Niue: Embracing a Culture of Migration

In the past 40 years the Polynesian island of Niue has experienced a population decline greater than that of any other independent state in the world. More than three-quarters of all Niue-born live overseas, mainly in New Zealand. The balance continues to shift overseas, mainly because of the presence of kin, education and employment opportunities there. Families with kin spread across countries have developed new transnational forms of family life. Given the ubiquity of migration, island families have reconciled changes in local culture, and the social costs of disrupted extended households, in part because of the inexorable logic of migration and its economic benefits. A culture of migration is created whereby migration may be assumed to be positive, acceptable and even inevitable. Practices of mobility are deeply entrenched in islanders’ lives, even those who have stayed in Niue, where dualities of hope and despair, and fluidity and fixity, govern conceptualisations of population change. Migration constitutes no rupture with island life but is an extension of it. By contrast Niue, as a state, perceives itself to be facing depopulation and has long sought to encourage return migration and also immigration (and greater overseas aid) to prevent this.