Every Christmas, we go to a different Caribbean island to meet my wife’s family. This year, we went to Sint Maarten, Saint Martin, and St. Vincent. The first two, I should add, share the same island.
Sint Maarten, which makes up the southern half of a tiny Caribbean island in the north of the Lesser Antilles, is a new country in two ways. First, it really is a new country. The Kingdom of the Netherlands is not a small country on the northwestern coast of Europe. Rather, it is a federacy of several different countries, called, well, “countries.” In 1954, when the former empire was turned into a federacy via the Charter, the Kingdom consisted of the Netherlands, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles. (Dutch New Guinea was not part of the new structure.) In 1975, Surinam became independent in a disgusting little racist episode engineered by Prime Minister Joop den Uyl. Aruba split from the rest of the Netherlands Antilles in 1986, but remained part of the Kingdom. Finally, last year the Netherlands Antilles dissolved into two more countries, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, while the three remaining territories (Bonaire, Saba, and Saint Eustatius) became part of the Netherlands. Sint Maarten’s status as a country, then, is only a little over a year old.
Sint Maarten is a new country in another sense, however: more than three-quarters of the population consists of the descendents of immigrants who arrived after 1960. The sugar and cotton industries collapsed after the abolition of slavery in 1863. Maartenese laborers went to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic to work in the sugar industry. In 1918 a giant oil refinery opened on Curaçao, followed by one in Aruba in 1928, sucking out more labor from Sint Maarten. The result was stagnation: in 1960, the population was only 2,728. The island looked to be sinking into a backwater, an unpopulated remnant.
The jet age (and Fidel Castro) changed all that. The Cuban Revolution removed that island as a destination for North American tourists. Sniffing opportunity, in 1964, the Antillean government relocated and expanded Princess Juliana International Airport.
Tourists began to arrive en masse, the cruise ships followed. And the population grew. And grew. And grew. To only 40,000 people, admittedly, but the entire country covers only 13 square miles. By 1992, only 30% of the population had been born in St. Maarten, and a solid chunk of those were the children of post-1964 immigrants.
It is possible to be naturalized as a Dutch citizen, but it isn’t easy. (Strangely, it seems as though I may qualify for Dutch citizenship without the need to be naturalized, just as I qualified for Spanish citizenship until last Tuesday.) In 2001, citizens made up 51% of the population. 30% of the population was (still) native-born; an additional 10% came from elsewhere in the former Netherlands Antilles and 2% came from the Netherlands proper. The math, then, shows that only 9% of the population consists of naturalized citizens.
Who naturalizes? It isn’t easy to tell, but it is easy to see who doesn’t naturalize: in 2001, people born in the British West Indies made up 20% of the population, whereas citizens of those countries made up 21% — they do not naturalize; neither did a small number of their Sint-Maarten-born children. Even more dramatically, the Haitian-born made up 8% of the population, but Haitian citizens made up 12% — very few of their children naturalize. Finally, Dominican-born made up 12% of the population and while Dominican citizens made up 10%; of the three major groups, they are the most likely to naturalize. (Two-thirds of the foreign born outside those three groups and developed-world expats become Dutch citizens. Most of them are from Cuba, South America, and Lebanon.) The West Indians may be unlikely to receive Dutch citizenship, but they are also next-to-invisible on the Dutch side. The initial plantation owners on that side of the island were from Britain; they brought English. Everyone speaks it fluently, from birth, with a faint West Indian inflection.
The Dominicans, on the other hand, are pretty distinctive. Our first contact with them actually came on the French side of the island. We were walking along Orient Bay in the evening, and heard tropical music coming from one of the beach clubs, all the way at the southern end of the beach. It was a live band, and an awesome live band. Everyone in there except for us (including the waitress) was Dominican. (There are no border controls.) It was awesome ... and by day an utterly nondescript beach bar populated by tourists.
On the Dutch side, you can see money-sending places, Spanish service shops, and evangelical iglesias scattered around the poorer outskirts of Philipsburg. The Dominicans are visible. The migration is skewed towards women: 61%. According to the Sint Maarten government, most of the initial migration came in illegally from Romana and San Pedro de Macoris. The migrants provided fake work sponsors to Sint Maarten’s then-lackadaisical immigration officials. It’s also skewed towards the unskilled: Dominicans make up 29% of all unskilled workers, with Haitians filling an additional 30%.
The Haitian migration is almost the mirror image of the Dominican one in terms of gender: it’s 59% male. It’s also the mirror image in terms of visibility. The only easily-spotted presence is the fishermen near the airport, and the stalls where they sell their products.
Policy, as you can imagine, has been confused, although it is getting better. Before August 1, 1996, education was neither free nor compulsory for immigrant children. The legal school population doubled in 1990-95, and so educating immigrants was not particularly popular, especially since many of the Haitians were refugees fleeing the chaos of the early 1990s and living in tent cities. Nonetheless, the government came around to the idea that creating a large uneducated underclass was a bad idea, and so compulsory education was extended to all. State health insurance, however, is not available for undocumented immigrants, who often cross over the French border to receive emergency care.
Thoughts?
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