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Migration worry: What is U.S. Plan?
GAO Study Raises Everyone’s Concerns—But for Different Reasons
The FSM calls it “dangerously misleading.” The Marshall Islands says it’s a “call to action.” Guam believes it ignores its economic suffering. And Hawaii says it sees no end in sight to mounting bills and draining state funding.
These are among the reactions sparked by the release in October of a detailed U.S. General Accounting Office report on the migration of thousands of islanders from the Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Palau to the U.S. insular possessions of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the state of Hawaii.
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Among its many significant findings is that the majority of the 14,000 islanders from the freely associated states (FAS) living in the three U.S. island areas as of 1998 are living in poverty. The GAO says it is conducting a similar review of FAS migration to the U.S. mainland, believed to be significantly higher than the flow of FAS citizens into the three island areas since the Compact of Free Association allowed visa-free access to the U.S. and its territories.
The GAO report documents the economic impact that FAS migration is having on the governments of Guam, CNMI and Hawaii. “The three U.S. island areas have collectively reported at least $371 million in costs to local governments for 1986 through 2000 that are associated with migrants from the FSM, Marshall Islands and Palau, with Guam’s estimate accounting for close to half of the total amount,” GAO said. In response to demands from the U.S. islands for cost reimbursement, the federal government has provided $41 million to Guam, $3.8 million to CNMI and nothing to Hawaii, GAO reported.
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Hawaii, for example, reports that in 1988 it had 227 FAS students in its public elementary and high school system, costing the state about $812,000 to educate. By 1999, that number had jumped to 1,521, costing Hawaii $9.1 million. Hospitals report that the slow payment of medical bills by the FAS governments is an “ongoing and escalating problem.”
The report’s major recommendation is that the U.S. State Department should consider targeting future aid to the FAS countries to treating and preventing communicable diseases in the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia that are a public health concern in Guam, Hawaii and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), which would both improve health conditions in the islands and reduce the impact on the U.S. areas.
The State Department is presently renegotiating financial aid provisions of a long-term defense treaty with the FSM and the Marshall Islands. The GAO audit is one in a series on many aspects of the Compact of Free Association relationship with the U.S.
It says that after the Compact went into effect in 1986, the flow of FSM and Marshall Islands migrants to these U.S. island areas increased dramatically, from fewer than 1,000 a year prior to the Compact to more than 3,000 annually in 1998. The GAO identified a shift in migration patterns: in the early 1980s, the CNMI was the focus. This shifted to Guam from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, and to Hawaii in more recent years.
The GAO’s review is “dangerously misleading by limiting its review to gross impact experienced by U.S. island areas, without regard to positive factors such as strong employment, tax contribution, consumer spending and other related matters,” the FSM government said in a reply to the GAO. The FSM particularly objected to the GAO saying thousands of FAS citizens live in poverty in the U.S., calling it a “damning and probably inaccurate statement.”
FSM Ambassador to Washington, Jesse Marehalau, said FSM citizens don’t choose to live in poverty any more than do Americans, but the problem may stem from the fact that work for which they are qualified does not lead to rapid movement out of “poverty”. He added that U.S. companies running nursing homes and factories have gone to great lengths to recruit FSM workers for low paying jobs that force FSM citizens to seek public assistance.
The Marshall Islands, however, reacted differently, saying the GAO report is a call to action by both governments to adopt measures to improve upon their relationship. “If the Marshall Islands has a thematic criticism of the GAO draft report, it would be that the document tends to focus on the admittedly difficult but manageable problems facing the RMI and U.S. as partners in a strategic alliance and its inter-societal mechanisms, without adequately placing those issues into the larger context of the mutually beneficial…(and) extremely successful features of free association,” the Marshall Islands government said.
In assessing the impact on out-migration of future U.S. aid to the FAS, GAO suggests that “significant reductions in aid that reduce government employment would be expected to increase migration. In contrast, targeting future U.S. assistance to the FSM and Marshall Islands for education and health purposes might reduce some of the motivation to migrate (although migration will continue as long as employment opportunities in both countries remain limited).”
But Guam Gov. Carl T.C. Gutierrez says he believed that the GAO was missing the point in its limited recommendations on migration. “Without economic development and job creation in the FAS, migration is the only viable option to FAS citizens,” he notes. The U.S. government had, since the early 1960s, recognized that the lack of economic development in the islands “necessitated out-migration as a safety valve,” Gutierrez says. But the “effect of this ‘safety valve’ policy directly impacts Guam in ways that promote the underdevelopment of educational, health and other social infrastructure.”
The GAO reported that the possibility that the U.S. government might seek restrictions on migration privileges previously agreed to in the Compact of Free Association is of great concern to both the Marshall Islands and FSM. Both governments point out that, unlike funding provisions, migration is not one of the expiring parts of the Compact. The U.S., for its part, appears to have dropped its effort to put migration issues on the negotiating table.
In its next report, GAO will check into concerns raised by the State Department about recruitment of FAS citizens by U.S. firms. “It appears that many of these migrants are coming to the U.S. under recruitment contracts and are headed to different kinds of industries such as nursing homes, agriculture, poultry and amusement parks,” the State Department said. “There is concern that some of these migrants are misinformed with respect to their rights.” Commenting on GAO’s report that 70 percent of FAS migrants are under the age of 30, the State Department commented that “these young migrants will be more likely to remain in the U.S. permanently and may choose not to return to their parents’ country of origin.”
Photo: Giff Johnson
