The first Falepili Union visa ballot: a preliminary assessment
- Admin
- Aug 26
- 5 min read
By Ryan Edwards
The Falepili Union treaty stream visa ballot for Tuvalu citizens opened on June 16 and closed on July 18. Registration cost A$25 and 3,125 people applied in the first four days.
In total, 8,750 or more than half of Tuvalu’s citizens applied by the close of the ballot, leading to some obvious questions. Is everyone going to leave? Is this the brain drain we keep hearing about?
The Falepili Union is a migration-security deal. Security is broadly defined, per the Boe Declaration, but the crux of the deal is simple: “any partnership, arrangement or engagement with any other state or entity on security and defence-related matters” needs to be agreed with Australia in return for Australia’s providing Tuvalu with a special migration pathway.
Either party can walk away at any time (although there is a 12-month period until it takes effect). This is the closest thing we have to a compact. Its climate angle is especially important to note, as Tuvalu is one of only a few Pacific island states at such extreme risk of total population displacement due to climate change (and therefore also presents low foreign geographic expansion risk vis-a-vis other states).
Each year from 2025, 280 places are to be allocated by random ballot under the treaty stream. As with the Pacific Engagement Visa, there is no minimum residency requirement for benefits and services (full comparison matrix here).
However, Falepili visas differ from PEV visas (Tuvalu was part of the PEV ballot in 2024 but will not be in 2025) in three important respects. First, there are no maximum age or disability requirements. Second, ballot winners do not need to secure a job offer before a visa is granted. Third, it is not a “use it or lose it” (usually within five years) visa.
PEV and Falepili visas differ significantly from New Zealand’s equivalent, the Pacific Access Category, in at least one important additional dimension: the cost.
PAC visas cost at least NZ$1,389, depending on the applicant's circumstances.
For a first-time registration for a Tuvaluan residing in Tuvalu, ballot entry, which is stage one, costs NZ$86. For ballot winners, the resident visa application, which is stage two, costs NZ$1,280.
By contrast, in Australia, stage-one ballot registrations cost A$25 and stage-two visa applications cost A$200 for Falepili and start at A$335 for the PEV (additional adults and children cost extra), which is equivalent to more than four weeks’ consumption back home for the median Tuvalu citizen.
All these costs are significant and sit on top of airfares and other relocation costs, but the associated New Zealand costs are more likely to constrain participation and getting started abroad.
The implications of this new Tuvalu visa stream for Australia, at least in terms of the usual migration discourse around housing, jobs and infrastructure, are trivial. Two hundred eighty visas per year is a small fraction of a single percentage point of Australia’s annual permanent migration intake.
The Falepili visa is also incredibly popular in Australia: only about 15 percent of people in Australia don’t want it expanded to more countries, or want it cut.
The potential implications for Tuvalu, however, are more important.
Tuvalu is a small island nation with a resident population of 10,643 at the last census in 2022. Two hundred citizens represent about 2.8 percent of the current resident population, or less if eligible Tuvaluans abroad are included (over 3,000 in 2019, according to UNDESA’s International Migrant Stock database, excluding the 211 citizens reported to be in Australia).
Concerns around a so-called brain drain, which I’ve written about before, don’t ever seem to go away, regardless of context. Since everyone seems to know about the Falepili visa, an enormous share of those who know applied, and given that those selected in the ballot do not need job offers to apply for their visas, there should be little or no bias in favor of skilled workers.
Thus, the main concern is population decline, not losing skilled workers per se. If all residents wanted to leave, others estimate it would take between 30 years and 40 years for the total population to leave at a rate of 280 per year. This concern has generally not been realized for other countries with open labor market agreements, of which there are many, and there is high-quality research explaining why not everyone moves and why people return.
Tuvalu has a labor force participation rate of just under 25 percent. The remaining three-quarters of the working-age population are not working and not looking for paid work. Eight percent of the 25 percent participating are unemployed but seeking work. More than 25 percent are informally employed, about the same as two decades ago.
Tuvalu has a young population, and almost one in five economically active young people (that is, people aged 15-24 participating in the labor force) are unemployed, almost triple the unemployment rate of the labor force as a whole.
Good, well-paying jobs are not in high supply and are usually provided by the government.
Tuvalu is an archetypal "Migration, Remittances, Aid and Bureaucracy" economy, heavily reliant on external sources of income. For example, net foreign income is as high as GDP. Job scarcity and economic opportunities are the first-order issues. The fact that people can freely bring their families could be transformational for these young people.
How about current levels of well-being and the potential benefits for those who move? Median consumption in Tuvalu was A$3,887 per year in 2022, and the country’s basic-needs poverty line is A$2,688 per year. This is equivalent to about seven dollars a day. 21.5 percent of the population lives below this poverty line.
Australia’s minimum wage (A$24.95 from July 1 this year) is more than three times this in a single hour (pre-tax and transfers), so we should expect large income gains for movers even at the lowest possible baseline.
More than 60 percent of Pacific migrants in Australia, for whom migration through New Zealand has been the dominant pathway, settle in areas in the bottom two quintiles of relative socioeconomic disadvantage.
As Stephen Howes noted in a recent submission, Tuvaluan PAC visa holders typically have weaker labor market outcomes in New Zealand, and it will be important to monitor the settlement outcomes of this new cohort in Australia carefully.
Will more Pacific countries seek to move beyond the PEV and secure the advantages of the Falepili visa and an increased quota? Time will tell.
Disclosure: This research was supported by the Pacific Research Program, with funding from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The views are those of the author only.
This article appeared first on Devpolicy Blog (devpolicy.org), from the Development Policy Center at The Australian National University. Ryan Edwards is the deputy director of DevPolicy and a fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy, who leads Pacific migration research under the Pacific Research Program.
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