Comparative Regional Report on Citizenship Law: Oceania access for defence purposes in exchange for financial assistance. Under the free association arrangements, however, the island states are not entitled as of right to United States citizenship.7 The legacies of colonisation continued into independence. In many cases, the peoples and the territories of the new states were defined by the former colonial borders, which themselves had been imposed with little regard to the diversity of, or the connections between, the Indigenous peoples of Oceania.8 In some cases, however, decolonisation did provide an opportunity to redefine colonial borders to better accommodate different cultural groups, leading for example to the separation of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony into Kiribati and Tuvalu. In all cases, independence required uniting communities under the national law of a new, democratic state. Citizenship was a part of nation-building, although citizenship laws were themselves informed by common law and legislative models provided by colonial administrators. In some cases the citizenship provisions of independence constitutions were carefully negotiated with the departing colonial administrators, who sought to protect their own interests.9 At independence, Indigenous peoples comprised the majority of the population in all twelve states, although flows of migrant labour and immigration had created significant minority groups. For example, the British colonial government recruited indentured laborers from India to work in Fiji, and their descendants now make up a significant proportion of Fiji’s population. Many Pacific peoples had been displaced because of the Pacific War of 1941 to 1945 or damage to their lands from mining, nuclear testing and over-urbanisation. European settlers were a significant minority in most states, not so much numerically but because they were given special privileges as colonial governments instituted racially defined distinctions between the original inhabitants, other Pacific islanders, and European, Chinese and Indian settlers.10 2.3 Geography and economics In addition to these historical influences, the citizenship laws of Oceania are shaped by geographic and economic context. With the exception of Papua New Guinea, which shares a land border with Indonesia, the states of Oceania are island groupings. Several states cover large ocean areas. All Pacific communities are under stress from climate change, experienced through rising sea levels as well as increasingly severe cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis and droughts. Climate change has prompted discussion about the possibility of relocating people and perhaps entire communities beyond their current land territories. This is not, however, a new problem for Oceania. Over the course of the 20th century, peoples were relocated across borders as their island homelands were destroyed by mining, nuclear testing and other foreign activities. Examples include the relocation of people of Banaba Island to Rabi in Fiji as a result of phosphate mining on the Island; the migration of people from Vaitupu in Tuvalu to Kioa in Fiji as a result of overcrowding; and from Kiribati to Solomon Islands as the internally relocated population in Kiribati could no longer live on the drought-prone Phoenix Islands. 7 Cf Cook Islands and Niue, self-governing polities in free association with New Zealand, whose people hold New Zealand citizenship: Alison Quentin-Baxter, ‘Niue’s Relationship of Free Association with New Zealand’ (1999) 30 Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 589. 8 Stewart Firth, ‘Decolonization’ in Robert Borofsky (ed), Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (University of Hawai‘i Press 2000) 317–18. 9 An example from Solomon Islands is discussed in Part 3.2.1. 10 See, eg in Fiji: Sanjay Ramesh, ‘State Hegemony and Ethnicity: Fiji’s Problematic Colonial Past’ in Steven Ratuva (ed), The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity (Springer 2019). RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-Comp 2020/1 - © 2020 Author 3