(DRAFT, UNFINISHED) The United States Doesn't Care About These Islands

 

A couple years back, I remember being on vacation in St. John, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and noticing two distinct parts of the island: one with lavish, golden hotels and beaches, and one with litter, squalid conditions, and people laid upon the sidewalk like forgotten plastic. The first part was reserved for tourists, while the second part was mostly for the locals.

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            That experience has been ingrained in my memory ever since. The contrast between what tourists got to experience and what the people who lived on and worked the land had to live through was something I hadn’t experienced yet, but is a contrast I now know happens in nearly all U.S. island territories, especially in the Caribbean. The United States exploits and ignores its island territories, which can be seen most clearly in the phenomena of overtourism, mismanagement of toxic waste, and disastrous post-hurricane conditions.

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            Overtourism can be defined as tourism of an area to the point that it becomes actively harmful to the environment and the local populace, which is certainly how this 2021 peer-reviewed paper uses the term. The paper finds that Caribbean islands that do not have their own government, such as U.S. territories, experience significantly more overtourism than do independent islands. The authors attribute this fact partially to “tourism specialization”, which suggests that these territories, as they are not independent governments, are able to ignore issues that pertain more to the locals, such as education or poverty, and instead specialize on serving tourists.

            According to this article, overtourism can have the following effects: litter, damage to public spaces, tourist traps overcrowding businesses designed for locals, and the degradation of public spaces such as museums. These effects can increase the price of living for locals and lessen the spaces they have access to. These issues are, then, largely ignored by the U.S. government, as it makes a profit from the tourism industry that is slowly destroying these islands.

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            However, tourism is not the only way that these islands are being neglected in favor of those with deeper pockets. This article dives into how these territories are often used as dumping grounds for waste created in the mainland. It also shows how this is not a recent issue, as can be seen from the nuclear testing that occurred on Bikini Atoll and the Marshall Islands. It is worth noting that Bikini Atoll had an indigenous population before it was ensured that the land would no longer be inhabitable.

            The relationship between environmental crime in an area and the health of the local community is well established by this point. Therefore, the higher density of illegal waste dumping in the Caribbean territories has undoubtedly caused much suffering among the people of these islands. The environmental impact of this waste is also cause for concern, as it can negatively impact many industries these people may rely on. The fact that green crime takes place so frequently in these territories heavily suggests that the United States does not do a good enough job of properly enforcing environmental law in these territories.

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            An argument against neglect and exploitation from the U.S. could be made by citing the U.S. money funneled into the U.S. Virgin Islands alone through grants and other means, which adds up to about 500 million dollars in 2026 alone, and a staggering 10.6 billion dollars in 2025. However, the raw number do not show the real, on-the-ground experience of those suffering from hurricane damages still unaddressed years after they hit.