Transcript
SANTI HOTIORANGI: We have to put the situation in context. Rapa Nui is part of Chile. It's been under colonial occupation for 130 years. Chile, being a country of South America, which has economic treaties amoungst those nations and Rapa Nui, being part of Chile, will as well be impacted by the free travel of all those nations, which have caused in Rapa Nui to have a new influx of Haitian immigrants, Colombian immigrants, Peruvian immigrants and so on.
What the government has been doing is to control the immigration from only the tourists who come to visit the island. But they will not control the Chilean citizens who can travel to Rapa Nui freely and that's the migration that needs to be regulated.
We see the tourists who come to Rapa Nui as our natural resource who bring their money and spend it in Rapa Nui. They are a transitory influx of people by nature. The other side of this influx, the Chileans who come from the marginalised neighbourhoods of Chile and have brought crime, the impact on the community and the infrastructure, degenerating the culture. They are doing taxi tours, venturing into tourism and the problem with that is the information they give to those tourists. They are a warped perspective of who we are.
BEN ROBINSON DRAWBRIDGE: Are there not provisions within the law that restrict the ability of mainland Chileans to come to Rapa Nui? The requirement for them to be related to a resident of Rapa Nui in order to migrate.
SH: It all sounds very nice on paper. They need a contract, they need to be employed, they need to have a registered address, they need to be paying their utilities and not just meandering about on the island which most of them are.
But the situation is most of them, amoungst themselves, start selling fake contracts. The authorities are saying that once in action there's going to be rigorous enforcement. So far we haven't experienced that. What we have experienced is the ability of the Chilean authority in collusion with business people on the island, be it Rapa Nui or Chileans, they are keen to find creative ways to jump over those so called provisions. So those clauses, they are good on paper but they're not enforced.
