Are we exporting our future?
It’s the question echoing through Fiji’s living rooms, bus stands, and Facebook pages: Are we exporting our future? Every time I call my family and friends, the same topic comes up. Someone’s son has left for Brisbane. Someone’s daughter just got her New Zealand visa. Someone’s neighbour is packing to go. It’s as if the country is slowly exhaling its people.
Over the past few months, the topic of migration has moved from quiet family conversations to front-page headlines. In The Fiji Times, Arvind Maharaj reminded us that since 2018 about 114,000 Fijians (nearly 12 per cent of our population) have left the country. That’s like losing every single person in Lautoka and Nadi combined. The numbers are staggering, but the feeling behind them runs deeper: our villages are emptying, our professionals are packing up, and every week another piece of Fiji’s future lifts off from Nadi airport.
Let’s be clear, migration itself is not new. Since the dawn of humanity, people have moved in search of two things: livelihoods and security. That instinct is as old as our species. The real issue is not why Fijians are leaving, but why Fiji no longer offers those two simple foundations of a dignified life.
Economic historian Adam Tooze put it bluntly in Foreign Policy: “Development is not just about ticking boxes and chasing targets; it is inherently and necessarily political.” He’s right. Development is about who has access to power and opportunity, who gets jobs, who feels safe, and who still believes they have a future at home. When those political choices fail, migration becomes more than movement, it becomes a quiet vote of no confidence in the nation’s promises.
And the evidence is everywhere. Farms lie untended because no one wants to work them anymore. Hospitals run short of nurses, schools struggle to find teachers, and businesses can’t fill vacancies. We are not short of ambition or ideas, we are short of people to carry them forward.
I was reminded of this while visiting a school recently. When I asked a class of students what they wanted to be when they grew up, one boy smiled and said: “Sir, I want to go overseas.” Not “I want to be a teacher,” or “a doctor,” or “an engineer”, just go overseas. His answer stayed with me because it captured something deeper: the dream of leaving has quietly replaced the dream of building something here.
Losing our balance
Migration has quietly become our unofficial development plan, and that is how a country loses its balance. We are exporting ambition and importing labour. From Bangladesh and the Philippines to Indonesia and India, Fiji now relies on foreign workers to fill the gaps in our farms, factories, construction sites and hotels. We celebrate rising remittances while our communities quietly empty out.
Behind every statistic is a story: a classroom without a teacher, a farm without a worker, a clinic without a nurse, a grandparent raising grandchildren while parents are overseas. This is not resilience; it is erosion. The country is still standing, but its foundations are thinning.
In economics, we call it equilibrium, the point where a system is stable and sustainable. Fiji has lost that equilibrium. Our labour force has shrunk by 65,000 in just over a decade. Youth unemployment sits near 18 per cent. Employers cannot find workers; schools cannot keep teachers; hospitals cannot retain nurses and doctors.
Migration is not unique to Fiji. Even advanced economies are grappling with it, New Zealand lost around 74,000 people in 2024 alone, one of its highest net outflows in decades. Australia, the United Kingdom, and parts of Europe face similar challenges as skilled workers move for better prospects. But scale matters. For a large economy, such movements are absorbed; for a small island nation like Fiji, losing 12 per cent of our population in six years is seismic. It affects every classroom, clinic, and community. The global lesson is clear: migration is inevitable, but its impact is not. Strong domestic opportunities, fair wages, and trust in public institutions are what turn movement into mobility rather than loss.
The policy paradox
Fiji’s National Development Plan 2025–2029 sets an ambitious direction, one that rightly aims for a “high-employment, high-wage economy”. It reflects a government determined to lift living standards and expand opportunity. Yet the challenge now is not ambition, but translation: how these national goals connect to the everyday realities of work, wages, and wellbeing. The plan speaks to the future we want; the task ahead is to show how that future can be built in ways that make people want to stay.
The same is true for the national budget. It sets out the financial architecture to drive recovery and resilience, with record investment and confidence indicators pointing upward. But even as the macro numbers strengthen, the human numbers tell another story. Too many classrooms, clinics, and farms are running short of people. Migration should not be treated as a footnote to success, but as a signal, reminding us that growth must also mean belonging, and that progress is only real when people choose to build their lives here.
This is the paradox at the heart of our development story: we celebrate growth without asking who is left to sustain it. We call remittances “success” when they are really the income of absence. We design policies for prosperity while exporting the very people who could deliver it.
The PALM and New Zealand’s RSE schemes, launched with good intentions, have become our default strategy. We now export talent and import labour, a contradiction no serious economy can sustain. Each dollar that arrives in remittances represents someone who left, and an empty chair in a classroom, a clinic, or a workshop.
In my work with the International Labour Organization and across the United Nations system, I have seen how public policies, when grounded in evidence, participation, and fairness, can transform lives. From Asia to Africa, from the Europe to the Latin America, I’ve watched countries rebuild confidence in government simply by restoring confidence in decent work. The lesson is always the same: When people believe their labour has value, they stop leaving; when they see opportunity at home, migration becomes a choice, not a necessity.
Fiji can do the same. But it requires leadership that listens, evidence that guides action, and policies that serve people, not statistics.
Fiji still lacks an integrated labour strategy linking migration, wages, education, and investment into one coherent vision. We must move from remittance economics to employment economics, from exporting labour to creating dignified, decently paid work at home. Because every time a young Fijian leaves, we lose more than a worker; we lose part of our future.
The cost we don’t count
The silence of Dreketi, and other villages tells one story, the human cost. But the numbers tell another: the cost we don’t count.
We count the $1.2 billion in remittances, but not what we lose. We count those who leave, but not the classrooms without teachers, the wards without nurses, or the grandparents raising children alone.
Each nurse who leaves represents roughly $60,000 in training costs now benefiting another country. Each teacher trained at public expense but teaching in Auckland instead of Labasa is a quiet fiscal leak. Add up the lost taxes, skills, and productivity, and the fiscal loss dwarfs the remittance gain, but you won’t find that in the budget speech.
Remittances ease poverty but deepen dependency; they buy time, not transformation. The true measure of progress is not what’s in the ledger, but what remains in the life of a nation. A strong economy doesn’t export its people (it inspires them to stay).
It’s time to count what truly matters, not just the money sent home, but the futures lost abroad. Because every dollar that arrives without a worker behind it weakens the foundation beneath us. To change course, we must reclaim control, not just of our policies, but of our purpose.
Reclaiming policy sovereignty
A nation that cannot shape its own labour destiny cannot shape its own future. Reclaiming Fiji begins with reclaiming control, not only of our policies, but of our purpose.
For too long, our approach has been reactive. When Australia and New Zealand need workers, we send them. When we face shortages, we import them. We’ve allowed other economies to define our priorities, turning labour mobility into dependence rather than opportunity. That is not sovereignty, that is drift.
True sovereignty means migration by choice, not by necessity. It means crafting policies that place Fijian livelihoods, skills, and dignity at the heart of our development vision.
We can learn from others:
- Mauritius diversified fromsugar to services.
- Singapore ties scholarships to national service, ensuring talent returns home.
- Ireland reversed emigration through education and domestic investment
Fiji can adapt these lessons to its own reality. We need a National Skills Compact uniting government, employers, and education providers, mapping critical skills, requiring return-of-service for publicly funded graduates, and aligning what we teach with what the market needs.
Every foreign-worker permit should trigger training for a Fijian to fill that role within a year. Our policies must reward those who stay, through housing support, tax credits, and innovation grants for entrepreneurs. These are not expenses; they are investments in confidence.
Real sovereignty is not measured in remittance flows or balance sheets. It is measured in the dignity of work created at home, and in the pride of a people who no longer have to leave to live well.
The fiscal equation
When over 114,000 people migrate in just eight years, the loss is not only personal; it is profoundly economic. Tax revenue shrinks, demand contracts, and communities lose both workers and customers. We are financing daily life through money earned abroad while local production declines. That is not building resilience but dependency dressed as success.
Each departure weakens the foundation on which our economy stands. Every teacher, nurse, and technician who leaves represents not only a vacancy in the workplace but a gap in our national capacity. Migration may ease short-term pressures, but over time it hollows out the economy that remains.
Reclaiming Fiji means reversing that equation, building jobs, trust, and opportunity at home so that growth once again comes from within.
Reclaiming Fiji
Reclaiming Fiji is not about nostalgia; it is about courage, the courage to look honestly at where we are and to trust our people again.
For too long, our national story has focused on what leaves (our workers, skills, and remittances) instead of what stays. But development is not what departs; it is what endures.
Reclaiming our future means building an economy of belonging:
- where teachers and nurses are proud to serve because their pay reflects their worth;
- where rural youth can farm, code, or create from their own province and still earn a decent living;
- where entrepreneurs have platforms to grow;
- where remittances are matched by reinvestment and migration becomes a choice, not an escape.
It means leadership that measures success not in dollars earned abroad, but in futures built at home, leadership that listens, learns, and leads with empathy. Because reclaiming Fiji is not only a policy task; it is a moral one. It is about giving young people something money cannot buy (the conviction that they matter here).
When I return to Dreketi, I often sit with my mother on the veranda as the sun sets over the rice fields. The air smells of rain, and the sky turns the colour of forgiveness. She still asks the same question: “When will they come back?”
And I tell her, “They will, when we make it worth coming back to.”
That is what reclaiming Fiji means: giving every Fijian a reason to stay, a reason to return, and a reason to believe again.
In the end, reclaiming Fiji is not just an economic task, it is a political one. It demands leaders who see beyond the comfort of remittances and the illusion of borrowed growth, and who have the courage to build an economy that works for those who remain. The measure of progress is not how many citizens we send abroad to seek dignity, but how many can find it here.
When a nation begins to lose its people, it is not the migrants who have failed, it is the policymakers who have stopped imagining a future worth staying for. Fiji deserves leadership that restores that imagination, rebuilds trust between government and citizen, and makes this land once again a place where people choose to live, work, and dream.
- DR NAREN PRASAD is an economist and head of Education & Training, ILO. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ILO or this newspaper.
