They Gave Me the Form and I Could Not Fill It

Because miners had stripped Banaba of its phosphate, its people arrived on Rabi in December 1945, a Fijian island bought with royalties held in trust for them. Vaitupu families bought Kioa in June 1946. Thirty-five volunteers stepped ashore there on 26 October 1947. Those two communities crossed from one island group to another under administration from Suva. Eighty years later, the agreements governing climate mobility in the Pacific have almost nothing to say about a journey of that kind.

At mid-2024 the United Nations population division counted 3,888 Pacific-born residents in Fiji, 27% of the country's foreign-born total. Kiribati held 2,565 on that measure. Arrivals from other island states amount to 78% of the foreign-born population on its atolls. Samoa counts 1,628 and Solomon Islands 983. Against Auckland or Brisbane the absolute figures look tiny. As a proportion of recorded arrivals, the intra-Pacific figure dominates in Tarawa and holds at 27% in Fiji.

Across the region eighteen agreements bear on climate mobility. Twelve of them are subregional. Four are regional instruments and two are bilateral treaties. Almost all of them address departure toward metropolitan states, which leaves the island-to-island journey without a dedicated instrument. Their drafters wrote for labour mobility toward four metropolitan states. A Ni-Vanuatu family relocating to Fiji finds no protocol naming its residency status or the office holding its file. A clerk at a municipal counter in Suva has no instrument to cite.

In 2023 Forum leaders endorsed a regional instrument on climate mobility. The text sets out principles and no individual entitlement. Dignity and the primacy of staying appear by name. A language for the departure notice or the arrival form does not. Forum officials published an implementation plan for the period 2025 to 2030. That plan repeats the omission in its own wording. A receiving ministry issues counter material at its own discretion.

Australia and Tuvalu signed the Falepili Union Treaty in 2023. The mobility pathway under it allocates 280 places a year by random ballot from 2025. When the first ballot opened on 16 June 2025, 3,125 Tuvaluans registered inside four days. By its close on 18 July more than 8,750 citizens had registered, against a resident population of 10,643 at the 2022 census. Entry cost A$25, with a further A$200 for the visa application. The pathway admits those 280 to Australia.

Under three standing schemes, Pacific people take up places in metropolitan states. New Zealand admits seasonal workers under the RSE scheme and permanent migrants under the Pacific Access Category. The United States admits citizens of the compact states under COFA. Those three schemes describe entitlements in Wellington and in Honolulu. A Tuvaluan arriving in Suva has no standing under their terms. Fiji is not a party to them. The tables count 3,888 Pacific-born residents inside its borders.

Three comparable arrangements exist elsewhere in the Global South. Since 1979 West African states have allowed free movement among themselves under the ECOWAS protocol. MERCOSUR members grant one another two-year residence permits on the strength of nationality alone. The Caribbean wrote a right of establishment into the CSME. Income does not explain the Pacific absence. Pacific island states have produced no comparable arrangement for movement among themselves. Their populations have been relocating between the island states for eighty years without one.

To make an arrival administratively real, a receiving ministry publishes two documents in volume, an enrolment form and a tenancy fact sheet. Huri fixes the vocabulary in a controlled glossary, then puts the instruments into Fijian and Fiji Hindi. A clerk needs two entries, the eligibility line and the address of the office. Reviewers check those one at a time rather than as a block, twice over on the tenancy sheet. Service names and merge variables keep their English form, because the mail merge fails otherwise.

On one such job a first-language reviewer marked the entry naming a government department together with its acronym. The reviewer asked for the department name in the target language and for the English form with its acronym in parentheses beside it. A family hunting for that office finds English on the door and in the search bar, the target-language version useful for comprehension and useless for finding the building. The reviewer applied the identical rule to a named health post further down the file.

For the communities receiving these arrivals, few ministries hold a budget line. Suva absorbs families from Tarawa and Funafuti using municipal services costed for residents. Vanuatu hosts 730 Pacific-born residents and Tonga 658. A clerk in Port Vila could count them by hand in a morning. A housing officer there answers the newcomer's first question across a counter and in English, years earlier than a treaty ever governs the exchange. The primary school in the town enrols the children the following term.

Under cost pressure a ministry will put the arrival form through a machine engine and have someone tidy the output afterwards. The result, smooth at the sentence and wrong at the field label, still parses. A buyer can test that difference against the graded comparisons in Pacific languages set beside the human version. A clerk checking the field labels finds the fault in minutes. The exercise costs an afternoon. It answers more than a vendor's assurance does.

Fiji administers in two languages besides English, Fijian and Fiji Hindi. A packet issued in Fijian alone leaves out the Fiji Hindi speaking population. A Gilbertese-speaking family from Tarawa gets neither version. The school asks that family for a birth record and cannot process the document it receives. Taetae ni Kiribati and ʻGana Tūvalu belong in the Suva packet as much as in Tarawa and Funafuti, because the tables record those journeys ending in Fiji.

For most of the region the population figures come from United Nations estimates. Island statistics offices produce few counts themselves. Tuvalu records 128 Pacific-born residents and Niue 165. Naoero holds 529 and Papua New Guinea 428. A district officer could verify those figures against a school roll in an afternoon. Pacific-led counting would leave the language question with the ministry issuing the form. The United Nations currently maintains the series from New York.

Given the size of these populations, budgeting for the arrival packet is a small line in a municipal estimate. An unfillable form produces a second visit and a telephone call to an office already short of staff. Drafting the Gilbertese version once costs less than fielding those calls for a year. Municipal offices absorb the cost and regional bodies write the instruments. That split explains most of the pattern in the tables and its persistence over eighty years.

After the Cook Islands recorded 753 Pacific-born residents and the Federated States of Micronesia 560, that absence showed in jurisdictions of a few thousand people. Naoero, with 529, publishes in Dorerin Naoero and in English. The eighteen agreements impose no obligation of that kind. Their parties bargained over ballots and visa classes. The Falepili treaty is one of two bilateral instruments among the eighteen. Australia is the destination in its text. The arrival counter belongs to the municipality facing it.

By the time a treaty becomes practice, a clerk is holding a form across a counter. One arrival packet in Taetae ni Kiribati and ʻGana Tūvalu costs a receiving ministry less than one round of remedial appointments in Suva. Mid-2024 figures already justify the line item in four island states. A ministry waiting on a regional instrument to specify the language will still be waiting when the next Kiribati family arrives at the school office.