemes’, emphasising how the idea of Pacific guest workers had become the ‘great taboo’ of Australia’s Pacific policy.
Most recently, Helen Ware has argued that whereas in other parts of the world the slogan ‘trade not aid’ makes sense, in the Pacific, where trade options are limited, it should be ‘migration rights for the poor not handouts for the rich’, to avoid continuous aid delivery. She has further argued that because numbers are small (other than in PNG), Australia and New Zealand could ‘readily take all those who wish to come in from the Pacific (especially if short-term migrant worker schemes are accepted)’ (Ware 2005: 451–2), and that they could be employed in jobs such as fruit picking and working in nursing homes. Since various nationalities are allowed to enter Australia on working holiday visas, and the supposedly non-discriminatory migration policy treats New Zealand differently, ‘[i]t is simple racism not to allow our Pacific neighbours the same access to work in Australia. Australia is all for free trade in goods — where we are the ones who benefit. Why not free trade in people where the benefit is equal on both sides? The Pacific Islanders supply the labour and earn money to take home, and Australia gets the work done and forms closer bonds with its neighbours. As sea levels rise we will have to take them in any case’ (quoted in Anon. 2005). Ware has also argued that ‘it is a humane and cheap way of keeping the region secure’ (quoted in Sharp 2005: 30). Stewart Firth has taken an apparently similar perspective in arguing that Australia might play the same role for Melanesia that New Zealand does for Polynesia, by enabling Melanesians to come as guest workers and generate millions of dollars of remittances (Pacbeat, September 15, 2005), though many of those who send remittances from New Zealand are settlers rather than short-term migrant workers. There is therefore a growing consensus that relaxation of migration restrictions and the introduction of a guest worker policy might benefit island states.
After Nauru’s economic crisis, Australia has quite remarkably examined the possibility of developing a migration-remittance economy that might benefit Nauru in the absence of other obvious alternatives, which presumably would be centred in Australia where there is already a tiny migrant Nauruan community. Australia has, however, rejected a request from PNG to allow Papua New Guineans to undertake seasonal work in Australia, with the Minister for Immigration observing that ‘there are issues of people overstaying and that would bring into question the credibility of such a program and obviously issues of other countries then saying we’d like the same opportunity’ (Pacific Islands Report, December 16, 2004). By August 2005, the Government was again examining the possibility of guest worker migration with the Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Bruce Billson, stating somewhat blandly that ‘[t]here’s a lot of work to be done. We are not closed off to the idea. It’s [a] work in progress’ (ABC, August 11, 2005), but later observing that there should be reciprocal rights for Australian workers. Similarly, in response to the National Farmers’ Federation’s demand for labour migrants, a Department of Immigration spokesperson stated that there were no plans to change policy (ABC Radio, September 21, 2005: see below), and opponents of guest work continue to argue that it would be hard to regulate, it could take jobs from Australians and guest workers might be vulnerable to exploitation (Pacbeat, September 22, 2005). The Australian Workers’ Union has argued that ‘[g]uest workers are vulnerable to exploitation, depress local wages for Australian workers and could form an illegal immigrant underclass’ (quoted in Australian Financial Review, November 21, 2005).
In 2005, Australia also considered the possibility of recruiting as many as 2,000 soldiers from Pacific Island states to serve in the Australian Defence Force, where there are similar labour shortages. This has raised familiar questions about ‘the culture’ of the Australian Defence Force, the extent to which this would add quality and the value of such personnel in regional missions (Pacbeat, August 26, September 14, 2005). Were this to be implemented it is probable that many recruits would be from Fiji, they would be trainees rather than existing military, and they would be considered skilled migrants rather than guest workers.
Australia presently experiences almost full employment and there are repeated demands, sometimes from unexpected quarters, for more open labour migration to Australia. There are particularly evident shortages of unskilled workers in the agricultural sector and of skilled health workers, and Australia as a whole, and states such as NSW, have recently become even more interested in attracting greater numbers of migrant health (and other) workers. Most recently, the National Farmers’ Federation and the ALP have argued for the introduction of a guest worker scheme that would draw agricultural workers from Pacific Rim-aid recipient countries (National Farmers’ Federation 2006; Sercombe 2005).
It is readily evident that refugees have been highly efficient workers in rural and regional contexts (Stilwell 2003), and that rural labour migration policies — effectively a ‘guest worker’ scheme — in New Zealand were of considerable value to New Zealand and Fiji, ending only when New Zealand imposed political sanctions on Fiji (Levick and Bedford 1988). In Canada and the USA, there have been several seemingly successful short-term employment programs, taking Caribbean health and agricultural workers to the southern states, which might also be models. Given these precedents, similar schemes in Australia might work well. Though some Islanders are notorious overstayers, this has been at no obvious cost to Australia and the greatest enthusiasm for such schemes has come mainly from those farmers who are the present beneficiaries of Pacific Islander employment. There is no question that the Melanesian states are the more impoverished in the region (alongside the atoll states) and would therefore be best placed to benefit from a guest worker scheme, yet fewer Melanesians are English speakers and — despite 19th-century blackbirding (which provides an intriguing precedent) — there is minimal tradition of migration to Australia or elsewhere. It is not therefore surprising that Bedford has commented that ‘[a]rguably the most contentious issue confronting Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific during the next half century will be how to cope with pressure for an emigration outlet from Melanesia’ (Bedford 2003: 37). Space, and the current rapidity of change, preclude more detailed consideration.
Many migrants from the Pacific have been employed in the secondary labour sector, working in unregulated, non-unionised employment and being paid low and irregular wages (Khoo et al. 2006). This has been particularly true for Micronesians, who have migrated to the USA relatively recently, and for workers in the unregulated nursing home sector where there has been a considerable degree of exploitation of women. Similarly, there has been reported ill-treatment and exploitation of Fijians working in the Cook Islands (Fiji Times, August 30, 2004), where some 200 work, mostly in hotels and other service industries without being protected legally. Some have no work contracts at all while the contracts of others have been breached by their employers (Khoo et al. 2006). Tongans have exploited other Tongans in Hawai’i and elsewhere in the USA and cases of human trafficking have come to court (Fiji Times, September 8, 2005). In some contexts, notably the last example, such illegalities emphasise the demand for migration opportunities, and the need for there to be regulation of migration and labour contracts.
It is possible to be concerned that once a culture of migration is established short-term workers will prove to be long-term residents (as in Europe, where the ‘Polish plumber syndrome’ is a major contemporary discourse), as the antithesis of flexible labour markets. This poses complex questions about the relationships between employment and society, the needs of rural and regional Australia, multiculturalism and even of ‘Australian values’, which cannot be discussed here.