Letter from Majuro
Note To Washington: These Are Friends
Island Governments Worry About How Congress Will View GAO Findings
The U.S. government’s General Accounting Office has produced a very detailed report on migration of citizens from the freely associated states of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau to three U.S. island areas during the 15-years of the Compact. A study of migration to the U.S. mainland is to follow this initial report.
The report contains a wealth of interesting and useful data. But the GAO migration study could end up being more fuel for people in the U.S. Congress who have little perspective on or historical understanding of the longstanding ties between the freely associated states (FAS) and the U.S. governments. The FSM and Marshall Islands governments, in particular, are clearly concerned at how this will be perceived in Washington.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
All told, the GAO study reports there were only 14,000 FAS citizens living in Guam, Saipan and Hawaii up to 1998 — 14,000! Even if it were double or triple that number, it’s quite literally a fraction of the numbers of legal and illegal immigrants entering the U.S. each year from many other parts of the world. And the FAS citizens living in the U.S. come from countries that are about as closely allied as countries can be and still be considered separate nations.
The Marshall Islands pointed out that the significance of this latest GAO report is that it describes manageable problems that have developed within the existing — and working — free association relationship. The Marshall Islands also made the observation that the GAO report suggests why it is impossible to separate one aspect of the multifaceted relationship without considering the many social, economic and strategic issues that comprise free association.
The migration problems identified by GAO — and clearly there are problems, most of them financial in nature, particularly for the smaller U.S. island areas, where the impact of a small number of people on government services is greater — are solvable within the relationship that exists between the U.S. and the FAS.
One step that the FAS could consider taking is to more proactively address treatable communicable diseases in the FAS. Such illnesses as TB and leprosy, to name two, come to mind. More active screening and treatment would improve the health of the populations, while sending a message to the U.S. that the islands are attempting to deal with illnesses that have required expenditure of funds for treatment by state and local governments in the U.S. island areas.
The U.S. State Department has apparently backed away from its earlier demand that immigration issues be on the negotiating table during the current Compact economic talks. As the immigration provisions are not among provisions that expire, they should not be up for renegotiation.
As the Marshall Islands suggests, they should be dealt with as part of the development of the overall relationship: problems occur, they get looked into by the appropriate agencies and resolved or mitigated.
Nobody could foresee all of the possible ramifications of a given provision of the Compact when it was negotiated in the 1970s and 1980s. Now that the GAO has pointed some out, the challenge at hand is to get to work fixing them.
Contact Giff Johnson at pacmag@ntamar.com
