A Beginner's Guide to the Marshall Islands Compact
Small is good, small is all (The large is a reflection of the small)
The Marshall Islands are an independent island country near the Equator in the Pacific Ocean, slightly west of the International Date Line. It’s a tiny nation, around 58,000 people live on the many islands and atolls.
In the next five years or so, however, the majority of the world’s Marshallese population will be living not on the Marshall Islands, but in the United States. And the majority of these Marshallese will reside in Northwest Arkansas. Currently, around 18,000 Marshallese live here.
Why Arkansas, everyone always asks, and the simple answer is jobs. Initially, the Marshallese moved to Springdale, Arkansas for available jobs in the poultry industry. Because the Marshallese are a tight knit community, once a critical mass of Marshallese lived in the area there began a cascade effect that hasn’t slowed. New Marshallese arrive in Northwest Arkansas daily.
The Marshall Islands have a unique arrangement with the United States compared to other independent countries. The US and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) first entered into this compact in 1986. The US provides financial assistance to RMI as a form of reparations for the harm caused by our repeated testing of nuclear weapons on their islands over decades.
Part of this compact also includes freedom of travel for Marshallese citizens. They can come to the United States without a visa or passport. This freedom is on the one hand a benefit: it means Marshallese looking for work and a new life can easily move here.
However, it also comes with some debilitating drawbacks. Marshallese in the US cannot vote and so lack political power. Additionally, although they must pay taxes and social security like US citizens, but they only collect partial social security when they retire because of their immigration status, and have only very recently gained access to some forms of Medicaid.
This Compact of Free Association was most signed through 2023, which means in the next year the compact will be renegotiated. I’ve been listening to Marshallese neighbors and friends discuss the compact, and I can see some significant sticky points for Marshallese advocacy.
The United States is not particularly good at taking responsibility for the harm we cause other nations and the planet. The Marshallese people, perhaps more than any other people on earth, have been harmed by us. Their nation was literally poisoned by our nuclear tests (the majority of Marshallese experience some health effects yet today from radiation) and their islands/atolls are sinking as a result of global warming (which our nation’s energy consumption has contributed to significantly). The United States needs to take greater responsibility for the nuclear fallout in the Marshall Islands.
Current protections for asylum seekers and refugees does not include a status related to climate change. According to the UNCR, a refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. There is not yet a category for “a well-founded fear that their home will sink into the ocean.”
Marshallese advocacy appears to be focused around the needs of the Marshallese still living on the island. This is natural, I think. But the global situation is more complex. Soon the majority of Marshallese will live not on the island but here on the mainland (or in Hawaii), but their legal status under the compact is still related to the compact. They do not yet have any kind of legal representative voice as Marshallese living here, and as I mentioned, they cannot vote.
The compact to date has not included a pathway to citizenship. The compact makes the Marshallese permanent resident aliens. Children born in the United States are citizens, and as they turn 18 are beginning to vote, but their parents and elders have not been in the habit of voting and have never forms a voting bloc.
I’ve had the unique pleasure over the last few years of partnering with Albious Latior in developing Ozark Atolls, a ministry for and with the Marshallese of Northwest Arkansas. We’ve developed this partnership as an intentional form of accompaniment. It’s not a mission. I have no interest in evangelizing the Marshallese: they are in fact already majority Christian and if anything can evangelize me far better than me them.
But our partnership is in solidarity, shared purpose to defend the needy and the vulnerable. It’s also ecumenical because although Albious works for Good Shepherd Lutheran, he’s a member of his Marshallese UCC congregation in Springdale (he directs the Sunday school program!)
Early Ozark Atolls projects have included financial support during the pandemic, Covid-19 education, elder visitation, driver’s ed classes, sewing classes, home-ownership classes, many many parties and social events, and lots of community organizing and education. And we’ve helped register over 350+ Marshallese Americans in the last 2 years (those born here now eligible to vote as they turn 18).
What I’ve learned as we work together: the realities the Marshallese face are a microcosm of the larger world. What we see at the local level is the way in which the world is small at the same time. Here are a people far from their islands but making a new home in these mid-South atolls. They are here far from any ocean because of climate change and the poultry industry. Their very life is shaped by the forces of global commerce and nation-state entanglements. Even peoples on small islands far from any continent are not immune to large global forces. In fact, they are the most vulnerable.
Which is why I’ve devoted a whole post to the topic. These are our neighbors, and they need our voices and solidarity.
Marshall Islands Heritage Month (Manit) is the last Monday in September. Ozark Atolls will be celebrating their heritage in many ways, but one of those will be a meal at our the GSLC Campus on Sunday at 11 a.m. Everyone will have the chance to sample almost 30 different types of Marshallese food. I encourage anyone in NWA to come join us for the food, and for everyone reading this to learn more about the Marshallese and the compact and then advocate for the Marshallese people. Small is all, remember, and what we do for this small group of people will be reflective of who we are as a large nation.
My parents spent a year in the Marshall Islands in 1950, when I was a year old. They were building a school in a program that was a precursor to the Peace Corps. My mom had two miscarriages after their stay there that she thought were related to radiation exposure from the nuclear bomb testing that went on there. She was only there for a year but the testing went on for over ten years. The impact on the Marshallese people was and is still devastating.