Transcript
GIFF JOHNSON: There are about 55,000 people here in the Marshall Islands and probably about approaching 40,000 in the US. Of course there's a large population of Marshall Islanders in Hawaii but possibly the largest settlement is in the north-west area of Arkansas. The estimates of the number of Marshallese living in Arkansas range from anywhere from 8 to 15,000 and it's a really significant population with a large number of people working in factories there. But significantly Marshallese are being recruited by employers to work there because of the ease of employment and the lack of any requirement of work permit so there's no issue say of hiring people who, you know, have to go through labour requirements and so on. There's now I think a couple thousand Marshallese students in the Springdale Arkansas schools.
DON WISEMAN: Do they form a community, is it a tight community that group in north-west Arkansas?
GJ: There are organisations representing people and of course people tend to gather according to religions. At last count several years ago I was told there were twenty-seven Marshallese churches in that area which also gives you an idea of how many people are over there. But Arkansas isn't the only focus of migration. There are significant populations in the west coast states of Oregon, Washington and California and interestingly one of the early settlements way back before the Compact of Free Association offered visa-free access so it wasn't so easy to go in, a group of Marshallese settled in the L.A. Orange County area but that community never really blossomed any larger than maybe 500 or so people. But now Sacramento has now become a really large and growing population so it's like a few people put down some roots, maybe buy a house, get set up, start working and then tell the relatives 'come on over'. We've even seen, not with Marshallese but Micronesians from the Federated States of Micronesia, there's a little town in Minnesota of all places, population 400 people or something and now virtually half the town is made up of Micronesians and they're now blending in and people who are mostly Scandinavian, of Scandinavian descent who settled the town seem to be delighted to have the Micronesians there because they're kind of revitalising the town with lots of kids. I mean, just some very different type of situations that Micronesians and Marshallese are developing in the US.
DW: One of the key drivers for all of this migration of course is disappearing job opportunities in the Marshall Islands. Is there any long term prospect of that turning round?
GJ: An annual economic report issued last month by the Graduate School USA on the Marshall Islands shows that from 2004 to last year there were only 220 or so jobs created in the private sector. That's like 15 or 16 jobs a year. Government expanded more but it just shows you that there's just been a really finite job market here and could more people be employed? Yes, there's lots of money coming in for infrastructure so there's construction jobs and so on but I think that an atoll has a limited number of things it can do to employ people and right now there's almost 30,000 people in Majuro which is really an unsustainable level of population just like South Tarawa in Kiribati. I mean the size of these populations in the capital cities of these atolls is is just huge. So unemployment is high. Interestingly we have a fish processing plant here in Majuro but they struggle to get workers because they're relatively low paid, I mean around two dollars an hour and they used to get 400 people per day working on their fish processing lines. Now they're lucky if they can get 170 a day and I think what it is is a lot of Marshall Islanders just look to the US. If they want to work in a factory they'll go to Arkansas where they'll start at one of the poultry packing plants at nine dollars or ten dollars an hour. That's been an issue in terms of trying to get people employed here is people don't want the job.
DW: Are there significant remittances coming back from all of those communities in the US?
GJ: We are now seeing it. I'd say 15 years ago the feeling was both in the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia, remittances were not significant, not in the way that they have been for Kiribati and Tuvalu for many years. But in more recent times, yes there's been a lot of money coming back but interestingly, particularly at the US tax refund time which is in the February and March period and then relatives in the US send literally tens of thousands of dollars back home and mostly it's used for people to get their passports and a one-way ticket to join their relatives in the US. So we see February, March, April period as a high time each year now for outbound Marshallese heading on one-way tickets to go up for a job or take their kids to get them into school or look for health care or whatever but generally jobs and education is really driving people to move to the US.