Executive Summary

The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Labour.

Introduction: a decade of demographic milestones

Already this century, the global population has passed seven billion, and by 2009 around half were living in urban centres. In the Pacific, the total population reached 10 million in 2010.

The world population is forecast to exceed nine billion by 2050, with more than six billion living in cities. And the Pacific population will have blown out to 18 million.

The Pacific nations have shown little signs of urbanisation over the past century. But in the coming decades, politicians, planners and policy-makers of these countries (as well as Australia and New Zealand) will have to consider how best to deal with the region’s increasing urbanisation especially of Papua New Guinea, Solomon islands and Vanuatu.

John Key, the New Zealand Prime Minister, in addressing the 2011 Pacific Forum, identified four sectors that all Pacific nations should focus on: tourism, energy, fisheries and education. He made no reference to urbanisation or the rise in youth numbers. But he did observe that the forum member countries should “work harder to get kids into school in the Pacific region, and teach them the skills they need to succeed and contribute to the economy”.

Those four key industries, though critical for the development of many Pacific countries, were unlikely to provide enough jobs for the growing workforce, especially in Melanesia, he said. Mr Key challenged Pacific leaders to “be creative, innovative and open to new ways of approaching old problems” and to “listen to new voices and explore new partnerships”.

International migration and development

In the Pacific region, the international migration debate has moved on from concerns about the ‘brain drain’ effect on the source countries. Now, development agencies recognise its potential for addressing several of the United Nations’ ‘Millennium Development Goals’, especially those concerned with poverty, gender equity, spread of infectious diseases, environmental sustainability and the creation of development partnerships.

Over the next four decades, an interesting reversal in workforce demographics is forecast. While the region’s high-income countries (primarily Australia and New Zealand) lose workers because of low fertility and ageing, the poorer countries’ populations will continue to grow, though more slowly than before.

The high-income countries, to maintain their workforces, will look to a greater flow of workers from the low-income countries.

The youth bulge

Asia has already had its ‘youth bulge’ — large numbers of adolescents and young adults who were born when fertility rates were high. But with the more recent decline in Asian fertility rates, this trend has passed and Asia’s workforces are growing older. By contrast, the youth population of Pacific countries, especially those in Melanesia, are expected to grow rapidly over the next two decades.

Polynesia’s population explosion of the 1960s fuelled their last big period of mass emigration. In the 21st century, it will be Melanesia’s population growth that offers the challenge to policy-makers and politicians in New Zealand and Australia.

Between 1960 and 2000, the world’s urban population nearly trebled, from just under one billion to 2.84 billion. And in the least developed countries, city-dwellers increased five times as fast as in the more developed countries. The United Nations has projected that the global urban population will soar to 6.3 billion by 2050, with the biggest increases in Africa, Asia and Oceania (the Pacific region in this report).

The Pacific region has wide diversity in its urbanisation rates: from small islands such as Guam and Nauru, with 100 percent urban living, to Papua New Guinea, with less than 20 percent. The populations of Polynesia and Micronesia are generally more urbanised than those of western Melanesia. And New Caledonia and Fiji in eastern Melanesia have very different colonial histories from the western Melanesian populations. By 2050, the Pacific region is projected to be 36 percent urban.

Irregular migration

Irregular (illegal, undocumented or unauthorised) migration is expected to rise markedly around the world. In migration from the Pacific Islands to Australia and New Zealand, this is expected to consist mostly of short-term workers who have overstayed their permits.

Other global problems that have ballooned in recent years include smuggling (people getting paid to help with clandestine border crossings), human trafficking and ‘boat people’ (asylum-seekers). But other than Australia’s boat-people influx from places such as Indonesia, these are not considered major issues in the Pacific region.

What drives Pacific migration

Up to now, migration in the Pacific has been fuelled by simple labour-market supply and demand. The islanders, with limited manufacturing and service sectors at home, seek work elsewhere. The developed, industrialised and urbanised Pacific Rim countries, with their rapidly ageing populations, have filled the gap with workers from their less developed neighbouring countries. The wages that menial jobs in New Zealand and Australia pay is much higher than for high-status skilled jobs in the island countries.

There are simply not enough regular, paid employment opportunities at home, and that will become more of a problem as the unskilled workforce expands over the coming years. Of lesser significance is the demand for skilled workers, though many of them leave the home countries to seek better opportunities abroad. As a result, many Pacific countries now have skills shortages in areas such as health, education and the trades.

At the annual meetings of the Pacific Islands Forum, island leaders have been asking migration policy-makers in their bigger, more developed neighbours to have sympathy for the difficult environmental challenges that island peoples face, such as rising sea, tropical cyclones and drought. But they should also recognise how the Pacific’s growing youthful populations can help solve human-resources dilemmas.

The wider region

With European colonisation, Pacific peoples began moving to Pacific Rim countries for the new labour opportunities: on Australia’s sugar plantations, and on ships involved in whaling, trading and transport of missionaries. From the 1960s, the demand for low-skilled labour increased, particularly in New Zealand, coincided with air travel from countries such as the Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa and Tonga.

But not all Pacific countries have enjoyed equal access to the developed countries. Polynesia and Micronesia have fared much better on obtaining work and residence than the three countries of western Melanesia. Yet those three countries have the lowest levels of urbanisation and the highest population growth rates.

Meanwhile, all Pacific nations have suffered a brain drain in crucial skills areas — notably doctors, nurses, teachers and technicians. This is because of limited training and career opportunities for educated and skilled workers, but also because of Australia, Canada and New Zealand cherry-picking the best and brightest under their their immigration points systems. This problem is projected to worsen over the next 40 years, as the youthful working-age populations balloon and urbanisation intensifies.

Importance of remittances

As more and more young working-age Pacific island people seek work in the developed countries, so have their weekly remittances back home, to their families and communities, became increasingly important. In some of the smaller Pacific countries, the income from remittances exceeds earnings from any other domestic sector — certainly more than returns from the mixed-subsistence, cash-crop village economy.

The Pacific region’s economy is more dependant on remittances than any other world region, including such Asian countries as the Philippines, Bangladesh and Pakistan. However, as migrants get better integrated into their new country, their commitment to remittances may decline. Tonga recently introduced dual citizenship as an incentive for migrants to maintain remittances.

The double lure of overseas work experience and (comparatively) lucrative remittances has spurred a greater urgency for emigration, particularly among Melanesians.

Population growth and urbanisation

The projected rapid growth of working-age Pacific populations over the next 40 years — some to even double their present size — is expected to bring new problems. The World Bank has cited:

• lack of capacity in Pacific rural and urban labour markets to absorb these workers
• a lack of formal sector jobs to absorb educated young people
• the increasing concentration of young people in coastal towns
• the potential for unrest among unemployed and disenfranchised young people in cities.

But the biggest problem is the projected population explosion in the new urban landscape of the Pacific. Censuses since the 1980s have made it clear that the region faces an urban future. Yet this is likely to be very different from the cities in Australia and New Zealand, with millions of residents living off informal activities rather than regular waged employment in the public and private sectors.

The biggest urban explosion is projected for Melanesia — expected to bring an extra four million people to the cities by 2050. By then, the city-dwellers of Melanesia could number 5.45 million, which is larger than New Zealand’s projected urban population.

Mobility-related challenges: HIV and climate change

With the increased mobility and urbanisation of the Pacific’s youthful population will come new challenges. Changing cultural and social mores brings a bigger risk of HIV infection, through risky sexual behaviour. HIV can lead to Aids, which has already had an impact on mortality rates in Papua New Guinea.
But an even bigger threat to the the livelihoods, security and well-being of Pacific people is climate change, which may force mass migrations.

Forces for change in mobility patterns

Over the next 20 to 30 years, the main forces for change in Pacific mobility patterns are likely to be:

• population growth
• secondary and tertiary education needs
• the increasing role of Papua New Guinea as a destination for migrants, especially from the western Pacific
• more Melanesian influence in Pacific affairs
• more Asian involvement in the region
• a changing power nexus in regional security
• the pace of environmental change.

There is already a growing unease about ‘fortress ANZ’ — the tightening of immigration policies and residency approvals by Australia and New Zealand. These two traditional regional powers will need very very different levels of engagement with Pacific people if they are to prevent ‘illegal’ flows.

Pacific migration to the Rim

By 2010, a total of 850,000 people of Pacific ethnicity or ancestry were living in the four main Pacific Rim migrant destinations: New Zealand (350,000), Australia (150,000), USA (300,000) and Canada (50,000). There were also small populations in the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia.

The combined Pacific-born populations in Australia and New Zealand rose by 440 percent between 1971 and 2006, from 46,000 to 250,000. A similar increase up to 2050 would bring the population to around 1.5 million.

Continuity through change

In the late 1940s, very small populations of Pacific-born people lived in New Zealand (just over 3000) and Australia (4700). The main source for both countries was Fiji, followed by migrants from the two countries’ respective colonies: the Cook Islands, Niue and Samoa for New Zealand and Papua New Guinea for Australia.

By the mid-1950s, New Zealand’s Pacific-born population had exceeded Australia’s, and it grew much more rapidly through the 1960s and 1970s in response to labour demand in rural areas and manufacturing. By 1971, New Zealand’s Pacific-born population was just under 31,000 — nearly twice Australia’s. 

But 85 percent of Australia’s were from Melanesia, especially PNG, whereas New Zealand had 81 percent from Polynesia, and half of its total were Samoa-born. Fiji had still contributed the second biggest populations for both Australia and New Zealand.

In their 2006 censuses, Australia recorded 106,900 Pacific-born residents and New Zealand 138,400.  The Melanesia-born (especially Fijian and Fiji Indian) population continued to dominate in Australia, though the Samoa-born population was rising. New Zealand’s figures showed a continuation of the link with Polynesia, though political events after 2000 brought an increase of migrants from Fiji.

Access to residence in Australia and New Zealand

Between 2003 and 2007, three times more Pacific people moved to New Zealand than to Australia with the intention of settling. The main reasons given were:

• the importance of family in Polynesian culture
• New Zealand’s special quota systems for Samoa
• New Zealand’s ‘Pacific Access Category’, which grants access to a set number of migrants from Tonga, Kiribati and Tuvalu each year.

Pacific diaspora to North America and Europe

Historically, most Pacific migration to the US came from American Samoa and, since the Second World War, the American territories of Micronesia. Those migrants tended to settle in Hawai’i and various Californian coastal cities.

By 2000, USA’s Pacific-ancestry population totalled more than 200,000 — comparable with New Zealand’s. Samoans dominated New Zealand’s Pacific-ancestry population, followed by Tongans and Micronesians. More recently, many more Fijians and Fiji Indians have been applying for permanent residency.

Canada is a less important destination for Pacific migrants than USA, Australia or New Zealand, though coup-weary Fijians and Fiji Indians have shown much  more interest in recent years. Small Pacific-born populations also live in some European countries, especially the UK (more than 10,000 in 2000), France (more than 1000, mostly from its colonial or former colonial territories) and Germany. In recent years, the Middle East and Japan have entered the frame, especially with Fijian involvement in UN peace-keeping missions and private security firms in global trouble spots.

Temporary movement and access to work

Overall, temporary visas in Australia and New Zealand remain hard to obtain for unskilled or low-skilled Pacific workers. But New Zealand has set up special Pacific migration programmes to fill overloads of seasonal work in agriculture. The Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) policy was launched in April 2007, to allocate up to 5000 places a year for these workers. This has since risen to up to 8000 a year. 

Under this scheme, labour comes from (in order of numbers) Vanuatu, Tonga, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Kiribati.

In 2008, Australia introduced a seasonal-work pilot scheme for Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Tonga. In 2011 it added Papua New Guinea, and it is preparing to include Samoa, the Solomons and Tuvalu.

Since these two schemes began, other sectors have been putting pressure on the New Zealand and Australian Governments to ease restrictions on temporary workers from the Pacific. These include the New Zealand dairy and meat processing industries, the post-earthquake rebuilding of  Christchurch, and the Australian tourism and fishing industries.

Temporary movement: students and visitors

In the 1960s and 1970s, access to New Zealand’s secondary and tertiary education drove much of the migration from Samoa and Tonga. In fact, this was a major reason cited for these countries looking to the Australian and New Zealand seasonal-work schemes — so they could cover education costs back in the islands or offshore. At the 2011 Pacific Forum in Auckland, both the Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers reaffirmed their commitment to improving school attendance and literacy and numeracy levels throughout the region.

While the issuing of study visas and permits has grown steadily over the past 15 or so years, visitor visas issued to Pacific citizens have grown more slowly. We believe the temporary movements of Pacific citizens to Pacific Rim countries has reached a watershed. The policy-makers and politicians of Australia and New Zealand must think seriously about how to adapt to a increasingly urbanised populations.

Conclusion:  Major shifts in Pacific migration ahead

Australia has already experienced a major rise in immigrants from Melanesian countries — especially Fiji and increasingly Papua New Guinea. As a result, Melanesian people are becoming more prominent in political and policy discourse about Pacific region migration.

The main four forces that will change mobility patterns in the region are:

• urbanisation of Pacific (especially Melanesian) populations
• the demand for skilled labour in PNG’s resource-extraction industry
• ongoing environmental deterioration in low-lying coral islands of central and northern Pacific
• the youth bubble and increasing investment by Australia, New Zealand and USA in improving education and skill levels.

Immigration authorities in the two trans-Tasman neighbours should anticipate a rise in temporary work and residence visa applications from the western and central Pacific over the next two decades, as well as continued immigration from Polynesia.

Our understanding of the changing Pacific migration trends can be enhanced through further research especially the use of futures scenario based modeling developed by the Oxford University – based International Migration Institute (IMI).

 

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