It is difficult to imagine circumstances more likely to undermine a system of extended kinship based on common ownership of resources that had evolved in a small, rural village-based society. Yet, early studies of the migrants showed that kinship remained a central feature of migrant community organisation (Macpherson 1974; Pitt and Macpherson 1974). Kinship played a central role in Samoan transnationalism: chain migration, in which early migrants opened the way for later migrants from their families, produced Samoan enclaves in New Zealand and connected the nodes of transnational Samoan society. This raises the question of why extended kinship remained significant in the new environment.

Residential and occupational concentrations in the enclaves provided the critical masses of migrants in which central elements of a Samoan world-view and life-style were more likely to survive. Samoans became concentrated in a restricted range of occupations and in low-income residential areas in and around cities where economic growth and diversification was occurring (Ongley 1991; 1996). Concentration was also fostered by racism on the part of some ‘gatekeepers’ in the private housing market, concentrations of government-owned rental housing and by the tendency to cluster new, owner-occupied housing in tracts around city fringes.

New Zealand’s immigration policy favoured less ‘expensive’, better ‘educated’, younger, single migrants. Families in Samoa also encouraged younger, single people who had demonstrated commitment to service (tautua) to their kin group to migrate in the belief that they would continue to acknowledge their membership of and obligations to their āiga, and would remit money and goods (Pitt and Macpherson 1974). Migrants who met the costs of sponsoring the migration of kin did so in order to bring others who would share the costs of supporting the non-migrant āiga and, therefore, also had good reason for identifying people committed to Samoan values and practices.

To ensure that new migrants remained committed to these, most were sent to live, at least initially, in households with relatives who had demonstrated continuing commitment to āiga. Many of these people were integrated into Samoan migrant communities and encouraged new migrants to associate with other Samoans (Pitt and Macpherson 1974). Pressure from household-heads and migrant peers combined to ensure that the new arrivals remained committed to tautua to family in the island (Macpherson 2002). The consequence was the rapid growth of socially ‘traditional’ Samoan populations in New Zealand cities in the 1960s (Pitt and Macpherson 1974).

Each of these elements ensured that kinship remained important and that most migrants remained connected to the villages and families from which they had migrated. This connectedness was reflected in the flow of people, ideas, money and resources between the origin and enclave communities which became transnational Samoa.