Does a nation exist if it's submerged?
There are no easy answers, said the organizers of a symposium last week that called migration and resettlement "thorny issues for island nations whose future is threatened by rising seas" and that looked to immigration laws and international compacts for guidance.
The three-day conference was billed as the first academic meeting to study "how a population disperses if a nation physically ceases to exist." It was cosponsored by the Columbia University School of Law's Center for Climate Change Law and the government of the Marshall Islands, which "has no intention of becoming, like the Aztecs or the Mayans, a lost civilization," center director Michael Gerrard said. "It's a vibrant civilization today, and it wants to remain that way."
Threats to the republic's statehood and boundaries, however, are real and serious, the country's foreign minister, John Silk, told attendees.
Best known for Bikini Atoll, the still-radioactive site of U.S. atomic bomb tests after World War II, the tiny nation sits west of the international date line, about halfway between Hawaii and Australia.
A seafaring civilization that got its modern name from British naval Capt. William Marshall, who sailed there in 1788, the land was variously ruled by Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United Nations (under U.S. administration for 40 years) until attaining sovereignty in 1986.
Though it is independent, its defense is ensured by the United States under a Compact of Free Association that permits America to maintain a large naval base on Kwajalein Atoll, and allows Marshallese to freely emigrate to the United States. In recent years, almost 8,000 have moved to Arkansas to work at chicken-processing plants and other jobs.
A wholesale relocation of Marshallese to the United States would be possible if it became necessary.
