As noted earlier in this chapter, much of the literature on Pacific migration has focused on the diaspora and the issues facing migrants and their children in their new homes.[6] Although much of this work acknowledges the ties that Pacific migrants maintain with their homelands, little of it examines these transnational ties in any detail, or attempts to explore in any depth the ways in which transnationalism impacts on people’s lives and identities in the host countries. As yet, we know little of how people’s transnational ties affect their engagements with the wider society, their interactions with others within their own communities, their family lives, or their economic situation. Ahlburg has observed that few studies have investigated the impact of remittances on the sending households and he claims that ‘at least in the US, many Pacific Islander households live close to the poverty line. The payment of average remittances can force many of them into poverty and those already in poverty even deeper into poverty’ (2000, 65). Ahlburg and Song (2006) later showed that overall, Pacific Islanders in the USA experienced an improvement in their economic situation in the 1980s and 1990s, which they attribute in part to gains in ‘human capital’ through education and employment.
Spoonley has observed problems associated with poverty in New Zealand:
there are growing pressures on communities which contain a significant proportion of work—or education—poor, and benefit-dependent households with the negative statistics that accompany such conditions. This disadvantage is now intergenerational as the costs of accessing education, housing and health increase. With a declining ability to pay, future generations are locked into a poverty cycle which even collective strategies are unable to reverse in any significant way…The growing pressure impacts particularly on the children and women of transnational communities (2001, 94).
Further research is needed to ascertain the relationship between economic status and transnational practices: one would assume that living in poverty reduces people’s ability to remit, to travel between home and host countries, and otherwise engage transnationally, but anecdotal evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. There appears to be a growing disparity between those who have managed upward mobility and those living in poverty, but how does this affect their transnational ties? Or, to pose the question in reverse, how do transnational ties impact on migrants’ socio-economic status? Ongoing research will be needed to assess the effects of the global economic crisis that began emerging in 2008 and which could have significant and multiple impacts on migrants’ transnational practices. Even before this crisis there was evidence of economic status affecting mobility; for example, Spoonley (2001) reports Pacific Islanders moving to different parts of the diaspora to find work.
[6] One of the first collections of papers was Macpherson, Shore and Franco (1978). Since then there have been several more: see, for example, the work on New Zealand in Spoonley et al (1984); Spoonley, Pearson and Macpherson (1991, 1996); and Macpherson, Spoonley and Anae (2001). The collection of papers edited by McCall and Connell (1993) looks at Pacific populations in New Zealand, Australia and the US, as does Pacific diaspora (Spickard, Rondilla and Wright 2002). There also have been studies of particular Pacific populations, with a predominance of work on Samoans, as in the work of Macpherson, mentioned above (and see Janes 1990; Pitt and Macpherson 1974; Shankman 1976).