Four in five Tuvaluans apply to move to Australia. Frayzel is among them

The great climate migration of the 21st century has begun, with 80 per cent of the population of tiny Tuvalu entering a lottery to migrate to Australia.

Midnight on Friday was the deadline for the Pacific island nation’s 10,643 citizens to enter a ballot for a permanent residency visa. As of Friday afternoon, 8074 people in 2278 family groups had applied, in what the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade called “an incredibly positive uptake”. Just 280 places are available in the first year.

The Tuvalu figures are on top of the 56,000 people from other Pacific nations who applied for 3000 places in the broader ballot for the Pacific engagement visa last year. The next round is due to open soon.

Frayzel Uale is one of more than 8000 Tuvaluans who have entered a ballot for one of 280 permanent residency visas.Credit: Penny Stephens

One of the applicants in the Tuvaluan lottery is Frayzel Uale, 18, who moved to Melbourne four years ago with his family when his mother came on a student visa.

Uale, who is working a packing job while studying information technology, remembers his homeland as “peaceful and joyful” and still feels connected to his culture, but he doesn’t see a future for himself in Tuvalu.

“There are more opportunities here,” Uale said. “I hear stories from Tuvalu about how the weather’s been changing a lot lately, with king tides going up, the streets are sometimes covered in water, and erosion is happening everywhere. Tuvalu has contributed so little to climate change, but we are one of the most affected countries.”

Tuvalu is a low-lying atoll nation, like Kiribati and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, facing an imminent existential threat as sea levels rise.

The visa is part of the Falepili Union Treaty, which also includes a security pact and climate mitigation to support Tuvaluans to stay in their homeland. DFAT says that in 2025-26, an estimated $47 million in development support will contribute to important climate adaptation, telecommunications, infrastructure, health and education projects in Tuvalu.

Minister for Pacific Island Affairs Pat Conroy said: “The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty is the first agreement of its kind anywhere in the world and the most significant Pacific policy this country has undertaken in the last 50 years.”

A DFAT spokesperson said it provided “a pathway for mobility with dignity as climate impacts worsen” as well as a mutually beneficial security guarantee.

Climate change is explicitly acknowledged by both countries as the reason for the treaty. However, applicants do not have to prove climate impacts to be eligible for migration as might be the case with a specific “climate visa”.

The treaty restricts the right of Tuvalu to enter security arrangements with other countries, a fact that some have criticised, including former Tuvaluan prime minister Enele Sopoaga, who accused Australia of “weaponising [Tuvalu’s] poverty and vulnerabilities to its advantage”.

Tuvaluan lawyer Lisepa Paeniu, who recently lived and studied in Australia, said it did not surprise her that half the country had applied because there was nowhere else to go.

Paeniu told this masthead a year ago that she intended to apply, along with her partner and children. Now in New Zealand on a temporary visa, Paeniu confirmed on Friday that she had entered the ballot.

Lisepa Paeniu (left) and Tekita Neemia with their children, Laban (front) and Nehemiah.Credit: Simon Schluter

“And so did everyone else in my extended family, given our root crops can no longer grow in our traditional food garden nor is there enough land as the coastal erosion is causing a significant loss to our already small parcels of land,” Paeniu said.

Australia has a bilateral treaty with Tuvalu because the Pacific nation requested it. Other countries in the region are discussing climate mobility through multilateral channels such as the Pacific Islands Forum. The end goal is not just to provide opportunities to emigrate from islands to Australia or New Zealand, but also mobility between Pacific islands.

The Australian government announced the Pacific engagement visa in 2024 and the Tuvalu visa is now part of that, with its own dedicated stream.

The following countries were invited to participate – Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. The Marshall Islands, Samoa and Kiribati opted out in the first year but remain eligible, and final discussions are under way about participation in the second ballot to open later this year.

Both types of Pacific engagement visa work the same way, with the idea that immigration will not solely be one way, but enable islanders to go back and forth between Australia and their home countries. Normally, permanent residents who leave Australia face a financial penalty to return.

One person who knows more than most about the plight of the millions of people already displaced around the world due to climate is Andrew Harper, the Australian who now serves as special adviser on climate action to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva.

Harper notes that extreme weather events, as well as drought and extreme heat, can accelerate conflict, and have a far greater impact on people displaced by conflict and violence.

A report recently prepared by Harper’s office for the UN Security Council says 90 million displaced people are living in countries with high-to-extreme exposure to climate-related hazards, and nearly half of all forcibly displaced people are bearing the burden of both conflict and the adverse effects of climate change. These include countries such as Sudan, Syria, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Yemen and Somalia.

Over the past 10 years, weather-related disasters have caused 220 million internal displacements – equivalent to 60,000 displacements a day. The problem is set to get worse, fast.

By 2040, the number of countries projected to face extreme climate-related hazards is expected to rise from three to 65, the report says, including many refugee-hosting countries such as Cameroon, Chad, South Sudan, Nigeria, Brazil, India and Iraq.

The number of people living in the Pacific is small by comparison, but Harper said the Falepili Union was a significant milestone.

“Around the world we are looking for precedents like this, and this [treaty] is important,” Harper said. “It provides confidence for others to do something smart.”

Jane McAdam, Scientia professor of law and the founding director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, said Tuvaluans do not necessarily see the visa as a way to evacuate their nation. Rather they want to be able to move more freely around the Pacific for work and education to build up their economic resilience as climate change hits.

“The point is, it’s not purely about the impacts of climate change,” McAdam said. “It’s much bigger than that.”

This might be the case, but the visa is unlike other work visas. For both types of Pacific engagement visa, applicants pay $25 and must pass police and health checks, but selection is otherwise random. Reflecting the humanitarian nature of the agreement, the system specifically allows people with disabilities and has no age restrictions.

Angeline Heine- Reimers, director of National Energy Office in the Marshall Islands.Credit: Eddie Jim

Angeline Heine-Reimers, the director of the Marshall Islands’ National Energy Office, said in March that the government was discussing visa options with Australia, but was concerned not to exacerbate brain drain.

Citizens of the Marshall Islands have the right to live and work in the United States through a security pact because of the now-independent country’s history as a US protectorate and legacy of nuclear testing. There are now more Marshallese people living in the US than in the Marshall Islands, census figures show.

While the Marshallese have been emigrating for decades, it is speeding up as climate change worsens. Eve Burns, 28, a journalist in the Marshall Islands, says people’s homes are regularly inundated and it is becoming too expensive. “Everyone is leaving,” she says.

Eve Burns, 28, from the Marshall Islands, who says “everyone is leaving” because of climate change.Credit: Eddie Jim

Heine-Reimers said people were driven to migrate because of sea level rises and warming oceans destroying scarce land and food sources, but it also meant loss of identity and being forced to assimilate into a different culture that was not always welcoming.

“You have big countries establishing strict migrant laws and fostering anti-migration [feeling], but they will not extend their scope of perception to see that people are being forced to migrate for many reasons, and one of them for us here is climate change,” Heine-Reimers said.

Reverend Faaimata (Mata) Havea Hiliau, a Tongan woman and the head of the Uniting Church in NSW and the ACT, was at both the Pacific Islands Forum and the United Nations climate talks in Azerbaijan last year.

Reverend Faaimata Havea Hiliau, the moderator of the NSW/ACT synod of the Uniting Church of Australia.Credit: James Brickwood

Hiliau is concerned about their wellbeing once islanders arrive in Australia, especially if they are relocated inland away from their cultural connection to the ocean and forced to grapple with unaffordable housing and rising heat levels in western Sydney or outer Melbourne.

She is not surprised by the overwhelming demand for these visas.

“Their home has been washed away,” Hiliau said. “They’re desperate.”

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