rfmcdonald (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rfmcdonald) wrote2009-05-13 02:30 pm
rfmcdonald) wrote2009-05-13 02:30 pm
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[LINK] "A Small Place"
Slate's Ian Mount lets us know that the has become an immigration magnet proportionately as huge as any Persian Gulf state.
Post-war investment by the British government, and a boom in the local fisheries and oil exploitation, turn out to be responsible for this immigration surge. So far, it seems to be going easily enough. So far.
For decades, the Falkland Islands have been a mix of punch line and trivia question, its popular image that of a few hundred boozy, inbred sheep farmers living on a rock in the South Atlantic. During the so-called Falklands conflict, British troops memorably dubbed the locals "Bennies" after Benny Hawkins, the village-idiot character in the British soap opera Crossroads. And, indeed, after going for a run on my second day on the islands and finding myself held still by the famous driving winds, I wondered why a dimwitted penguin, much less a sentient human adult, would willingly move there. The word grim comes to mind: Besides sandpaper winds, the islands are blessed with a skin-frying ozone hole, a near complete lack of trees, and import-dependent stores where sad tomatoes fetch $4.15 a pound (about twice what FreshDirect charges in Manhattan).
But there they were: gaggles of immigrants. Every five years, the islands conduct a census with the Orwellian precision that is possible only on remote islands with a population of 2,478. Besides enumerating statistical curiosities—the number of dishwashers, for example, rose from 130 in 1996 to 338 a decade later—the census notes the surprising facts that only 53.2 percent of the 2006 population was born on the islands, and 25 languages other than English are spoken in Falkland homes. Among the immigrants are 650 U.K.-born residents, plenty of them Kelpers whose parents had moved to the United Kingdom to look for work and who themselves returned after the conflict. But there are also 153 Saints, 131 Chileans, 36 Australians, 26 New Zealanders, and a sprinkling of Germans, Russians, Indonesians, and Filipinos. Even an Argentine or two.
Post-war investment by the British government, and a boom in the local fisheries and oil exploitation, turn out to be responsible for this immigration surge. So far, it seems to be going easily enough. So far.