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A Small PlaceNearly half the Falkland Islanders are immigrants. What draws people to a grim chunk of rock in the South Atlantic?

By Ian MountPosted Saturday, May 9, 2009, at 7:28 AM ET

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There's the attraction of money, of course—the islands have a higher GDP-per-capita than Germany—but the immigrants also form a kind of Dark Side of the Moon Club of the desperate, nostalgic, adventurous, or just plain bored. After arriving, many get addicted to Stanley's Truman Show small-town perfection and find it impossible to move back to mean city streets—or merely to busy suburbs. The work day runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with an hour for lunch, invariably taken at home. Phone numbers are only five digits long. And the idea of locking, well, anything is an affront to the community. In such an environment, the current population boomlet (about 400 people have moved to the islands in the last decade) can seem menacing. "I hope they don't find oil. We're already becoming little Britain," says Helen Wallace, a police department criminal-records officer who arrived from Portsmouth, England, in even more bucolic 1991. The threat of urban anonymity does not appear imminent, however: After several days on the islands, my introductions were invariably answered with, "Oh, right! The reporter staying at Arlette's place."

A war souvenir in a Stanley driveway"Stories about coming here are always complicated," says Julie Halliday, who arrived from New Zealand in 2001. Halliday came to the islands when her then-husband was hired to be the economic adviser to the government. Following her divorce, she decided to stay for the tranquility (and for the birds she photographs), and today—after a remarriage to a Kelper—she runs Studio 52, Stanley's only graphic-design shop. In 2001, Sebastián Socodo moved from his native Argentina to the islands with his wife, a Kelper who grew up in his country (as many did before the war), to get away from a low-paying paper-mill job just as Argentina's economy began to implode. Today, he's a construction foreman—and a tour guide for returning Argentine veterans. And Chris McLean, burnt out on an urban schedule, brought his wife and two kids from Montreal in 2007 after his wife found an Internet job listing for a Public Works Department design engineer. "After getting a call from a recruiter who said I'd been shortlisted, I had a 30-minute call with my boss here, and that was it. Within three months of sending a résumé, we'd sold our house and moved," he says in the soft monotone of someone who really likes quiet. "The kids have so much freedom, because everybody looks out for them."

Not everyone is aiming to create an island version of Little House on the Prairie, though. Valdimir Laptikhovsky, for example, loves fish. After finding his skills as a fishery scientist in little demand in his home of Kaliningrad after the Russian fishing fleet started to collapse, the ingenuously enthusiastic biologist moved to the islands in 2004 for a job in the Falklands' Fisheries Department. There, he compiles fish statistics, assesses the marine stock, and monitors the squid fishery, which provides the largest chunk of the islands' income. "There are places with better climates and more access to civilization, but I would never have such scientific freedom. You should have 300 scientists in such an ecosystem. We only have seven, so there's no competition for scientific materials," he says. Behind us, Laptikhovsky's second wife—his first one, unhappy on the islands, moved with their two children to nearby Chile—applies extensions to an islander's nails. In Russia, she'd been an assistant to an insurance company director, "always with a cell phone in her hand, so she could be available for people who had had car crashes."

In his clandestine Falklands-filmed movie Fuckland, Argentine director José Luis Marqués fantasized about retaking the islands by impregnating local women. Similarly, Buenos Aires-based Ezequiel Gatti, who leads Argentine veterans on Falklands tours, told me that Argentina would have had better luck conquering the islands in 1982 if it had sent several boats of beautiful Argentine women. Judging from the continued flow of immigration, however, Argentina's chance of conquering desperate islanders by procreative means seems to have passed. Victoria Guisande came from Punta Arenas, Chile, in January 2009 to work as a meatpacker in the local slaughterhouse, where she could earn 10 times the Chilean minimum wage. "I've already met an Englishman who's been here nine years, and he's asked me to marry him. We want a baby. My son is 19 years old, and I only have a little time to have another one. It was always my dream to have a daughter," says Guisande. "I think this place was my destiny."

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Ian Mount is a journalist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Food & Wine, New York, Monocle, and other publications.

COMMENTS

As the article pointed out, the Falkands War probably secured the island's financial future and ensured that what was previously a fairly insular community would receive enough new blood to stop them all growing 6 toes on each foot.

It also shows why Argentina would never, despite years of neglect from the British government, convince the islanders that their future lay with Buenos Aires.

The Falklands Islands may lie only a couple of hundred miles of the coast of Argentina but their soul has always been English (even if it is an Englishness that only exists in Miss Marple stories).

-- steelbucket
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