Abstract:

This research was completed during an Australian National Internships Program placement at the Development Policy Centre in 2025.

This report builds on an earlier 1994 analysis by Poirine to identify reasons why New Caledonians rarely migrate towards Metropolitan France despite their right to free entry and employment as French nationals. This research expands on the few French- and English-language articles which study New Caledonian migration to the Metropole by attempting to further explain the economic, social, and cultural deterrents to emigration.

Using existing French statistical studies and census results, this research bases its findings off of the estimation that only 17,575 New Caledonian natives were living in Metropolitan France as of 2020, and that, since 1999, they have accounted for only around 0.02% of the Metropolitan population. Relative to the presence of migrants originating from French DROM-COMs like Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Reunion, as well as from other French ex-colonies, this figure does indeed demonstrate a low migration rate. Unfortunately, the available data only counts Metropolitan residents native to New Caledonia, and does not specifically track citizens of New Caledonia, or the country’s indigenous Kanak population.

This report explains the low migration by pointing to factors of local wages matching overseas wages due to booming public and private sectors, educational inequality leading to a lack of mobile skills for many New Caledonians, internal migration as an alternative to external migration, New Caledonia’s geographic distance from Metropolitan France, the Metropole’s ‘low-skilled’ migration needs already being supplied by other historic migrant communities, a lack of New Caledonian diaspora to provide support for newer migrants, and continued cultural tensions between Metropolitan France and, in particular, New Caledonia’s Kanak population.